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Ahead of the 2023 general election, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has expressed its resolve to continue storing sensitive materials with the Central Bank of Nigeria.
Festus Okoye, the National Commissioner for Information and Voter Education, INEC, disclosed this during an interview with Channels Television on Monday.
According to Okoye, the electoral umpire would engage with CBN on ways to resolve concerns regarding the storage of election materials.
Recall that INEC had in June said sensitive election materials would no longer be kept with the CBN over controversy generated by the association of the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, with the All Progressives Congress, APC.
Okoye said, “It is going to be a huge logistics nightmare. What we intend to do going forward, since there are issues with keeping our materials with CBN. We have not had enough opportunity to sit down with the Central Bank to review the entire issue surrounding our moving our materials with the Nigerian Air Force.
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“We are definitely going to do that. If at the end of the day, we are not satisfied with the arrangement, then we are going to look for a new logistics pathway for how to manage logistics during the 2023 elections. But no decision has been made.”
He stressed that storage measures used for recently conducted elections in Ekiti and Osun governorship will not be feasible going into the general elections in 2023.
“You cannot use the Ekiti governorship election and Osun governorship election as a measure of what will happen in 2023,” he said.
Okoye added, “This is because, for instance, in the Ekiti governorship election, we had less than a million registered voters. In the Osun governorship election, we were shy of two million registered voters. These are stand-alone elections.
“For the Ekiti election, we utilised the service of the Nigerian Air force and they flew the materials into Akure airport. We did the same thing with the Osun election, and we moved the materials to our state offices.”
Source: Punch