Former Chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Attahiru Jega, has claimed that the greatest challenge facing the electoral body is politicians with a reckless mindset.
According to a Punch report, Jega blamed politicians for turning the country’s electoral arena into a battlefield, due to their belief in winning at all costs.
Jega, who presided over INEC during the 2015 presidential polls, has stated that the situation has gotten so bad that INEC had to put in a lot of effort to revive their interest in the process before coming out of the vote last year, Naijreports.
“INEC, as an election management body, faced perhaps its greatest challenge containing the predisposition and reckless mindset of Nigerian politicians. I quite often say that Nigeria has a special breed of politicians – ‘militicians’. They generally tend to believe that political power, through election, has to be captured and this has to be done by hook or by crook; by any means necessary. For many, winning an election is literally a do-or-die affair. That is why the Nigerian political arena increasingly resembles a bloody battlefield with maiming, killing, burning, assassinations and unimaginable destruction of lives and property,” Jega said.
