2015 General Elections May Hold In January – Jega

If the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has its way, the 2015 general elections may hold in either January or February of that year. The last general elections held in April, 2011 and the commission recalled that if not for the Voter Registration exercise which preceded that year’s elections, it would have been held on an earlier date to give room for imminent legal actions to be resolved before the inauguration date of May 29th. According to an in-house bulletin published by the commission, these were the views of INEC’s chairman, Professor Attahiru Jega at a two-day international workshop on “Ethics And Elections: Challenges And Institutional Responses”, organized by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation in Abuja recently.

According to the bulletin, Prof. Jega, however, regretted that pre-election cases which dealt with “disagreements arising from nominations and primaries had to drag on for years, eating into the tenures of some candidates.”

Prof. Jega, therefore, expressed optimism that the judiciary would hence forth not deal with such cases routinely, but adopt a business-like approach.

“The key challenge is when these cases go on forever; they are not given priority. Three years after, we’re still dealing with pre-election cases,” he said.