IDPs To Vote In Designated Centres, Says Jega

Ahead of the February polls, the Chairman, Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Attahiru Jega, has stated that Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) can only vote in designated centres in the three states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa due to the lean resources available to the commission.

According to an INEC Bulletin, the INEC Chairman told stakeholders in Abuja that the commission’s plans include:

•Setting up designated centres in various locations in each of the three states for the purpose of distribution of permanent voter’s cards and organising voting for IDPs.

•Location of the centres outside of the established camps, but suitably located to enable all those in camps or in host communities across them to easily vote.

• Arranging the designated centres such that voting can take place according to local government areas, registration areas and polling units.

•Working with security agencies to ensure adequate security for the planned activities.

Jega said that while the commission recognised the rights of the IDPs to vote in the 2015 General Elections, “we should be realistic to acknowledge that given the constraints of available time and resources, we can only have a limited objective, which is to try to carter for IDPs in the three states (of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa) which had been under emergency as a result of the Boko Haram insurgency in the North East geo-political zone.”

He argued that the commission needed to do this in order to afford as many people as possible in these three states the opportunity of voting so as to minimise the likelihood of a constitutional crisis in the context of legal requirements for collation and return of results for the governorship and presidential elections.

The INEC chairman, who put the number of IDPs between 981, 461 and 1,059,868 in the three states, regretted that the commission, as at now, had no capacity in the limited time to cater for those (IDPs) who had left the three (3) states to other parts of the country.

He stressed that matters where not helped by the fact that there were no accurate records as to where they were and in what numbers.