Mahmood Yakubu, the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), says the electoral body’s major problem in conducting elections is logistics.

“Logistics has often been a major Achilles heel of elections in Nigeria. We are determined to solve the challenge. We have established a logistics management system, which uses an android application and web dashboard to track election materials from procurement through storage to delivery,” the INEC chair explained. 

He added, “For the first time, we have a comprehensive Election Logistics Framework (ELF) to guide logistics for the general elections from planning through deployment to retrieval. This is the first deployment of an end-to-end logistics framework for elections.”

However, Mr Yakubu said INEC had received the final batch of the BVAS to be used for the election and hinted that the commission, in addition to the deployment of the device in previous off-cycle elections, planned to conduct a series of mock trials of the BVAS with actual voters in real-time in parts of the country to ascertain their functioning in actual election situations further.

He added that other sensitive materials, such as the ballots and result forms, were being printed while INEC was progressively delivering them and deploying them to locations across the country.

Mr Yakubu stated this in Chatham House, London, on Tuesday while addressing the world on preparations for the February and March general election in Nigeria.

The INEC chief said that in its preparations, the commission learnt from 2019 experiences, particularly the sore experience of postponing that election a few hours before it commenced.

According to him, the lessons include early preparations for adequate planning, resourcing, and testing of its systems and early choice of election management tools, especially the main election technology.

He listed other lessons as early finalisation of changes to the Electoral Act and early release of funds to the commission.

(NAN)