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The House of Representatives, yesterday, Tuesday, 19/3/2019 resolved to set up an ad hoc committee to investigate holistically, the militarization of the 2019 general elections.
The resolution followed a motion of urgent national importance by Patrick Asadu (PDP, Enugu) on the alleged “illegal deployment, use and misuse of soldiers of the Nigerian Army during the 2019 general elections.”
Asadu said the investigation was necessary given that such deployments were made despite valid, subsisting court judgments that prohibited the use of the military for election purposes.
“There are three separate, subsisting judgments by courts of competent jurisdiction against the deployment of the military during elections in Nigeria, without recourse to the National Assembly.
“These include the judgments of Justice Mohammed Aikawa of Federal High Court, Sokoto, 2015; Justice Abdul Aboki of the Court of Appeal, 2015; and the 2015 judgment granted Femi Gbajabiamila by Justice Ibrahim Buba of the Federal High Court, Lagos,” Asadu noted.
He said the judgements were clear that the military had no role to play in the electoral process, and that whoever deployed the military for the conduct of elections in Nigeria had breached the law.
Asadu said even as the National Assembly was not consulted before the deployment, some of the soldiers acted unprofessionally by descending into conflicts, taking partisan sides, and allegedly interfering in the electoral process.
He expressed concern that a nationally accepted, unifying and critical agency like the Nigerian Army was unnecessarily being dragged into partisan politics.
The lawmaker warned that Nigeria’s democracy was being threatened by the illegal deployment of the army during elections, in utter disregard of the extant laws of the land.
• Source: Daily Trust.