The Independent National Electoral Commission has voiced concern that attacks on its facilities might impact how the general elections are conducted if they continue until January 2023.
Festus Okoye, National Commissioner and INEC's Information and Voter Education Committee Chairman, made this statement.
On Monday in Abuja, the National Defense College hosted political violence and election security workshop. Okoye gave a speech there.
According to Okoye, the commission had documented certain negatives in the states where the attacks occurred, including the destruction of vote boxes, other election materials, and Permanent Voter Cards.
According to him, the commission has documented 50 assaults in 15 federated states since the start of 2019.
He said the attacks noted in 2022 were planned and deliberate attempts to prevent INEC from holding free, fair, credible, and transparent elections.
He specifically mentioned how the commission suffered several losses due to the attack on its headquarters in Ogun State's Abeokuta South Local Government Area.
However, Okoye gave the assurance that INEC could recover from those assaults.
He said: “So all these attacks that have taken place, we can recover, and we are going to recover because we are already reprinting the permanent voter's cards that were lost during the inferno.
“We are also replacing the lost voting cubicles and ballot boxes.
“We are also trying to rent offices for the ones that we cannot repair.
“But if these attacks go into January and February, it may be difficult for us to recover from those attacks.
“This is because if you look at section 134 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 as amended, it has a threshold that a candidate must meet before that candidate can be declared the winner of any election.
“So we do not want these attacks to continue; we don’t want them to persist.
“But we have the assurance from the various security agencies that they will dominate the environment, neutralise these attacks.”
Okoye added that the security agencies had given the assurance that they would ensure a secure and safe environment for the conduct of the 2023 general elections.
He assured Nigerians that INEC would conduct an election driven by technology that would produce a winner that the Nigerian people want.
He said: “We will declare only those the Nigerian people elect as the election winners.
“So we do not want any distraction at this point in time, and that is why we have made it very clear to the National Assembly that all INEC offices shall and must be declared as high-priority areas that need adequate protection and safety.
“The Nigerian people deserve to go into the election with a clear conscience and mind.
“We don’t want people to go into the election with fear and anxiety because that will not make for a credible election.
“But in terms of our own preparations, in terms of delivering on our mandate of organising, undertaking and supervising the election, we are on top of the situation, and we are not going to disappoint the Nigerian people.”
Another National Commissioner, Prof. Sani Adam, commended NDC for organising the workshop addressing election violence and election security in 2023.
Adam said introducing technology by INEC would discourage ballot snatching in future elections, adding that voters should come out and vote decently and leave decently.
He said the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System would ensure that results would be announced properly and acceptably.
He said: “NDC is pioneering this kind of conference on election security and political violence that shows that INEC is heavily protected and the country is well stabilised.
“The armed forces are synergised to ensure that free and fair elections occur in 2023.”
The Commandant of the NDC, Rear Admiral Murtala Bashir, said the workshop was one of the series of activities of the college to build the capacity of the armed forces to know the roles they were supposed to play.
Bashir said that ensuring a free and credible election was one particular aspect that NDC considered as vital for the synergy of efforts between the armed forces and the other security agencies.
He said: “This is one of the platforms that bring together these agencies so that we can see how all of us can be on the same page with each agency.
“This is to ensure that we harness and pull our resources to ensure a very good outing during the 2023 elections.”