FIJ
President Bola Tinubu appointed Etekamba Umoren as the new Akwa Ibom State REC despite his party activities and links to Senate President Akpabio and previous embezzlement cases.
Umoren was one of the 10 new Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) Tinubu appointed on Wednesday.
In its statement, the State House said that Tinubu expected the appointees to abide by the highest standards of professional and ethical conduct in discharging their duties.
However, FIJ has found that Umoren showed his partisan bias towards the All Progressives Congress and Akpabio many times.
Section 141 of the Electoral Act 2022 states that “No person holding an elective office to which this Act relates or a registered member of a political party shall be eligible for or be appointed to carry out the duties of a returning officer, an electoral officer, presiding officer or a poll clerk.”
While all electoral officers can deny being card-carrying members of any political party, a clearly determined partisan allegiance questions the ability of such officers to act transparently while discharging their duties.
Back in 2018, Governor Udom Emmanuel removed Umoren from his position as Secretary to the Akwa Ibom State Government. Umoren had been described as an ally of Akpabio. It was Akpabio who appointed Umoren as secretary to the state government while he was governor.
Akpabio, who was once a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), became a member of the APC and this led to conflicts between him and Emmanuel, his successor and PDP governor.
Aniete Okon, a PDP chieftain and senator, had claimed that Umoren’s removal had nothing to do with the PDP’s rift with Akpabio at the time.
Umoren showed support for Akpabio numerous times afterwards. He took it a step further to align with the APC with his comments following the 2019 elections.
“APC candidates won at the fields and collation centres but lost in the process of declaring the results by INEC officials; this is unacceptable to us. We have all the evidence and I want to assure you that Senator Akpabio will reclaim his mandate at the tribunal,” Umoren said in March 2019.
