Abbas made the call while he was featured on Channels Television’s ‘Breakfast Show’ on Thursday.
He said, “We need to refocus. We need to go back to the drawing board and begin to ask how we can decentralise electoral processes in Nigeria.”
The law professor talked down on the country’s “miracle” expectations of the Independent National Electoral Commission to deliver excellently well during democratic elections, thereby stressing the need for decentralisation.
“The first problem we face in Nigeria today, talking about the democratic election in Nigeria, is that our democratic system has been heavily centralised. We put everything on INEC every four years, we expect INEC to come and perform a miracle literally for 200 million people in 36 hot states in the government,” he stated.
Speaking further, Abass gave the United States as an example in comparing how other nations conduct elections.
He explained, “How do they do it in some countries? We have to learn how other people do it. Look at the US. States actually have the primary responsibility for conducting elections, so most states have what they call the secretaries of states who will organise elections. Sometimes most of the litigations that we follow in elections would have come in the pre-election time.”
Abass called for a paradigm shift, emphasising the need to refocus Nigeria’s electoral system. He identified decentralisation as a way to enhance transparency and efficiency of the democratic process in the country.
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