Dr Abdullahi Ganduje who is the National Chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has commended the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for its handling of the electoral process in spite of landmines buried in its ways by partisans.
Noting that the electoral umpire cannot be blamed for election violence, Ganduje said politicians must be held responsible.
He spoke on Wednesday in Abuja during a visit of INEC’s election and party monitoring team to the Buhari House national secretariat of the party.
Ganduje said; “There is no doubt today is a historic day, the day of reckoning, accomplishment, in terms of the relationship between INEC, and political parties, particularly the ruling party APC,
“There is no doubt, it is important for INEC, to undertake such visits so that they can obtain the viability of political parties for the sake of planning and records and also as part of their duties as provided by law.
Read Also: SDP Advocates For INEC’s Absolute Autonomy
“I want to assure you that our party is a strong party. We are ready to provide all the information required. We want to make our party a very strong institution as required for the development of democracy. Therefore, we have decided to make our party active throughout the year not only during elections.
“We have also directed that all our party offices ranging from wards, local governments, zones, and states, basically the officers must be available. And operationally, the office must be functioning.
“Also, we have decided to make our party ICT compliant. We have directed for e-registration of our members and we believe that will help us to partner with INEC. This will help us in planning, identify members, sex and age bracket in our party, qualification, professions of our party members, identities of our members right from ward level to the national level.
“We are developing what we call the National Institute for Progressive Studies in order to teach our members the basics of democracy so that the issue of hate speech will be eliminated.
“I know one of the biggest problems of INEC in conducting elections is insecurity. Everyone will say INEC, but it is the politicians.
“So, in order to understand the rules and regulations of elections, in order to understand what is required to be civilized politicians, our institutions will be educating our people from time to time so that they can abide by the rules”.