Popular human rights activist and lawyer, Femi Falana, SAN, has said the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections destroyed lots of myths that hitherto prevailed in the nation’s political space.
He said the in spite of the challenges related to the polls, many positives were recorded including the destruction of the myth of political structure.
Speaking on a Channels Television’s programme on Monday, Falana said that in the just concluded elections, the people showed that they are the structure.
“There are some positive developments that were recorded. For instance, the myth of these political structures has been destroyed whereby people have shown that we are the structure, and the people are the structure ultimately.
Secondly, young people have also shown this time around that we are going to determine the future of our country. Thirdly, you no longer have to be a moneybag to contest elections in Nigeria. Another development is that whereas the Senate chamber has been converted to a resting home for former governors; this time around, many of the governors lost their seats, they lost in the election and so they won’t be able to go back to the national assembly.
The other development is that sitting governors and sitting president could not win their states for their political parties. So, in spite of the challenges, a number of positive developments have been recorded by our country, and of course, I think the most significant is the use of BVAS for accreditation. It has improved the accreditation of voters,” Falana said.
He, however, lamented the inability of the Independent National Electoral Commission to upload results to their central server electronically in real-time as they promised ahead of the elections but hopes the electoral body addresses the challenge before the March 18 governorship and state assembly elections.
Falana said that after postponing the governorship and state assembly elections by one week, no excuse will be entertained by the INEC again by Nigerians as he believes that they won’t repeat the mistake of not uploading results from polling units in real-time.
