As the February 25th general elections draw closer, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has confirmed the receipt of funds required for the success of the exercise.
This was made known by h commission’s Admin for Kaduna State, Auwal Mashi, during a stakeholders’ meeting and training of members of Correspondents’ Chapel of the Nigeria Union of Journalists(NUJ) on the workings of Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS).
In the words of Mashi, “Let me use this opportunity to tell you that, all funds for the execution of the general election have been sent to us. Everything that is required in term of financing have already been received and that include for transportation, payment of ad-hoc staff and others; everything has been sent to us.”
He added the Commission had recently held a successful mock accreditation to ascertain the functionality and efficacy of the BVAS machine. ” It was satisfactorily, the machines were perfectly okay. I can assure you that God willing, we will not have any problems with our machines.”
Speaking further, Mashi disclosed that about 408,000 new Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) and 228,000 others transferred from other locations were received by the Commission and almost 90 percent of them had been collected by the owners before the close of the PVC distribution exercise.”
He said that sensitive materials for the election were already secured at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), while 70 percent of the non-sensitive materials have already been distributed to the INEC state offices.
“We have employed 34,000 personnel to conduct the elections in the state, this figure includes the adhoc to man the 8,012 polling units in Kaduna State,” he said.
At the meeting which was attended by politicians, traditional and religious le aders,there were question and answer sessions and the journalists were shown how to use the BVAS device.
Chairman of Correspondents’ Chapel, NUJ Kaduna, AbdulGafar Alabelewe, who spoke on behalf of the trainees, appreciated INEC for the training and called on the journalists to deploy the knowledge acquired while covering the elections.
