CANDIDATE NAMES MUST BE SUBMITTED BY PARTY CHAIRMEN – INEC

To avoid conflicting presentation of candidates and wasting tax payers resources through litigation after conducting elections, all 91 political parties have been informed that only the chairmen of each party can submit the list of candidates while the National Executive Council of each party can inform the commission on the date, venue and membership appointed in the committee to handle primaries before it is conducted.

The Chairman of INEC, Prof. Mahood Yakubu, mentioned it the above in a meeting with party chairmen in Abuja on Friday. According to the INEC Chairman, practices in the past were submitted by state chapters and the national body of the party would send in the candidates information for the same position only to have conflicting names of candidate. This pre-general election has led to many continued litigations wasting the resources of the commission as party primaries litigation are without bound periods like the post-election which is 180 days at the Tribunal, 60 days at the Appeal

Court and 60 days at the Supreme Court.

Explaining the complexity further, the Chairman mentioned that INEC will be responsible for conducting election of 1,558 constituencies nationwide (i.e one presidential constituency, 29 governorship elections, 109 senatorial districts, 360 federal constituencies, 991 state constituencies and 68 area councils in the FCT) processing over 144,000 candidate forms for all the political parties involved within a short period.