BY: MOHAMMAD LAWAL MAIKUDI
The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC plans to engage the services of 1.4 personnel to prosecute the 2023 general elections.
INEC National Commissioner and Chairman Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, announced this while featuring on a Television programme, ‘Sunrise Daily’.
Okoye said: “the Commission will engage 1.4 million adhoc staff made up of National Youth Service Corps members and students in tertiary institutions in their final year.
“You will know that it is next to impossible for INEC to have over 1.4 million staff in its payroll.
“The strength staff of the Commission is around 16,000 and so when we devolve the collection to the various registration areas, we are going to engage the services of corp members to assist the Commission in terms of giving out these PVCs.”
Okoye said the Commission would publish the official register of voters that will be used for the 2023 general election on January 16.
“Our voters register is robust and we believe that it is very credible. As of today, we have 93.5 registered voters in the register.
“On the 16th of January 2023, the Commission will publish the official register of voters that will be used for the 2023 general election.
“Yes, I completely agree that there have been issues around underage registration.
“In some of the areas where we recorded underage registration, we have summoned all the officers that engaged in that particular exercise to appear before the Commission and appear before a special panel of the Commission and it is still ongoing.
“We have made it very clear that any visibly underage person should not approach any of our polling units on election day.
“If the person does appear, he or she would be arrested, alongside their parents for aiding and abetting such a venture.
“The Chairman has told Nigerians that the cleaning of the voter register is an ongoing venture and we are going to make sure that all malicious registrations that got into our register will be removed prior to election day.
“Some of the information on social media relating to underage registration was carried out between 2011 and before we went into the 2019 general election.
“This Commission had the courage to publish the voter register and asked Nigerians to scrutinise the register to make sure that every malicious registration is removed.
“We assure Nigerians that the voters register that will be used in the 2023 election is the one that they will be proud of.”
