ABUJA: Nigeria's national security adviser said on Thursday that the country's presidential and parliamentary elections should be postponed because not all voter cards had been distributed.
Sambo Dasuki made the claim at a conference at the Chatham House international affairs think-tank in London, just three weeks away from polling.
"We said (to the Independent National Electoral Commission), look, there is a problem... We still have about 30 million... (voter) cards to distribute," he said.
"Look at the possibility of shifting this thing and doing it when everybody has a card because it doesn't cost you anything, is still within the law and it is safer for all of us.
"So, that is what we are encouraging. They (INEC) keep assuring us that everybody will have his card but I doubt it."
Voting for a new president and parliament has been set for February 14, with gubernatorial and state assembly elections two weeks later.
The run-up to the election has already been clouded by fears over security, with swathes of the northeast in the control of Boko Haram militants, making voting impossible.
INEC has been scrambling for a solution to allow hundreds of thousands of displaced people to vote in the area, which is an opposition stronghold.
The main opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) has voiced concern that if voters in the region are disenfranchised, then the validity of the overall result of the election will be in doubt.
The APC is seen as having its best chance of dumping the ruling party of President Goodluck Jonathan out of power for the first time since Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999.
It said in a statement that Dasuki's suggestion "has exposed the hitherto clandestine plot by the Jonathan administration to push for the postponement of the polls, using all sorts of cheap tricks".
"Now that we have found the smoking gun, we are urging the international community, in particular, to urgently extract a commitment from President Goodluck Jonathan that the elections will hold as scheduled next month, and that he would respect the outcome, just as we have said," it added.
Any postponement could trigger a constitutional crisis and was "capable of undermining the nation's democracy", it added.
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