A Senior Advocate of Nigeria, (SAN), Oba Maduabuchi, has said that INEC reserves the constitutional right to conduct elections according to the Constitution, without external interference.
“You cannot tell INEC how to do elections. It is section 153 of the Constitution, then section 160 gives INEC the power to assign responsibilities. You cannot. When they have been told organise, undertake, then you are now saying don’t organise, we organise for you. So when people say you must do e-transmission real time, it is what we all want. But then, the constitution says something different; it is not constitutional”, he stated.
Maduabuchi also emphasised that the issue does not lie with the electoral laws themselves, but rather with their poor implementation, noting that e-transmission of election results is currently not possible in Nigeria.
“Actually, there was nothing really wrong with our electoral laws. What was wrong is implementation. Electronic transmission of votes is an imperative, but it is not possible in Nigeria today because of the position of the constitution. The constitution gives the sole power of organizing elections to INEC, so we must go back and amend Section 160. Once you give them that discretion, that complete autonomy, there is no way you now make a subsidiary legislation like the electoral act and it will override the constitution”, Maduabuchi explained.
Insisting that the Constitution overrides any other law, Maduabuchi said:
“I usually speak as a lawyer, I don’t talk politics. When the law prescribes a way of doing something, you can’t do it in any other way. It doesn’t invalidate the form EC8A, it is a double check on it.”
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 insists that INEC retains the constitutional rights to conduct elections as it pleases.</p>
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