ICPC partners INEC to stop vote-buying

The commission’s spokesperson, Mrs Rasheedat Okoduwa, disclosed this in Abuja during an anti-corruption essay competition organised by the ICPC and Youth Alive Foundation. Okoduwa, who represented the commission’s acting chairman, Musa Abubakar, said INEC and ICPC had evolved strategies that would deal with peddlers and buyers of votes during the elections. She said the Department for International Development was also sponsoring a similar campaign. She said, “ICPC continues to march forward in its three-pronged mandate of enforcement of the law, corruption prevention which is also system study and review of corruption-prone system in government organisations, and public education and mobilisation against corruption. “Part of the project that DFID sponsors is the campaign against vote-buying and selling. “ICPC does not support this crime and we already having a robust collaboration with the Independent National Electoral Commission so that we do not allow this to go unpunished. “Through the collaboration with INEC, we assured it that we will be looking out for issues of electoral malpractices especially with respect to vote-buying and selling. “Buying and selling of votes during election is bribery and the Nigerian law is against such practice. Also, the electoral law does not accept it; it sees it as an offence. ICPC and INEC will check the practice in the coming elections.”]]>