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Abuja, 16 February, 2018(NAN)The Independent National Electoral Commission has decided to shift Saturdays presidential and National Assembly elections till next week 23 February.
The governorship and house of assembly, FCT area council elections have also been shifted from 2 March to 9 March.
INEC chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu confirmed NAN report of the shift of the presidential election, attributing the postponement of all the scheduled elections to logistic and operational problems.
He said the postponement will afford the commission the opportunity to address the identified challenges in order to maintain the quality of Nigerias elections.
The postponement of the election came after more than six hours of meeting between INEC chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu and 12 national commissioners in Abuja.
The meeting, which began Friday evening ended early on Saturday.
Professor Yakubu said the INEC will be meeting all stakeholders at 2pm on Saturday at the International Conference Centre in Abuja to explain the commissions position.
Rotimi Oyekanmi, the chief press secretary to the INEC chairman had hinted newsmen earlier that some decisions about the election had been reached and that the decision would be communicated later.
I can confirm to you that the INEC Chairman and the 12 national commissioners are in the meeting.
Decisions have been taken and you will be addressed later, Oyekanmi said.
Presidential and National Assembly elections were scheduled to take place throughout the country today, while governorship and state assembly elections were slated for 2 March.
The national elections are expected to hold at 119,973 polling units across the country while collation of results will take place in 8,809 Registration Areas or Wards, 774 Local Government Areas and 36 States and the FCT.
It will not be the first time that the commission would postpone a scheduled general election.
In 2015, the presidential election w
The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has disclosed that the late release of budget by the President Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government affected the deployment of servers for the 2019 general elections.
INEC’s National Commissioner in Osun State, Solomon Soyebi, however, admitted that the commission once experimented the electronic transmission of results but it was not deployed in the 2019 general elections.
Soyebi, in a statement he issued, explained that the commission only experimented the use of a server in the Anambra, Sokoto and Osun elections.
According to Soyebi: “We piloted the use of transmission of election results electronically in Sokoto, in Anambra, even in Osun. What happened was that we were trying to pilot to see the desirability of such technology in our electoral process.
“Once in a while, you will see an experiment going on but we have to pilot it before we will deploy wholesale for election. We did not use it because of circumstances beyond the control of the Commission.
“First, our budget came out very late. There was also (an) issue (with) the Electoral Act. For these and some other reasons, the commission did not adopt that option; 2019 elections were conducted according to the law.
“We used the Constitution of the Federal Republic, we used the Electoral Act and our guidelines for 2019 elections. If you look at the three instruments carefully, the issue of the server was not highlighted.”
