The National
Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commissioner, Prof Mahmod
Yakubu, says there is no possibility that the 2019 general elections will be
postponed.
Yakubu made this declaration on
an interview on Osasu Show posted
on the show’s You Tube Channel.
He said,
“I cannot see any possibility of a postponement. We started this a long time
ago; we have gone ahead with preparations. INEC is not even contemplating the
possibility of a postponement.”
He said the commission
had contacted the National Youth Service Corps to release corps members
for elections.
Yakubu added, “We are liaising
with the NYSC for ad hoc workers to be used for the elections, and where there
are shortfalls, the commission has a very clear policy: we will make up the
difference by using students of federal tertiary institutions.
“Unless the number is
exhausted and there is still a shortfall, we will then go to the state tertiary
institutions.”
He said the commission
had replaced over 62,000 ballot boxes, which were either damaged or
destroyed.
Yakubu also said the
electoral body had procured an additional 200,000 ballot boxes for the
presidential election.
He said, “We needed to replace
27,000 smart card readers after the stress tests on the ones used in the 2015
general elections. We have changed the batteries, the SIM cards and the
memory cards.”
Yakubu said the introduction
of technology had made it impossible for any party to win an election by a wide
margin.
He said
the Permanent Voter Cards and the smart card readers had been able to tackle
ballot rigging, hence the Ekiti and Osun governorship polls last year were
tightly contested.
The INEC boss said, “Between
2015 and November 2018, we conducted elections in 195 constituencies,
the largest number of offseason elections.
“The turnout varied from a
little over 50 per cent in Katsina to as low as 2.9 per cent in Ifako/Ijaye in
Lagos and 3.4 per cent in Eti Osa state constituency in Lagos.
“I think because
elections in Nigeria have progressively and incrementally improved, there is no
possibility now that you will have the kind of margins that we used to
experience in our elections before the introduction of technology, basically
the PVC and the smart card reader.
“The elections in terms of
outcomes and votes are becoming more international. You can see the
outcomes of the elections are becoming more and more competitive and closer to
the kind of results we see even in advanced democracies.”
Yakubu added that the
commission was ready for the general elections.
0 comments:
Post a Comment