The Independent National Electoral Commission says it is still in talks with the Central Bank of Nigeria over storage of electoral materials.
This was stated by the National Commissioner for Information and Voter Education, INEC, Festus Okoye, in an interview on Monday.
Okoye said that the commission would resume engagement with the CBN on how to resolve issues concerning the storage of election materials.
Okoye said that not keeping election materials with the central bank could amount to “a logistics nightmare”.
He 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.
“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.”
Okoye insisted that the recently concluded elections in Ekiti and Osun governorship storage measures will not be tenable 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.
“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.
“But for the 2023 general election, we are going to have over 95 million ballot papers printed for the presidential election. Over 95 million will be printed for the senatorial election; over 95 million papers will be printed for the house of representatives election. Then it goes down.
“It’s 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 material with the Nigerian Air force.
“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 of how to manage logistics during the 2023 elections. But no decision has been made.
“When you have to move materials to 36 states of the federation and the capital territory, it’s a completely different ball game.
“What we did in Ekiti and Osun in terms of the general election will not be sustainable. We need to look for a complete logistics pathway of how to deal with this particular problem.”
