A prominent Nigerian lawyer, Ifedayo Adedipe, has advocated that those who commit electoral crimes should be prosecuted and convicted as the country awaits another election year.
Adedipe, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN, who stated this in an interview in Port-Harcourt recently said the law should not appear helpless in dealing with electoral offences in the country.
The Senior Advocate of Nigeria said: “Since 1960 till date, I’m not aware, there may be, but I’m not aware of people prosecuted for electoral violence and convicted. So, when people do things and get away with the law appearing helpless, it is habit-forming. People will do it again and again”.
He critiqued the last governorship elections in Kogi and Bayelsa States and said those who committed electoral crime in one of the states were yet to be arrested.
The respected legal practitioner said: “We saw the last (governorship) election in Kogi and Bayelsa State. Prior to the election in Kogi, the secretariat of one of the aspiring parties was burnt down. As we speak, not a single individual had been apprehended. During the election, you saw what happened. We’ve had cases been shown that results were actually falsified by officials conducting elections (and) they’ve never been punished for that”.
He said if electoral offenders were not punished, they would continue to commit more electoral crimes and said the law should be deployed to sanction electoral offenders.
He said Nigerians will only behave if the law was used to punish those who commit electoral crimes and called for deployment of the law to correct offenders.
Adedipe said a political party known to have committed electoral violence in an election should be banned from contesting further elections.
He said: “If you have law being deployed to correct and sanction people for that kind of conduct, chances are that our people will behave. If for instance, you annul an election because of violence attributable to one of the political parties and you ban that party, you are likely going to get people say, ‘we are not going to do this, there might be this consequence’, but when they do it and they get away with it, they will do it again and again and again”.
The respected Senior Advocate of Nigeria also appealed to judges to not “wilfully ignore” established laws in the country.
