The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has kicked off a Voter Education and Publicity Training on Strategic Communication workshop on Monday morning in Lagos.
Franktalknow reports that the workshop was attended by the commission’s heads of voter education, alongside Heads of Department and Public Affairs Officers.
Addressing attendees of the event, the INEC Commissioner for Information and Voter Education, Festus Okoye, said that the 2023 general elections, coming up on February 25 and March 11, 2023, will be entirely “technology-driven”.
According to Barr. Okoye, the electoral commission will be deploying the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) to the 176,846 polling units across the Federation.
“The Commission will also deploy redundancies to the 8,809 Registration Areas and the 774 Local Government Areas of Nigeria,” his address stated.
The commissioner also mentioned that extensive testing of the “full component of BVAS” has been conducted.
“Following improvements made to the hardware and software components of the BVAS, the Commission approved and carried out Mock Accreditation and Polling Unit Result Upload nationwide. This took place on the 4th of February 2023 in all the 36 States of the Federation and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. Specifically, it took place in 218 Local Government Areas and 436 Polling Units. The Chairman of the Commission who supervised the entire process expressed satisfaction with the optimal performance of the BVAS in all the States of the Federation,” the address statement said.
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According to the INEC commissioner, the electoral body will recruit 707,384 Presiding Officers and Assistant Presiding Officers, about 17, 685 Supervisory Presiding Officers, 9,620 Collation/Returning Officers, as well as 530,538 Polling Unit Security Officials, making a total of 1,265,227 officers.
“All these categories of staff are undergoing training and the training of others will commence in a few days,” Okoye said.
INEC is also engaging the National Union of Road Transport Workers and the Marine Workers Union of Nigeria to hire “at least 100,000 buses and 4,000 boats for the election”.
All the sensitive and non-sensitive materials required for the conduct of the 2023 General Election are being moved to the location and will be in place at least a week before the election, the official statement said.
Meanwhile Barr. Okoye warned election officials of some “challenges”, which he identified as “the crave for sensational headlines, the spectre of fake news” and “breaking news syndrome”. Advising officials on how to navigate the press, the INEC commissioner said officials should “avoid ambiguity”, respond urgently to issues in their state locations, and comment only on issues concerning their state of duty.
“Once again, on behalf of the Chairman of the Commission, I join the Resident Electoral Commissioner for Lagos State in welcoming you to this program and I hereby formally declare it open,” the INEC commissioner said.
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