Coming to the emergency states now in the North East, we are threading into a very difficult area. We have to look at it two ways. At the moment, the refugees who have left the states and who are now kept in isolated and not their normal residential places.
How do you give them their PVC to identify their names in the voters’ register? It will be a huge task and a great problem for the federal government. We cannot run away from it. Three states in the federation!
The problem is that if elections do not hold, and I doubt if they can hold, except in a few local government areas in those states that are free from boko haram insurgents. The problem is the Constitution says to win a state election a Governor must have 25% of the votes in 2/3 of the local governments.
Now you find about half of the local government in Borno State are going to be disenfranchised! Then it means no election can hold in those areas and even if it holds, nobody can satisfy the 25% constitutional requirement in those areas.
Now in the presidential elections you are going to disenfranchise three states, leaving 33 states. The law says a president must not only win the majority of votes, but must have 25% in 2/3 of 36 states. This was unlike when we had 12 – 2/3.
Now we can identify 2/3 of 36 states and we know that would be 24. But what happens if one of the candidates has 22 states and three states have been disenfranchised?
Is he going to say ‘no, you have to rework your 2/3 based on 33 states?’ That cannot be because the Constitution says 36 and you cannot change the Constitution.
So, we are going to have problems in those areas. How are you going to determine the priority of votes when there are no elections in three states?
No comments:
Post a Comment