Ikubese advocates E-voting, same salary scale for Politicians, civil servants

Former Presidential aspirant and convener of the #YesWeFit revolutionary movement, Dr. Thomas-Wilson Ikubese has called for the implementation of electronic voting in the electoral system of Nigeria.

Ikubese, a renowned medical doctor and Philanthropist, who spoke on a live channels television morning show on Wednesday, also identified the ‘lucrative’ nature of Nigerian Politics as a reason for the violence often reported during Elections.

His words:

“I think we still have a long way to go. If you look at the turnout of people for this (Anambra Governorship) election, they are very few compared to the population of Anambra state.

I think INEC should work towards E-Voting. Each time we talk about this thing, we say we are not yet there. When are we ever going to get there?

At a time when we talked about card reader, now we have it. So, INEC should consider E-Voting where I could sit in my room without the fear of unknown gunmen or violence and I will just vote for my candidate and my vote will count.

This idea of shutting down the economy for a whole day, sometimes two days and losing billions of naira because of an election is archaic. We should be looking at a situation where an election is conducted in two, three days and collation is done on a daily bases like it’s done in some developed countries.

People have talked about the fact that we have violence, fear in Nigeria politics. The Nigerian people have seen politics as a lucrative business in Nigeria. It’s a business where you put some millions and you get billions in return. It’s actually the most lucrative business at the moment.

So, what we need to do is to make the office less attractive. We can achieve this in four ways.

First, we must put it in our laws to ensure political office holders earns salaries on the scale of the civil servants.

Secondly, the income and the expenditure of the state must be published monthly so that we know what comes in and what goes out.

We must also have special anti corruption corps that will complete corruption cases brought before it within 6 months.

Lastly, persons who are found guilty of corruption must be sentenced to life imprisonment without the option of fine.” he added.