***Signs MoU with transport unions
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) said it would require over 100,000 vehicles and 4,200 boats for the conduct of the 2023 general elections.
Its chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, made the disclosure during the signing of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the commission and Road Transport and Marine Workers Union in Abuja, yesterday.
He said the elections would involve nationwide deployment of over one million personnel and massive quantities of materials twice within a period of two weeks from states’ offices to 774 local government areas, 8,809 electoral wards and 176,846 polling units across the length and breadth of Nigeria.
“It will require over 100,000 vehicles and about 4,200 boats that will be accompanied by naval gunboats.
This is a huge undertaking that must be accomplished in the next 66 days and we are resolute in doing so to give Nigerians a pleasant voting experience.
“Let me assure Nigerians that we are determined that all polling units nationwide will open at 8.30am on Saturday, February 25, 2023 for the presidential and National Assembly elections and on Saturday, March 11, 2023 for the governorship and state House of Assembly elections,” Yakubu said.
While defending the decision to sign the MoU, Yakubu said: “In order to ensure personnel and materials will be at the polling units on election day awaiting the arrival of voters rather than the other way round, INEC requires large numbers of vehicles, including motorcycles, tricycles, boats and canoes in the riverine areas which cannot be met from its internal resources.
It was for this reason that the commission signed the first MoU with NURTW in January 2015. In order to expand the pool of our service providers to meet the requirement for the increasing number of vehicles, the MoU was reviewed in December 2018 to incorporate NARTO.
Over the years, the commission has come to rely on the partnership with NURTW and NARTO to provide vehicles for the successful deployment of electoral personnel and materials.
However, we did not incorporate the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN) within the ambit of the MoU, a situation which has often resulted in logistics nightmare in the deployment and retrieval of personnel and materials to the riverine areas of the country.
This oversight is now addressed by the revised MoU to include MWUN comprising sailors, dockworkers and those in related trades in our electoral logistics planning and delivery.
In this MoU, the contractual agreement between the commission and the actual service provides will be worked out at the state and LGA level between officials of the unions and our Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) and Electoral Officers,” he said.
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