NBA Elections: Lawyer Questions Abuja Voters’ List
A former Publicity Secretary of the Abuja branch of the Nigerian Bar Association, Joseph Silas, has questioned the authenticity of the list of voters released by the association’s electoral committee for the branch.
The NBA elections are scheduled to hold electronically between July 29 and 30.
In a July 7, 2020 letter to the Chairman of the Electoral Committee of the NBA, Chief Tawo Tawo (SAN), Silas said he was surprised to see the list of voters for the Abuja branch balloon from 2,861 to 5,799.
According to him, the list containing 5,799 eligible voters for the Abuja NBA branch is doubtful, given that the branch has been embroiled in a crisis in the past four years, leading to its breakage into two factions.
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Silas wondered whether the ECNBA considered payment of association due, which is one of the conditions for eligibility to vote, in compiling the voters’ list for the Abuja branch.
He said, “I am not only in doubt of this astronomical rise in the number of voters from Abuja, I am also in shock that it can be imagined. There is no way the Abuja branch combined will produce such a number of qualified voters if the branch due payment was taken into consideration.”
He therefore called on the ECNBA to justify the list by “publishing all statements of accounts belonging to Abuja branch.”
Meanwhile, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Mr Ade Okeaya-Inmeh; a former Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, Prof. Chidi Odinkalu, and two others have advised the Tawo-led ECNBA to consider shifting the elections forward, as they expressed concerns about the electoral committee’s preparedness for the exercise.
In a July 6, 2020 letter to the Chairman, ECNBA, titled, “Urgent Concerns Regarding the Upcoming 2020 NBA Elections,” Okeaya-Inmeh and Odinkalu; alongside the Vice-Chairman of the NBA Section on Business Law, Ayuli Jemide; and an ex-Chairman of the NBA Young Lawyers’ Forum, Barbara Omosun, raised concerns about a myriad of issues, including “missing names on voters’ list.”
They said there was a need for the ECNBA to iron out the issues before proceeding to the polls, in order to avoid the 2018 experience when the NBA elections were fraught with glitches.
They wrote, “Thousands of members have complained that despite having paid their Bar Practising Fees and branch dues and armed with receipts, their names are still not on the voters’ list.”
On the transparency of the elections, the lawyers said, “It is fearsome that with less than three weeks to the elections, voters and candidates do not know how the election technology works.”
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