Are INEC Resident Commissioners homeless bats?
By Mike Ozekhome, SAN I watched and listened very carefully to my good friend, Chief Festus Okoye, INEC’s cerebral Commissioner for Information and Voter Education, on his recent Channels Television interview. I completely disagree with his take and analysis of the place and space of the Resident Electoral Commissioner, REC, in the organogram and scheme of things concerning the electoral process in Nigeria. His analysis, which literally dismissed the RECs with a wave of the hand in a most cavalier manner, if swallowed hook, line and sinker, has the dangerous effect of not only completely defanging RECs and rendering their electoral efforts at the grassroots state levels, completely useless, but also of creating avoidable turmoil and schism within INEC itself, as one homogeneous and independent family unit. It can also have the unintended consequence of self-immolation which can self-destruct. It amounts, in my humble view, to saying that the RECs who are constitutionally created a...