By Ayodele Oni
Presidential Candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) Atiku Abubakar has put forward suggestions to guarantee that each Geopolitical zone of the country has access to the Presidency.
Atiku condemned a situation whereby two or more zones will hang up and alternate the Presidency among themselves.
Addressing a press conference in Abuja on Monday, in reaction to recent judgement of the Supreme Court which threw out his appeal against the victory of President Bola Tinubu, he also canvassed for a single term of six years for the President.
“In order to reduce the desperation of incumbents and distractions from governing and also to promote equity and national unity, we need to move to a single six-year term for President to be rotated among the six geo-political zones.
“This will prevent the ganging up of two or more geo-political zones to alternate the presidency among themselves to the exclusion of other zones.”
On the role of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in future elections, Atiku stated that “INEC should be mandated to verify the credentials submitted to it by candidates and their parties and where it is unable to do so – perhaps because the institutions involved did not respond in time – it must publicly state so and have it on record.
“A situation where a candidate submits contradictory credentials to INEC in different election cycles and the electoral umpire accepts them without question points to gross negligence, at best, or collusion to break the law by the leadership of the INEC, at worst.
“The submission of contradictory qualifying documents by a candidate as well as those found to be forged or falsified should disqualify a candidate even if the falsification or forgery is discovered after the person had been sworn into office.
“The burden of proving that a document submitted to INEC is forged should not be on the opposing candidates in the election. It is never the responsibility of an applicant for a job to prove that the person who eventually got the job did so with forged documents.”
He also canvassed for amendment of the electoral act saying “In addition to these proposed constitutional amendments, the Electoral Act should be amended to provide that, except where they explicitly violate the Constitution and other laws, the rules and procedures laid down by the electoral umpire and made public for the benefit of the contestants and the voters will be treated as sacrosanct by the courts in deciding on election disputes.
“A referee cannot be allowed to set the rules for the game only to change or ignore them when one side has scored a goal or is about to win the match.
“We must restore confidence in our electoral system which the current leadership of INEC has completely eroded and undermined.
“Also, we need well-thought out provisions in the legislation and regulations to reform the judiciary, including the introduction of an automated case assignment system; transparency in the appointment of judges; a practice directory that stresses that the goal of judges in election cases should be to discover and affirm voters’ choice rather than disregarding voters’ choice for the sake of technicalities.
“There should also be publicly available annual evaluation of the performance of judges using agreed criteria.
“By improving the transparency of the electoral process and reducing the incentives to cheat, in addition to transparency in the appointment of Judges and other judicial reforms, the number of election petitions as well as corruption in the judiciary will be significantly reduced.
“More importantly, we would have succeeded in taking away the right to elect leaders from the courts and return it to the voters to whom it truly belongs.”
The former Vice President, also, dismissed Tinubu’s declaration as winner of the February 25, 2023 Presidential Election as political banditry, and accused the Supreme Court of endorsing banditry.
 Atiku Abubakar has dismissed Tinubu's declaration as winner of the February 25, 2023 Presidential Election as political banditry, and accused the Supreme Court of endorsing banditry.){kind=link}