Yakubu said that although INEC may suffer some hitches here and there but overall, it is ready to proceed with the election.
By Jeffrey Agbo
Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, on Monday said the recent attacks on its facilities won’t abort the 2023 general elections.
Yakubu spoke while receiving a delegation from Africa Union Special Pre- Electoral Political Mission led by Phumzile Mlambo- Ngcuka.
“In the last three weeks, three of our local government area offices were attacked in three different states of the federation and the last one occurred yesterday in the South Eastern part of the country.
“Although there were no casualties but quite a number of the materials already acquired and delivered for the elections have been lost.
“Now, the good thing is that so far, we can recover from all the looses but it’s a source of concern. This shouldn’t be allowed to continue.
“So, we will continue to engage with the security agencies to make sure that these offices as well as personnel and our facilities are protected ahead of the election,” he said.
Yakubu noted that the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the Results Viewing Portal (IReV) for voter accreditation and uploading of polling unit results in real time have come to stay.
“We may express some concern about the attack on these facilities but it will never deter the commission from going ahead with the election as scheduled,” he said.
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Yakubu also said there is no going back on the deployment of those technologies because it is a requirement of the law, making it mandatory for INEC to do so.
Yakubu said that although INEC may suffer some hitches here and there but overall, it is ready to proceed with the election.
“We are required to proceed in the manner that the law requires us to do using the deployment of technology for the purpose of accreditation and uploading of Polling Unit level result from the PU on election day for transparency.
“The good thing is that since we started this process, we hear less and less of litigation arising from the conduct of elections by the commission.
“Now we have more litigations arising from the conduct of primaries by political parties rather than the main election conducted by the commission,” he said.