BEVERLY HILLS, March 27, (THEWILL) – The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has fired 205 officials over various unwholesome roles in the 2015 general elections.
INEC’s Chairman Prof. Mahmud Yakubu made this known in his keynote address at a national colloquium organised by the Independent Service Delivery Monitoring Group (ISDMG) in Abuja.
Mahmud disclosed that the commission had conducted elections in 179 constituencies so far, adding that only five had been challenged in court, which attested to the credibility of the elections.
He added that at present, INEC had received over 100 additional applications for new political parties, while nine had met the criteria.
The INEC chairman gave an assurance that the 2019 elections would be better than that of 2015.
He revealed that an additional seven million Nigerians have registered through the window provided by the Continuous Voters Registration Programme and reiterated the electoral body’s stand that there was no legal encumbrance stopping the commission from proceeding with the sequence of election as entrenched in the existing electoral law.
“On how what we are doing to prevent the connivance of collation officers in rigging of results, we still believe that the university community is still apolitical and we can rely on them largely for the job at hand,” he said.
“It is for that reason that the commission has always worked with ASUU to recruit credible persons for us. We have now changed the strategy of recruitment as we now move outside the immediate environment where an election is taking place to recruit collation officers.
“And to endure minimal contact with them, you will see that we no longer publish names of the collation officers as we used to do in the past.”
He also revealed that the commission is in talks with the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to help in liaising with telecoms service providers to assist in sending bulk messages to millions of voters who are yet to collect their Permanent Voter Cards, which are still in the offices of the electoral body.
