Unlike Anambra, there will be improved use of technology in Ekiti, Osun gov polls

 

The Resident Electoral Commissioner in Osun State, Prof. Abdulganiy Raji, speaks with FRIDAY OLOKOR on preparations for the July 16 governorship election with a promise that it would be inclusive and conclusive

The Osun State governorship election is just a few weeks away. What is your level of preparedness?

If I may just answer simply, we are fully prepared. All the materials we need for the election have been supplied. We are taking delivery and we have gone through nearly all the process of the election. There are about 14 steps and we have gone through 12. We have just two steps left, one is the election proper and the other aspect is taking delivery of the sensitive materials.

However, for the preparation, we started with a review of previous elections and a preview of the coming election at the national level that led to the creation of new polling units and thereafter the Continuous Voter Registration which started in June last year and it ended on March 31 in Osun State.

At the end of that exercise, about 333,195 new Permanent Voter Cards have been processed and are now being distributed in Osun State. This is the addition to the over 370 outstanding PVCs that have not been collected since 2011. So, we have roughly 600,000 PVCs at our local government offices awaiting collection.

Thereafter, we monitored the primaries of each of the parties and during the primaries, everything went well, we felt Osun was going to boil but it didn’t. It shows that they are actually Omoluwabi.

All the 18 registered political parties had their candidates but the process that they were supposed to follow is the submission and meeting up the constitutional requirements by the candidates.

While this was being done, three parties fell by the side, some because they were not able to meet up with the deadline for the submission of name; some found out their candidate, after further scrutiny, did not meet up with the requirements. So we have only 15 parties that are going to field candidates for the election.

Despite voters’ education, the number of unclaimed PVCs appears to be still high; what do you think might be responsible for this trend?

It is not high if you consider the national average. Out of the 1.7 million during the 2019 general election, only 300,000 plus have not been collected and this is very common nationally. There are several reasons for that, some known to us, some we don’t know and we are yet to decipher why people have not been collecting theirs. The collection process is slow but of course, some of you as journalists know the reasons, but we still continue.

You will realise that during the Continuous Voters Registration, Osun State had the highest number of people that came out for registration, so it was not that our sensitisation efforts were not enough, it actually helped during the voter’s registration.

However, we had over 650,000 people that registered online, out of which just around 400,000 completed their registration and it is out of this that we now have 335,195 cards ready; we are running the biometric verification on the remaining, roughly around 70,000.

Therefore, we will continue our sensitisation and voter education on a daily basis, on the media and also going on road shows. Presently, we are at the market, doing market rallies with our staff members.

Also, we are lucky in Osun State, the West Minister Foundation assisted us in establishing what we call the INEC-NYSC Ambassadors who, on their CDS days, move to the market to do a lot of road shows, market rallies to enlighten people and this has been assisting us greatly in Osun state. So the awareness is high and it will continue.

Presently, if you are in Osun, or you tune to any radio and television stations in Osun, every six hours, you will listen to our jingles or watch our jingles towards the election and we will continue like that until the day of the election.

What is the numerical strength of the staff that INEC will be deploying to the field?

We have a little below 4,000 polling units and in each, we need a minimum of four polling staff, with some other supervisory staff; so, we are not going to need more than 15,000 ad-hoc workers and you can recall that INEC has placed advertisement for people to apply to work in Ekiti and Osun states, which closed on April 21. It has been downloaded and we already have a list of people who applied and we are working on them to select those who are qualified.

Even though we had criteria for people who can apply, we found out that all sorts of people actually applied, some cannot be verified, and some you know forged documents. We are verifying and once we get the genuineness of all those people who applied, we will pick from there. About 98% will be youth corps members and so we are working with the National Youth Service Corps to ensure that we actually pick youth corps members.

How far have you gone with the training of electoral staff on how to use the new technology, given the experience during the Anambra State election?

Mostly this device will be handled by the youth corps members and contrary to what we used to do before, where we have one or two days extensive training, we actually made it a little bit more extensive by starting the training almost six weeks ago; so each of these youth corps members will be with us for a full day, for 12 days, one day in a week. Hence, we are running the programme for 12 weeks, which we call the root training, and with this, they will all have hands-on experience on our device.

The problem we always have in handling the device on election day will be a thing of the past. In Anambra, that was one of the problems but there was improvement when we did the Federal Capital Territory Area Council elections. You know there was not too much outcry over equipment failure as was the case in Anambra.