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Dayo Johnson Akure

The Convener of YesWeFit Revolutionary Movement and Former Presidential Aspirant, Thomas-Wilson Ikubes has called for the implementation of electronic voting in the electoral system of Nigeria and a drastic cut in the take-home of political officeholders.

Ikubese who spoke on a Channel Television Sunrise Daily said the cut in take-home of political office holders should include the President, Vice President, Governors, council chairmen state and federal lawmakers.

According to him, this should make them collect the same salary scale as civil servants in the country.

This, Ikubese said would make political offices less lucrative and encourage genuine people who wish to serve the masses to venture into politics.

He added that the people must wake up to force the National Assembly members to enact laws that would make political offices less lucrative.

On electronic voting, lkubese attributed perennial poor turnout of people on election days in Nigeria to insecurity and poor performances of political office holders who had monetised the electoral system for selfish gains.

“l think we still have a long way to go. If you look at the turnout of people for this (Anambra Governorship) election, they are very few compared to the population of Anambra state.

” l think INEC should work towards E-Voting. Each time we talk about this thing, we say we are not yet there. When are we ever going to get there?

“At a time when we talked about card reader, now we have it. So, INEC should work towards e-voting, they are saying we are not there yet, when are we going to be there. In the past whenever we advocated the use of card reader machines for voting, they said it was not possible, now we are using it.

“We must be looking at e-voting, we can be able to vote for the candidate of my choice and my vote will count without the fear of unknown gunmen,.

“This idea of shutting down the economy for a whole day, sometimes two days and losing billions of naira because of an election is archaic.

“We should be looking at a situation where an election is conducted in two, three days and collation is done on a daily basis like it’s done in some developed countries.

“The Nigerian people have seen politics as a lucrative business in Nigeria. It’s a business where you put some millions and you get billions in return. It’s actually the most lucrative business at the moment.

“So, what we need to do is to make the office less attractive. We can achieve this by putting it in our laws to ensure political office holders earns salaries on the scale of the civil servants, the income and the expenditure of the state must be published monthly so that we know what comes in and what goes out.

Also, “We must also have special anti-corruption corps that will complete corruption cases brought before it within six months while those found guilty of corruption must be sentenced to life imprisonment without the option of fine.

Vanguard News Nigeria