CHAIRMAN of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Maurice Iwu, yesterday told those calling for his sack to stop wasting their time as he can only be removed from office through impeachment by the Senate.

He buttressed this by affirming the constitutional procedures of his appointment, saying "once appointed, the chairman and the national commissioners can only be removed from office through impeachment by the Senate, on the grounds of an articulated offence, which would have been conveyed and properly evaluated."

He accused those calling for his resignation of harbouring a hidden agenda, and asked: "Why are they not asking the head of the Army to resign because of the crisis in Jos? Why are they not asking the governor of Bauchi State to resign because of the crisis there?"

Iwu spoke while delivering a lecture to participants of the Senior Executive Course 31 of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) in Kuru, Plateau State and also affirmed that he would not succumb to the pressures against his office by throwing in the towel, insisting that he is equal to the task of remedying the ills of the past elections in 2011.

Only on Tuesday, the Nigerian Labour Congress joined the call on the Federal Government to sack the INEC chairman on the heels of the voided governorship election of April 14, 2007 in Ondo State by the Court of Appeal sitting in Benin, which subsequently declared the petitioner, Dr Olusegun Mimiko as duly elected governor of the state.

In the past, countless individuals, civil society groups, activists and the Nigerian Bar Association among others had called for the removal of the INEC boss as various courts upended previous election returns and awarded victories to petitioners.

Those who want me sacked are ignorant

The INEC boss, in the lecture entitled, "The Electoral Process and the Imperatives of Electoral Reform in Nigeria" took up his protagonists, describing them as ignorant of the constitutional processes of appointing and removing from office the chairman of the national Electoral Management Body (EMB).

According to him, "we have two enabling laws that guide the commission. One is our constitution and the other is the Electoral Act. Our constitution provides for an Independent National Electoral Commission made up of 12 national commissioners, two drawn from each geo-political zone of the country, and then the chairman.

"The 13 of them are appointed through a process, including vetting by the council of state, which comprises all the governors of the 36 states of the country, regardless of the party that produced them, all the former Heads of State, regardless of how they came into office, all the service chiefs and the heads of the legislative arms of government," Iwu added.

The INEC boss, still on the processes of appointing national commissioners and chairman, said the National Council of State would make a recommendation that "goes to the Senate of the Federal Republic. It is the Senate that votes whether to appoint or not to appoint."

Still on those calling for his resignation, the INEC helmsman, described such action as the "most unpatriotic thing to do", stressing that "if I am unable to solve the problem, then I can contemplate resignation, but I am more than equal to solving the problem."

I won't resign

Iwu restated his resolve to stay on the job till the end of his constitutionally-guaranteed tenure, saying, "if I did not commit any crime, on the basis of which I could be impeached, I will not resign."

The INEC boss further accused the political class and elites of being the architect of the pitfalls in the nation's electoral system, particularly by their activities, "marked essentially by denial of reality and a conspiratorial preoccupation with finger pointing, mob action and unending parochial plots prompted in the main by nothing else but calculations of the interest of a few within the fold of the political elite."

He therefore called for a holistic re-engineering of the polity, which would seek to reform socio-political and economic norms, in place of the current focus on reform of the electoral system alone by the Yar'Adua administration.