Falana to Buhari: Sack Emefiele now

Falana said this during his address to participants at the Southwest youths and women conference, held in Ado-Ekiti on Thursday.

The lawyer said Emefiele’s involvement in partisan politics means that sensitive election materials cannot be kept at the CBN.

“INEC is trying; it has deployed technology to get rid of rigging, but we can no longer keep sensitive election materials in the vault of the CBN.

“This is because the governor of the CBN is a card-carrying member of the All Progressives Congress.

“It has never happened anywhere in the world; this is very dangerous. The CBN governor’s power is enormous under the CBN Act, so he can’t be a politician.

“We can’t look for an alternative place to keep our electoral materials; it is the CBN governor that must be removed and whether President Buhari likes it or not, Emefiele must go.

“Some Civil Society Organisations have filed a motion against him and we will pursue it to a logical conclusion,’’ Falana stressed.

He also suggested the establishment of electoral offences tribunals across the country to prosecute offenders and sanitise the system and also to stem election manipulation and bloodshed.

The rights activist expressed regret that while the police had arrested more than 2,000 electoral offenders from the 2011 general elections onward, most of them were neither prosecuted nor punished.

He argued that: “people commit electoral crimes because they are aided by politicians.

“Statistics showed that 750 electoral offenders were arrested in 2011; 900 such offenders were arrested in 2015, and in 2019, a total of 1,120 were arrested.

“Majority of them were not prosecuted; the police even filed motions to terminate some of the cases and discontinued prosecution.’’