The All Progressives Congress and the Peoples Democratic Party are among the parties that are yet to submit their audit reports from the last general election. The two major parties also ran afoul of campaign expenditures as they were said to have exceeded the N1bn ceiling set by the Electoral Act. However, the Independent National Electoral Commission said it had prepared forms that would make the process easier to track expenditures and had also trained auditors from the registered political parties.
The commission’s Director, Elections and Party Monitoring, Aminu Idris, disclosed this on Tuesday in Lagos at the two-day capacity-building workshop for journalists on critical issues in the Electoral Act, 2022 and the Commission’s Processes, Innovations, Preparations for the 2023 General Election. Idris said only 34 political parties out of the 91 registered parties that participated in the 2019 elections have submitted their audit reports. Among the 34 however, only nine met the full requirements of submitting audit reports accompanied by an affidavit.
He said, “In the 2019 general election, we tracked election expenses and we have a report of that. In 2023, we will go through this process. “The commission tracks expenditure for general elections. In the last report we did, we had some figures from the presidential election of the two major parties.
We remember that then, the maximum limit was N1bn and what we had based on our tracking across the country was N4.6bn and N3.3bn. What we tracked were about four items namely billboards, print media advertisements, electronic media advertisements and coverage/programmes.”
