No Law Limits Number of Attempts – INEC on Failed Recall of Natasha Akpoti

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has stated that there is no legal restriction on the number of times a recall petition can be filed against a lawmaker.

This clarification came after the commission announced that the petitioners failed to meet the Constitutional requirements for the
recall of Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, representing Kogi Central.

INEC officials emphasized that while the process must comply with constitutional and electoral guidelines, the law does not prohibit multiple recall efforts.

Rotimi Oyekanmi, the chief press secretary (CPS) to the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), made the clarification yesterday when he appeared on Channels TV Politics Today programme

“I don’t think the law talked about whether there could be a repeat or not; the law just talks about the threshold, the threshold meaning that if you want to recall, you must have, in addition to your petition, 50 percent plus one signature,” he said.

“The law did not specify how many times you can undertake that; if you check section 69 of the constitution, it did not limit the number of times you can recall a lawmaker or a representative.”

Earlier yesterday, the commission said the recall petition against Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, the lawmaker representing Kogi central, failed to meet the requirements of the 1999 Constitution.

The electoral umpire said the number of constituents who signed the petition against the suspended lawmaker fell short of 50 percent of registered voters in her senatorial district, as required by the constitution.

Making clarifications, Oyekanmi said INEC was not partisan in its handling of the failed recall petition against Akpoti-Uduaghan.

“In the case of the Kogi central district, we received a petition and a cover letter, and of course what Nigerians were saying was that we were taking sides,” he said.

“But what happened was that in the covering letter, the representatives of the petitioners did not include their address as required in our regulations and guidelines, and what we just did was to ask them to supply their address; it has nothing to do with the petition.

“And of course, there is nowhere in the law where INEC is asked to reject a petition just because the cover letter did not contain the address. So, there was no hanky-panky in what we did.”