…Petitions Foreign Embassies, World Bank, EU, DFID, Others
The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has escalated the call for the resignation of the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof Joash Amupitan to the Commission’s foreign development partners.
The foreign development partners provide funding and technical assistance for certain critical operations of the Nigerian electoral body in pre and post election periods.
Such assistance includes plugging budgetary shortfalls, or for urgent unanticipated needs where no budgetary outlays have been made by the Commission.
Primarily, the assistance is usually rendered through co-sponsoring of programmes, to augment INEC’s statutory allocation.
INEC has over the years, leveraged the interventions of the development partners at every election cycle to aid it in conducting free, fair and credible polls.
The areas of assistance include engaging consultants who advise the Commission on voter registration, voter education, media work, transmission of results and election management.
It also includes support for training of regular and as hoc staff, workshops and experience sharing. These interventions are geared towards strengthening of institutions and diffusion of democratic principles within a framework of mutual respect, harmony and co-responsibility.
INEC’s key foreign development partners that the ADC is reaching out to include the United States Embassy, the British High Commission, the
Canadian High Commission, the
Japanese Embassy and South Korean Embassy.
Others include the Joint Donor Basket Fund/UNDP, the Commonwealth Secretariat, London, the World Bank,
Department for International Development (DFID), the
European Union (EU) and the
European Centre for Electoral Support (ECES).
Also in collaboration with INEC are the African Union Commission (AUC), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS),
Association of African Election Authorities (AAEA), the
Institute for African Renaissance Studies (UNISA), and the
Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa (EISA).
Similarly, the Ford Foundation,
the Mac Arthur Foundation,
Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES),
International Foundation for Electoral System (IFES),
International Republic Institute (IRI), International IDEA,
Westminster Foundation for Democracy, and DAI Global Belgium SRL also provide support for INEC.
Investigation by TOPHEADLINES revealed that the leadership of the ADC is seeking the intervention of the development partners to prevail on Amupitan to resign.
The party and other opposition groups have been calling for the chairman’s resignation, accusing him of partisanship and bias towards the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
The ADC National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, confirmed TOPHEADLINES‘s report in a telephone interview with our correspondent on Thursday.
“Yes, I am confirming to you that we have been contacting INEC’s foreign funders and we are still contacting many of them.
“Of course we are reaching out to them to let them know that INEC is gradually becoming a rogue organisation,” Abdullahi told our correspondent on the telephone.
The ADC spokesman restated the party’s position that the electoral body under Amupitan cannot be trusted to conduct free, fair and credible elections.
The opposition party hinged the call for the chairman’s resignation on what it described as his deliberate misinterpretation of an order of the Court of Appeal directing parties in the ADC leadership dispute to maintain the “status quo ante bellum.”
The order arose from a suit filed at the Federal High Court in Abuja, by a former ADC Deputy National Chairman, Nafiu Bala Gombe challenging the legitimacy of Senator David Mark’s position as the party’s National Chairman.
Gombe had prayed the lower court to restrain Mark and his team from parading themselves as leaders of the party, and declare him as the national chairman instead, a request the court turned down.
Mark had approached the appellate court, seeking an order to quash Gombe’s request. The Appeal Court had declined the order, directing both parties to return to the lower court for the hearing and to maintain the status quo ante bellum.
The INEC leadership had gone ahead to delist the Mark-led ADC leadership from its records, citing the order of the Court of Appeal, a development that triggered the call for Prof Amupitan’s resignation.
Amupitan got into more trouble when critics exhumed his 2023 post on his X handle, depicting him as a passive supporter of the APC during the 2023 presidential election.
Prof Amupitan had tweeted, “Victory is sure,” in response to a tweet by an APC member who was announcing the imminent victory of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, who was the APC candidate in the 2023 presidential election.
The post is widely perceived to be partisan, with critics branding the INEC chair as a supporter of the APC. Attempts by Prof Amupitan to disown the post by changing his username on X, were countered by critics who unveiled his digital trail on X records.
The trail confirmed the INEC chairman’s e-mail address, his mobile telephone number and other information he provided in his bio column at the time he joined the X platform.
With the revelation, members of the public have since been transferring money to his account, which he registered with his mobile telephone number with a digital payment platform, OPAY.
The amounts being transferred to his OPAY account range between N1 and N10. Most of the payment receipts to Amupitan’s account, which are being circulated on the social media, showed the senders wrote “Resign Now” in the transfer narration column.