FCT Council Polls: 583 Polling Units Exist Without Voters — INEC

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has disclosed that there are 593 polling units in the Federal Capital Territory (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, who was invited to a meeting by the FCT Minister, Malam Muhammad Bello, to brief FCT stakeholders on preparations for the area council elections slated for February 12, made this disclosure at the FCT Expanded Stakeholders Security meeting, organised by the FCT Administration on Thursday.

Yakubu said the commission had already informed political parties, civil society organisations, the media, and security agencies at the national level about the development, that INEC had decided that no election would take place at the polling units without registered voters.

He added that no material has been produced for those units and no personnel would be deployed to them, saying that voting would take place in all the other polling units while for congested polling units, INEC would deploy more than one BVAS to facilitate a speedy accreditation of voters.

The INEC boss 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.

“In addition, soft copies have also been uploaded to our website. By doing, so, we want to achieve two objectives. The 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 chairman 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,” he added.

Earlier, the FCT Minister, Mohammed Bello, said the expanded security meeting which was the first in 2022, brought all the 17 graded chiefs in the territory to review the 2021 and look at a focus for 2022.

“In our review, we found out that the collaborative security efforts with neighboring states of the FCT are very effective. 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 despite 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 stated.