Prof. Mahmud Yakub, told the Senate Committee on INEC on Wednesday that
the commission would recruit about one million ad hoc members of staff
for the conduct of the 2019 general elections.
The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission said
that the ad hoc workers to be deployed for the polls, which will begin
in 484 days, will be about 300 higher than the 700 engaged for the 2015
general elections.
He said,
“The projected increase in the number of ad hoc (members of )
staff to be engaged in the elections by the commission arose from the
need to make provisions for adequate manpower for the exercise on a
general template and, specifically, to take care of peculiar needs for
that purpose in some polling units across the federation.”
The INEC boss, at the interactive session with the lawmakers, also
disclosed that the commission was planning to make the five categories
of disfranchised Nigerians participate in the 2019 general elections.
The
five categories, according to him, are the 16,000 INEC personnel,
members of the civil society organisations who serve as election
monitors and observers, the media, security personnel and prison
inmates.
Yakub assured Nigerians that the smart card readers to be deployed
for the polls would function efficiently as users would be adequately
trained on its usage before the election.
He noted that the irregularities recorded in the last poll due to
malfunctioning of the devices, would be prevented in the forthcoming
elections as adequate training would be provided for those to who would
handle the equipment.
“Controversies and challenges raised on
the smart card readers in the 2015 elections, to us in INEC, were over
magnified because the problem was not technological on the part of the
device but attitudinal on the part of the users due to lack of adequate
training.
“Thus, because the problem is more of attitudinal than
technological defects, solid steps are being taken by the commission to
bring about robust interface between the machine and those to use them in terms of practical trainings before the elections,” Yakub said.
Yakub boasted that INEC would show Nigerians how prepared it was for
the 2019 general elections with how the governorship elections would be
conducted in Anambra State in November 2017 and in Ekiti and Osun states
in 2018.