Yakubu Maikyau, the President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), has urged lawyers to fight to strengthen the democratic system in the nation by attempting to modify the current constitution to allow for independent candidates.
The call was made by the NBA president on Sunday during the NBA Ikeja Branch’s 19th annual Gani Fawehinmi Lecture in Lagos.
The current system by which political candidates emerge during the primaries commits fraud against citizens as it restricts their electoral options, according to Maikyau, who spoke on the topic “A free fair and credible election: An vital weapon for national development.”
He said, “To ensure fair and credible elections in the forthcoming elections, we should work towards improving the democratic process in Nigeria by which we ought to ensure that we have more political parties to choose from. We can take it a notch higher by seeking to provide for an independent candidacy.
“What you have in Section 2.2.1 of the constitution and with due respect to the freedoms of that constitution is that there is a fraud being committed on the people of this country. It is fraud in the sense that we don’t pay any attention to how we produce our candidates.
“You can’t contest an election unless on the platform of a political party and we all know what goes on in these political parties so that means we don’t get the best of us to emerge as candidates for us to choose at the general elections. So whatever the primaries produce is what we are limited to in terms of our choices.”
