Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Mahmood Yakubu, has called for new security architecture for the 2019 elections consistent with the provision of Section 29 (3) of the Electoral Act 2010 (as amended).
Professor Yakubu spoke, yesterday, at the regular quarterly meeting of the Inter-Agency Consultative Committee on Election Security (ICCES).
He said learning from the experience of some of the 195 off-season elections conducted since 2015, it was pertinent to draw attention to the need for a different approach to the deployment of security forces during elections.
The INEC chairman said the Nigeria Police Force remained the lead agency for election security, while other security agencies would play a supportive role.
He expressed the commitment of the commission to ensuring that elections were organised in such a manner that security agencies were not perceived to be running parallel arrangement with INEC.
He said INEC’s plan for the election should rather be implemented strictly.
The INEC boss said the country’s final register that stood at 84,004,084 voters was simply the largest database of citizens in Africa and one of the largest voter registers in the world.
“In continuation of our preparations for the election, the commission undertook a nationwide registration of voters and integrated the new registrants to the national register of voters for the 2019 general elections.
“We appreciate the collaboration of security agencies in facilitating the smooth conduct of the exercise. The Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs) for new registrants as well as those who are already registered but had requested for transfer of their registrations to other locations or the replacement of PVCs for various reasons have been reprinted and available for collection,” he added.
