By Musa Gambo

SIR: The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has in recent past been regaining the confidence of citizens through improvement and upgrade of its systems to international standards and carrying out elections that is gaining general acceptance from the majority of Nigerians. The new Electoral Bill is ordinarily expected to make the INEC stronger and give the newly tested and applied methods necessary legal backing.

But all of a sudden, the whole exercise has turned into a charade. The legislative arm seems to have used the exercise to perfect a mechanism to enable rigging and eliminate measures that INEC has put in place to tackle electoral malpractices.

It is obvious that the use of technology such as card readers and electronic transfer of result has succeeded greatly in curbing rigging and ensuring the correlation between the results from the polling units presented in hard copies, and the ones sent electronically to the central collation centres.

I recall in 2015 when the then INEC chairman Professor Attahiru Jega, kept sending back a state election commissioner over the difference in the result transmitted electronically and the hard copy presented. As it appears, our lawmakers have thrown such safeguards into the trash bin!

To put it simply, Section 50(2) of the Electoral Bill prohibiting electronic transmission of result is a gross mistake; it smacks of an attempt to compromise the integrity of elections.

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Sadly, this is coming from the current lawmakers who are all products of the digitally improved system. The prohibition will completely do away with the numerous successes of INEC and the hard-earned trust of Nigerians in the electoral system.

The frivolous section of the bill rejecting the fundamental and reasonable INEC request for the power to review any result declared under compulsion and duress is not beneficial at all; the rejection will make it easy for undesirable elements to use crooked and deadly measures to change the will of the people and yet go free. This will no doubt endanger the lives of electoral officers and give unscrupulous politicians free access to rig.

On campaign financing, assuming the estimated monthly N13.5 million earned by senators is true, why will the senators want to spend N1.5 billion on the campaigns considering that their earning in four years is N648 million? The same applies to the N9 million monthly salary of the honourable members. That is about N446.4 million in four years. Why will the lawmakers set a whopping N500 million to finance the campaign?

As citizens, it is in order to demand from our representatives and senators that this disguised fraud against the citizens does not scale through the light of the day. It is shameful that this is coming at a time when the country is contending with several calamities shaking our foundation as a united country.

• Musa Gambo, Maiduguri, Borno State.