INEC To Provide 16,500 More DDC Machines
Professor Attahiru Jega, the Chairman of Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, said this morning that the Commission is expecting receive 16,500 more Direct Data Capture, DDC machines from one of its contractors, Avante in the next 24 hours.
The INEC Chairman who spoke to some journalists this morning said when the DDC machines being expected will be deployed to polling units where the Commission has not been able to deploy the registration machines and to areas where there needs fo extra deployment because of the size of the population.
Jega said 117,000 DDC machines have been deployed so far.
“Of course, there are about 120,000 polling units which means that there about 3000 polling units in which we have not yet deployed the DDC machines and these are nationwide, it cuts across,â€Â said Jega who said the situation is unfortunate.
He added that the problem arose because the contractor, Avante could not deliver the machines as promised with the excuse that it has been unable to get aircraft to bring the machines to the country.
“He has delivered one aircraft, I think on Sunday and the second aircraft is expected today with 5,500 DDC machines.
“Once that arrives, we will now be able to deploy to all the polling units and we will have spares and of course, what we intend to do is that wherever we notice a large concentration of population, we can reconfigure another DDC machine to that polling unit and we can deploy it so that we can register as much people as possible”.
On the calls for extension of time for registration as a result of hitches that have dogged the exercise so far, the INEC chairman said the commission is still optimistic that the exercise can be completed with in the two weeks period allocated with the number of machines the commission is expecting to receive.
He however added that the Commission will consider extending the registration period based on reports from specific areas or locations.
The INEC Chairman said it is premature to begin to talk about extension now since most of the identified problems hindering the registration exercise are being tackled and that this has led to tremendous improvement in the conduct of the exercise.
— Oluokun Ayorinde/ Abuja
Comments