Mr. Femi Falana (SAN), a human rights attorney from Nigeria, stated in an interview with Channels TV on the Politics Today programme that the INEC had to transmit the election results if they had promised to do so.
In response to Seun Okinbaloye’s inquiry about whether he was dissatisfied with the way the most recent presidential election was handled, particularly in light of the growing amount of election-related litigation, Falana made this declaration.
Femi Falana mentioned that it would be interesting to know that since 2003, Nigeria recorded the lowest number of election petitions this year, with just about 426 election petitions, whereas in 2003 and 2007, there were over a thousand.
He explained that late Yar’Adua set up a panel to put an end to the shameful conduct of elections in Nigeria and bring reform to Nigeria’s electoral process because he saw the nature of the election that brought him to power and how he narrowly won at the Supreme Court. He continued by saying that, given this, if INEC had conducted a good election, nobody would have to go to court.
“If you say you are going to transmit election result, you must transmit. And that was the point that I thought it was not well canvass. Regardless of what Section 66 of electoral provide, once INEC has gone out telling Nigeria repeatedly even in UK and US, telling the whole world that they would transmit election result, you don’t need any other law…You cannot go back and say, I never said it, you are bound by your promise and by your commitment.”
