General Elections Will Hold as Scheduled, INEC Insists

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Wednesday reassured Nigerians the general elections would hold as scheduled.

The Commissioner for Information and Voter Education of the INEC, Dr. Festus Okoye, stated this at the 20th Daily Trust Dialogue in Abuja with the theme: “Interrogating the 2023 presidential agenda.”

This assurance came amid fears that the conduct of the elections would be imperiled in view of the present socioeconomic and political environment in the country characterised by insecurity, fuel scarcity and the new Naira redesign policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

Okoye said: “When I was leaving the office, the Chairman of INEC (Professor Mahmood Yakubu) did not give me the mandate to speak, but I am going to speak and then inform him that I assumed the mandate to speak.

“The Commission is preparing and preparing very well for this election. Our mandate and our remit is to organise, undertake and supervise elections. And that is exactly what we are doing and what we are going to do,

“We recognise the fact that security is a huge challenge and a huge concern both to election workers, to the Nigerian people and also to the Commission.

“We are consulting almost on a daily basis now with the various security agencies in relation to the security of our staff, security of the Corps members that will be deployed for the elections and also the security of the voters.

“So we want to assure Nigerians that this Commission is committed to conducting free, fair, transparent, verifiable and inclusive elections and that the dates that we have fixed for these election remains fixed and firm and we are not going to depart from it.”