Presidential Research & Communications Unit

President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua has extended the time frame in which the Presidential Committee he set up to reform the nation’s electoral system will submit its final report.

Receiving the committee’s interim report at the State House Abuja on Tuesday August 12, President Yar’Adua gave its members additional four months even though they asked for three.

This will enable the committee do a more thorough job to meet the President and Nigerians’ expectation.

The committee, which was inaugurated on August 28, 2007, with a 12-month tenure, will now submit its report in December 2008.

President Yar'Adua said that the on-going attempt to evolve a viable electioneering and voting system depended on the unity of the political class and called on politicians to work together on the matter because the report of the committee was central to political stability in the country.

Chairman of the Committee and former Chief Justice of the Federation, Mr Justice Mohammed Uwais explained that the extension would enable the committee complete its work and that the report would address the ills in the nation's polity.

The panel he said, received 1133 memoranda at the end of its public sittings across the country hence the need for more time.

Justice Uwais said that though the committee was inaugurated in August last year, it could not take off until last December "as a result of some initial problems."

In particular, he noted "the committee will make recommendations on the focal issues of the composition, autonomy and funding of the electoral commissions."

The committee, he added, "reviewed the roles and functions of Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and States Independent Electoral Commissions (SIECs) and will make appropriate recommendations. We are also working on the recommendations to improve the performance of security agencies, political parties, non-governmental groups, the mass media and Nigerians in the electoral process."

He said that the committee discovered that the inadequacy of political and civic education in the Nigerian context had impacted negatively on the electoral process and "will make appropriate recommendations for civic and political education as well as modes of civic engagement that will deepen democracy."