As Nigeria marches into the 2015 general elections, the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE) has tasked political stakeholders to ensure fair play in their conduct during and after the elections.
Making its position known in a communiqué issued at the end of their last quarterly meeting for 2014 in Lagos, signed by its President, Femi Adesina, the Editors argued that there was need to ensure that the elections were conducted in an orderly manner because Nigeria’s reputation as well as that of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) were at stake.
“With the shoddy arrangements in the issuance of Permanent Voters’ Cards (PVCs), there is urgent need for INEC to redeem the process by ensuring that eligible voters are not disenfranchised,” they said.
They advised the political class, security agents and the electorate to, “be cautious in their utterances, abide by the rules of campaigning and exhibit tolerance before and during the elections to avoid over-heating the polity.”
While insisting that the security agencies should be non-partisan, the NGE lamented that insurgency had lasted for too long in the northern part of the country, especially in Nigeria’s North-east, decrying its attendant huge death toll and massive number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).
“The crises call for harmonisation of efforts, change of tactics and a review of the country’s security architecture to win the war,” they wrote.
The Guild further reacted to the dwindling economic fortunes of Nigeria noting that the sudden sharp fall in global oil prices was a wakeup call on the federal government to urgently go beyond rhetorics by developing economic policies and measures to diversify the economy.
“The federal and other arms of government must take drastic actions to reduce the huge cost of governance, particularly in the face of recently announced austerity measures.” The editors said.
Also on the just released November/December results of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), the guild wrote that the high failure rate was believed to be “symptomatic of the decay in the education sector,” and therefore called for “increased allocation to the education sector, and training and retraining of teachers.”
NGE, while acknowledging the unifying role of sports globally, lamented that “as the Nations Cup kicks off in this month, our national team, Super Eagles and defending champions will be conspicuously absent at the AFCON tournament,” and called on the football authorities to promptly resolve all issues plaguing the nation’s sports sector.
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