The Independent National Electoral Commission has warned the its staff, National Youth Service Corps members and other ad-hoc staff in the forthcoming polls against compromising the electoral process.
The commission said the welfare of all cadres of staff had been adequately taken care of during the exercise, and that anyone found wanting will be prosecuted and jailed if found guilty.
INEC National Commissioner (Information and Voter Education) Festus Okoye said this on Sunday night while speaking to journalists on the commission’s level of preparedness for the Presidential and National Assembly Polls on February 16.
“NYSC members have been trained and they have been warned. In fact, they filled a form to be of good conduct and uphold neutrality. We told them if you are partisan, opt out, otherwise you will be prosecuted if found to have compromised the process.
“They must not take food from any politician. The other time we said smart phone should not be used at voting centres, some people criticised it. Quite recently, the commission discovered ploy to use food vendors and banned that at polling centres. At this point, we will be keeping out strategies against vote-buying to ourselves. On that day, we will unfold them. For the welfare, we have adequately taken care of that, both the ad-hoc and regular staff, so they don’t have any reason to compromise the process,” Okoye said.
On the commission’s readiness, he said: “We are ready; the commission is ready for the elections. We also lead with political parties to be ready by doing the needful and complying with the guidelines.
“For free, fair and credible elections, all stakeholders must be on board. INEC can’t do it alone. Media, security and the CSOs all must be ready to play their roles.
“The commission is presently fine-tuning its preparations for the conduct of the two strands of elections and National Commissioners are just returning from the state that they supervise where they went to assess the extent and level of preparations for the conduct of elections.”
On the new method of recruiting collation and returning officers, Okoye stated that INEC had concluded the identification and recruitment of over 814,453 ad-hoc staff for the exercise.
“The commission has identified and has started recruiting collation and returning officers from senior academic staff of various federal universities in Nigeria. Based on the number of registered political parties participating in the elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission will recruit two collation officers each for the 8,809 Registration Areas to facilitate timely collation of results.
“The commission has concluded the identification and recruitment of over 814, 453 ad-hoc staff for the election and their training has commenced in all the states of the federation. The Resident Electoral commissioners are supervising the training programmes. We are confident that the commission will recruit the required number of ad-hoc staff for all the strands of elections.”
Also in his remark, FCT REC Yahaya Bello said “Media reportage of election can make or mar it, as the people and international observers look up to them for information.
“It therefore behoves you as media executives to be responsible and circumspect in your reports and coverage of oncoming elections. This is not to say that you must not report facts, but the appeal is to shun sensationalism, fake news and deal with the temptation of declaring the results before the commission.”
