Former Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, has accused a northwest Governor of writing election results instead of conducting free and fair elections.
El-Rufai disclosed that the said Governor had approached him on how to conduct free and fair elections, but instead of heeding the advice given to him, the Northwest Governor went ahead to write election results as usual.
El-Rufai stated this on Monday in Maiduguri, while delivering a lead paper at a capacity-building workshop for top officials of the Borno State government.
Speaking against the backdrop of state electoral commissions as rigging tools in the hands of the state governors, El-Rufai recalled how he used electronic voting to conduct a free and fair local government areas elections during his tenure as governor.
He narrated that it was after the success of the local government elections that the Northwest state governor approached him to use his pattern, but after availing him of the technique used in conducting the elections, he went back to his state and wrote results of the local government elections he conducted instead of conducting it electronically.
El-Rufai, during his lecture, called for the scrapping of the state electoral commissions, arguing that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) could handle all local government elections.
“While I was the Governor of Kaduna State, I introduced electronic voting and conducted local government election with it. After the election, we lost about three to four local government areas to the opposition, because of the credibility of the election. And because we were transparent in the election, some of those opposition candidates decamped to our party because of our fairness in the election.
“I remember that one governor from the Northwest who loved the conduct of the election through electronic voting asked me to assist him with the technology I used in the election, but because it has the state logo, I told him that it would not cost more than 10,000 US dollars, so that he can get the equipment to conduct his state LGA election electronically. But after that conversation, I did not hear from him again, he went back home and conducted his election by writing the results as usual,” El-Rufai said.
