4th February, 2022
By Salisu Sani-Idris
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said no election will take place at 593 polling units without registered voters in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Area Council polls on Feb. 12.
The Chairman of INEC, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, announced this at the FCT Expanded Stakeholders Security meeting organised by the FCT Administration on Thursday, in Abuja.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that INEC boss was invited to the meeting by the FCT Minister, Malam Muhammad Bello, to enable him brief FCT stakeholders on preparations for the elections
The chairman added that no materials had been produced for those units and no personnel would be deployed to them.
The INEC boss noted that there were 1,328 polling units with between 0-50 voters and 546 polling units with over 1,000 registered voters.
Yakubu said that the commission had already informed political parties, Civil Society Organisations, the Media and Security agencies at the national level about the development
He said that voting would take place in all the other polling units, noting that for congested polling units, INEC would deploy more BVAS (Card Reader) to facilitate speedy accreditation of voters.
He also said that INEC would deploy additional staff to those locations, adding that the commission agreed with the security agencies to deploy more personnel to ensure peace and order.
According to him, for transparency, the commission is making the hard copies of the details locations of these polling units to all stakeholders at this meeting.
“In addition, soft copies have also been uploaded to our website. By doing so, we want to achieve two objectives.
“First is to ensure that voters in the FCT and indeed all Nigerians are aware of these polling units and the arrangements made for them on the day of election.
“Secondly, to seek the support of all stakeholders to ensure that these polling units are populated ahead of the 2023 General Elections.
“We need the support of especially the traditional, community and religious leaders in this regard,’’ he said.
Yakubu, who reiterated the importance of peace to the successful conduct of the area council elections, gave assurance that INEC would protect the integrity of the process.
“Our eyes are on all our officials, be they adhoc or regular staff, to ensure that they strictly abide by the rules. All parties, candidates and their supporters should do the same,’’ he said.
Earlier, the FCT Minister, Bello, said the expanded security meeting which was first in 2022, brought all the 17 graded chiefs in the territory, reviewed the 2021 and look at focus for 2022.
“In our reviewed we found out that the collaborative security efforts with neighboring states of the FCT is very effective.
“And, this is one aspect that we will continue to improve upon because that is where all the security agencies within the FCT and their counterpart in neighboring states of Nasarawa, Niger and Kogi work together.
“Overall also, we appreciate the efforts of all the agencies and in spite of what happened here and there within the rural communities we are quite satisfied with the efforts.
“And, we identified areas where we are going to give them additional support and we intend to do so,’’ Bello said.(NAN)