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The 2023 Vice-Presidential Candidate of the New Nigeria People’s Party, Bishop Isaac Idahosa, has urged the Independent National Electoral Commission to conduct presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections on the same day to cut costs and ensure better outcomes.
Speaking on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief programme on Wednesday, the cleric and NNPP chieftain advocated for a standardised election process, stating: “I would like to suggest that all elections be conducted on the same day. That will help curb a lot of issues—presidential, senatorial, gubernatorial, all on the same day. It will cut costs and produce the desired results. But when elections are spread over one or two weeks after the presidential poll, a lot can happen—a bandwagon effect can take place.”
He also called for appropriate penalties to be imposed on INEC and public officials for electoral failures.
According to Idahosa, an ally of former Kano governor and 2023 NNPP presidential candidate Rabiu Kwankwaso, the absence of consequences for electoral misconduct encourages repeated violations.
“We don’t punish anyone for wrongdoing; there are no consequences, so they keep repeating the same actions,” he said. “INEC makes mistakes, yet no one holds them accountable, and then the same mistakes happen again. Once there are no consequences for actions or inactions, the cycle continues because there is no accountability.”
For the 2023 general elections, INEC introduced its Result Viewing Portal and the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System. However, many politicians criticised the effectiveness of these technologies, while INEC attributed their shortcomings to technical glitches.
In the last election, Kwankwaso and his running mate, Idahosa, finished fourth with 1,496,687 votes. Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress won with 8,794,726 votes, followed by Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party with 6,984,520 votes and Peter Obi of the Labour Party with 6,101,533 votes.
The election results were challenged in court, but the Supreme Court ruled that the unavailability of results on IReV was not sufficient grounds to annul the poll.
Idahosa further lamented that some individuals in government had become more powerful than institutions, negatively affecting governance in the country. “Money politics has taken over the system,” he added.
