The Presidential Candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) Adewole Adebayo has cautioned President Muhammadu Buhari against the error when he nominated Lauretta Onochie who was his aide before she was rejected by the Senate.
Nigerians have raised issues of partisanship against some nominees of President Muhammadu Buhari to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) as National commissioners.
Ms Onochie, a presidential aide, was appointed by the President in October 2020 as an INEC commissioner to represent Delta State.
The appointment generated a public outcry from individuals, groups, and opposition parties who wrote petitions staged protests, and called on the Senate to reject it.
Continuing Adebayo said, “Let him not do what he did in the case of Lauretta Onochie who was rejected and he kept sending the name back until it was too late, he realised he could not do it and he had already embarrassed the office.
“He should not always be in that habit so we can always have respect for the judgement of the President when he is making nomination, he should not be getting Nigerians to start shouting all the time.
“So you are not upholding the Constitution if you are sending to an independent commission people who are partizan, that is an abuse of your power to nominate. For that reason we will envisage that the President, maybe he was wrongly briefed or he did not do enough security checks.
“He should ensure that he does not ignore information being given to him because information maybe given to him regarding these people who did not disclose to him that they are dependent so he should keep an open mind
“He should not say he has already nominated them it is too late and there is nothing anybody can do.
“On the other hand we should not automatically reject people and accuse them just because they are not our favourites.
“For credibility’s sake we are not saying these people are not competent or they are not good people but we are only saying that independence is the key factor and a partizan person is not independent. We are only saying that anyone who is aligned with a political party for membership of INEC
“What I think is that, we should locate the issue in three different, The President has the duty to nominate and once we elect a President he has all the powers to nominate.
“Nigerians should look at the character and the judgement ab initio before electing the President but on many occasions President Buhari had disappointed us by nominating persons that don’t meet the standard.
“For the INEC it is not for nothing that the name starts with Independence. It means that the people who you going to put there would have to be independent and people who are aligned to one political party or the other can not be said to be independent.
“It is also a commission, which means is a body of commissioners and if a substantial number of them is dependent or partizan then you have defeated the word independent and the commission would not be able to carryout it’s mandate.
“So for that reason it is the duty of every Nigerian who knows of any reason that can affect the independence and integrity of the candidates for the commission, to protests and bring that out, that is the second sphere.
“It is a patriotic duty for them to come out and say A, B and C have this affiliation and that affiliation and so they are not fit and proper to act as independent commissioners.
“The third sphere is the National Assembly, because the people who elected the senators elected them for occasions like this when they need to protect the interest of the people. “Luckily enough interest are diverse in the national assembly today that many of them who are running for elections so they will also be careful to say that their effort is not wasted by having a commission that is skewed against fairness. For that reason I think the national Assembly should reject anyone that is not above board.”
“The commissioners like Caesars wife are supposed to be above board, above question and they should be non partizan”