The Founder of the New Nigeria Peoples Party, Dr Boniface Aniebonam, has backed President Bola Tinubu’s choice of Prof. Joash Amupitan as INEC chairman. The party recently revealed that Amupitan already has his work cut out for him ahead of the Senate’s confirmation of his appointment.
According to him, despite the background of controversies surrounding Amupitan’s appointment, the new INEC chairman just has to study the commission thoroughly and correct the issues that Prof. Mahmood failed to address.
He stated that Prof. Joash Amupitan needs to do everything possible to hit the ground running because INEC’s image is currently battered and damaged.
“The first task for Amupitan is to change the battered image of INEC and restore the trust of Nigerians in the umpire.
INEC’s image has been so eroded over the years that the first task before Amupitan is righting the wrongs of the commission and re-creating confidence in it.
Amupitan needs to study the commission thoroughly and correct issues currently before it that Mahmoud ignored,” he said.
Dr Boniface further noted that President Tinubu and the Federal Executive Council members must have seen Amupitan’s capacity before nominating him.
He concluded by pointing out that the President is very committed to righting all of the wrongs in Nigeria.
“What we need in Nigeria at the moment shall be leaders who can take informed and hard decisions, if we must reinvent the Nigeria of our dreams.
Our experience with INEC over the internal leadership crisis in NNPP have given us an insight into the ills of the commission and how the body worked sometimes.
For the immediate past leadership of INEC to ignore subsisting court orders and directives to upload the NNPP’s new national executives was a shocker and very shameful to constitutional democracy.
What could have stopped the former INEC boss from obeying the court orders should be looked into. These and many more are part of issues that can erode a people’s confidence in an institution.
Amupitan has the choice to either follow the path of past INEC chairmen or write his name in Diamond.
It is still like a daydream to us that some bad eggs in INEC connived and changed the logo and colour of NNPP symbols without the consent of its founding members and holder of the original certificate of registration.
INEC did the conversion without asking or sighting the original certificate of registration of the NNPP.
This simply means that anyone can approach INEC and change the logo and colour symbols of APC, PDP, LABOUR, and others just like that,” he added.
