By Mary Okoh
Enugu
The Resident Electoral Commissioner of Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Dr Emeka Ononamadu, has said that the incorrect bank details of its Ad-hoc staff were responsible for the delay in the payment of their allowances.
Some ad-hoc staff that worked during the 2019 general election for INEC staged a protest in Enugu metropolis on Tuesday over non-payment of their allowance.
Addressing journalists in Enugu on Thursday, Ononamdu, said that the commission would pay every ad-hoc staff after a thorough verification.
His words: “Non-payment of genuine ad-hoc staff is history in INEC because payment of this nature is done through Central Bank electronic platform. A measure approved by INEC to forestall non-payment of those who worked.”
According to him, the payment of ad-hoc staff allowances was delayed because of some mistakes in their account details, saying that by the end of today (Thursday) all the genuine ad-hoc staff would have received their payment, leaving those that had issues in the account details.
He said, “At the time of the protest, only two LGAs were outstanding only for one aspect of the election due to faults from the Ad-hoc staff that were unable to stick to our procedure of filling the required forms for payment and the SPOs who were unable to get them rightly do so at the point of taking attendance. The protesters whether genuine or not were equally addressed by the EO of the affected LGA.
“When we inquired on details of few of the protesters, we discovered that majority of them are those INEC did not originally post to where they claimed that they worked and there is no documentation either in our posting list or attendance list to support their claims. Most of them could not have been posted when they are not either youth Corpers, students of Federal tertiary institutions or staff of Federal ministries, agencies and departments.”
Ononamadi said that the protesters could have been hired by those he claimed want to rubbish the “excellent records and to put us in more troubles by putting up pressure for us to pay the wrong persons which will prevent us from paying the right Ad-hoc workers.”