INEC commits to successful presidential elections

INEC commits to successful presidential elections
By Williams Osewezina, Lagos

Nigeria’s Independent Electoral Commission (INEC), has reiterated its commitment to addressing the challenges of conducting elections in Nigeria.

Speaking on Wednesday, at a press conference, in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, the chairman of INEC, Prof. Attahiru Jega, expressed optimism that the presidential election scheduled for Saturday, April 16 would be better than the National Assembly (NASS) elections.

Tackling challenges

He said that the commission had identified the challenges of the NASS elections and noted that appropriate decisions have been taken to ensure that they do not reoccur in subsequent elections.

Jega expressed appreciation over the early arrival of materials and the early accreditation in the NASS elections.

The INEC chief said that the commission had assessed the causes of delays in the arrival of materials in some polling stations and said that the commission had put measures in place to ensure that the delays were minimized during the next election.

Following reports of missing names in the voters’ registers in some areas, the INEC chairman said that the commission had mandated its ICT Unit to ensure that the irregularities are corrected before the presidential elections.

Jega explained that the omissions occurred due to human errors in the printing of the register and in aggregating data in places where more than one Direct Data Capture machines were used to capture data.

He said that the problem of crowd control in some polling units had been addressed to ensure that there was no reoccurrence of the rowdiness experienced in some polling units.

In his words: “INEC, has taken appropriate measure to bring remarkable improvements over and above what happened last Saturday.”

Call for proper conduct

He urged the ad-hoc staff to ensure that accreditations were done in good time to reduce the possibility of the voting dragging into the night.

On the issue of underage voters, Jega said that the security agencies had been directed to arrest underage voters.

He urged all Nigerians to cooperate with the presiding officers at the polling units so that the success of the presidential election would be assured.

Jega also tasked all and come out to exercise their voting rights in an orderly manner and called on all political parties to ensure that code of conduct was adhered to.