Olusola  Bello

As the Anambra Election is fast approaching, the Senate has told the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) that it is at liberty to transmit electronically the results of the November 6 governorship election in the state.

Senator Kabiru Gaya, who is the Chairman of the Senate Committee on INEC, in Abuja on Thursday stated that INEC was free to transmit the governorship election results electronically if it so desired.

He stated this when the National Assembly Joint Committee on Electoral Matters and INEC met with stakeholders on the forthcoming governorship election in Anambra State.

The senate INEC committee chairman said, “It is left for INEC to decide whether it will transfer the election results in Anambra or not. They have done that in the previous elections in Edo and Ondo states.

According to him, before INEC started transferring elections results from polling units, Nigerians have been monitoring results of elections the moment they are being announced at polling stations and by 4pm, even before the final results are announced, many Nigerians would have seen them on the Internet.

“Nigerians are fully involved in elections.”
The ranking senator said INEC had assured the joint committee that it would go ahead with the Anambra election and declare the winner, despite the prevailing security situation in the state,” he said.

“We expect the people of the state to cooperate fully with the electoral body by being law-abiding. The only way to achieve free and fair, credible election in Anambra is for everybody to eschew violence.”

iNEC National Chairman, Professor Yakubu Mahmood,  who had spoken earlier, said the agency had recovered from the series of attacks by yet to be identified persons in Anambra State.

Mahmood said, “We have recovered from the series of attacks on our facilities and I am happy to say that we have deployed all the non-sensitive materials to all the local government areas. We have trained the requisite number of adhoc staff for the election and we have also mobilised members of the National Union of Road Transport Workers for efficient distribution of materials on Election Day. As far as INEC is concerned, we are good to go on November 6, 2021.”

On the level of distribution of Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) in Anambra State, he said: “We have a little over 81,000 valid registrants. After the suspension of the CVR (Continuous Voter Registration) in Anambra State, that includes a little over 5,000 that applied for replacement of cards and inter-state transfers.
“As we speak, we are batching the cards. They will leave first thing tomorrow morning for Awka and all the new registrants will get their cards before the elections.

“This time around, with the help of technology, we were able to harvest the telephone numbers and email addresses of the registrants. So we will contact each and every one of them and tell them where to pick their cards. But the cards will be delivered to Awka tomorrow (Thursday).”