Femi Gbajabiamila, speaker of the house of representatives, says the European Union (EU) commission should strive for balanced views while monitoring the upcoming elections.
Gbajabiamila said this when the EU election observation delegation visited his office in Abuja on Friday.
He asked the delegation to speak to multiple stakeholders to get the real accounts of the election outcome before drawing its conclusions.
He said that as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country, Nigerians are bound to have different prejudices and opinions that represent their interests.
“We are prepared to [elections]and those who have the responsibility, from the President, the National Assembly, the INEC, the political parties and all the other actors in the chain, we are all ready for the votes to count”, he said.
“The electoral law is in force. We’ve done everything we needed to do, and now we have to wait and see how things work out.
“The election is a process that leads to the last day. It is very complex, but at the same time it can be very simple, depending on the attitude of the actors.
“We hope there are no issues in the area of technology implementation and also security issues, we hope we won’t worry too much about that.”
The speaker expressed concern about the low collection of Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs), but said that “we strongly believe that the number of PVC collections will increase well before the actual election.”
Barry Andrews, the leader of the delegation, said the EU mission will diligently watch the polls, as it has done on previous occasions.
He said that the body has a reliable data collection methodology to give a report on the results of the surveys.
He said the mission will formally unveil its work plan on Monday in Abuja and release a preliminary report on the election two days after the conclusion of the vote.
