THE Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) says it withdrew its involvement in electoral processes owing to malpractices that it alleged marred the 2015 elections.
ASUU president, Emmanuel Osodoke, said this on Saturday, June 11, 2022 on a live programme on Human Rights Radio while responding to a question on the alleged involvement of the Union in election rigging.
“When Jega was INEC president, he invited us that we should participate in the elections and select people, which we did. When the elections were over, we observed that there were riggings. We sat down and analysed it and found out that they asked us to participate in the elections at the collation level, whereas the rigging was taking place at the polling units.
”We gave the report to Jega and told him the only way we would continue to participate in the elections would be for him to allow us start from the beginning to the end, but he said no. So we said we were not participating again as a Union,” Osodoke said.
He added that when the leadership of the current INEC chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, approached the ASUU on the same issue, the Union turned down the offer.
He said ASUU then told Nigerians that it would not participate in the last elections until INEC looks at the grey areas and makes corrections.
The ASUU president clarified that members of the Union participating in the process were doing so on a personal level and not as ASUU members.
Nurudeen Akewushola is an investigative reporter and fact-checker with The ICIR. He believes courageous in-depth investigative reporting is the key to social justice, accountability and good governance in society. You can reach him via [email protected] and @NurudeenAkewus1 on Twitter.
This country 🥲🥲🥲