The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has revealed that there are 593 polling units in FCT without registered voters, 1,328 polling units with between 0-50 voters and 546 polling units with over 1,000 registered voters.
The Chairman of INEC, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, made the disclosure at the Federal Capital Territory Expanded Stakeholders Security meeting organised by the FCT Administration on Thursday in Abuja.
Voice of Nigeria gathered that the INEC boss was invited to the meeting by the FCT Minister, Malam Muhammad Bello, to enable him brief FCT stakeholders on preparations for the Area Councils Election slated for Feb. 12.
Yakubu said the commission had already informed political parties, Civil Society Organisations, the Media and Security agencies at the National level about the development.
He said that INEC had decided that no election would take place at the polling units without registered voters.
He added that no materials have been provided for those units and no personnel would be deployed to them.
Yakubu, however, said that voting would take place in all the other polling units, noting that for congested polling units, INEC would deploy more than one person to facilitate a speedy accreditation of voters.
He also said that INEC would deploy additional staff to those locations, adding that the commission agreed with the security agencies to deploy more personnel to ensure peace and order.
According to him, for transparency, the commission is making the hard copies of the details of the locations to these polling units available to all stakeholders at the meeting.
“In addition, soft copies have also been uploaded to our website. By doing, so, we want to achieve two objectives.
“First is to ensure that voters in the FCT and indeed all Nigerians are aware of these polling units and the arrangements made for them on election day.
“Secondly, to seek the support of all stakeholders to ensure that these polling units are populated ahead of the 2023 general election.
“We need the support of especially the traditional, community and religious leaders in this regard,” the INEC boss said.
Yakubu, who reiterated the importance of peace to the successful conduct of the area council elections, assured that INEC would protect the integrity of the process.
“Our eyes are on all our officials, be they adhoc or regular staff, to ensure that they strictly abide by the rules. All parties, candidates and their supporters should do the same.”
Expanded security
Earlier, the FCT Minister, Bello, said the expanded security meeting which was first in 2022, brought all the 17 graded chiefs in the territory to review 2021 and look at focus for 2022.
“In our review we found out that the collaborative security efforts with neighboring states of the FCT is very effective.
“And this is one aspect that we will continue to improve upon because that is where all the security agencies within the FCT and their counterpart in neighboring states of Nasarawa, Niger and Kogi work together.
“Overall also we appreciated the efforts of all the agencies and in spite of what happened here and there within the rural communities we are quite satisfied with the efforts.
“And we identified areas where we are going to give them additional support and we intend to do so,” Bello said.
Emmanuel Ukoh
