The Social Democratic Party (SDP) presidential candidate, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has stated that the majority of members of the 9th National Assembly are guilty of vote-buying.
The ondo-born politician made this known on Channels TV's Sunrise Daily on Tuesday, while lamenting the current crisis afflicting the country's democracy.
He said, “The problem of Nigeria is not that we are sinners, God can forgive us. But we are hypocrites, God can’t help hypocrites".
“Majority of the people in the National Assembly are vote buyers, even though they are passing the law against vote buyers and they are desperately looking for money everywhere to buy votes.”
“So it is not difficult to just make us believe that this is an offence that can only be committed by the political class and the same political class is the one passing the law they know they are going to disobey.”
Vote buying has been a problem in Nigeria, with the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Professor Yakubu Mahmood, reiterating the commission's commitment to putting safeguards in place to prevent vote buying in the 2023 elections.
The SDP presidential candidate also stated that anyone involved in vote buying would be expelled from their party and assured that his party has no such members.
“In the Social Democratic Party, there is not a single vote buyer there. if there is a single vote buyer, let us know we will expel them from our party.”
“So you look at the senatorial candidates, house of assembly candidates, governorship and house of representatives candidates, you can stop vote buying if every political party can say we will expel every candidate who engages in vote buying,” he said.
Adebayo also accused some of the candidates running for president in 2023 of vote buying during the primaries.
“Many of the candidates or some of the candidates you see today did vote buying to win the primary in their party.”
He stated that the next step was to issue a "moral challenge" to the candidates.
“I think that the first thing we are supposed to do is to take a moral challenge to these candidates. SERAP asked us to sign an undertaking against vote buying and I think that they should make a ceremony out of that and let it be a part of the process but from the point of view of INEC.”
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