The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that all funds required to conduct the 2023 elections have been sent to the Commission and allayed fears that it was having financial constraints.
The INEC Kaduna State Admin Secretary, Auwal Mashi, stated this during a stakeholders’ meeting and training of members of the Correspondents’ Chapel of the Nigeria Union of Journalists(NUJ) on the workings of Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS).
“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 includes transportation, payment of ad-hoc staff, and others; everything has been sent to us,” he said.
He said the Commission had recently held a successful mock accreditation to ascertain the functionality and efficacy of the BVAS machine. ” It was satisfactory, the machines were perfectly okay. I can assure you that God willing, we will not have any problems with our machines.”
He 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 leaders,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
