Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mahmood Yakubu, says logistics is the commission’s leading problem in conducting elections.
“Logistics has often been a major Achilles heel of elections in Nigeria. We are determined to solve the challenge. We have established a logistics management system, which uses an android application and web dashboard to track election materials from procurement through storage to delivery,” Mr. Yakubu explained.
“For the first time, we have a comprehensive Election Logistics Framework (ELF) to guide logistics for the general elections from planning through deployment to retrieval. This is the first deployment of an end-to-end logistics framework for elections,” he added.
The INEC chairman however added that the electoral body had already received the last batch of BVAS that would be used for the election. Mr. Yakubu also mentioned that, in addition to using the device in previous off-cycle elections, the commission plans to conduct a number of mock trials of the BVAS with actual voters in real-time in different parts of the country to ascertain its functionality in actual election scenarios.
The chairman also revealed that while other sensitive materials like ballots and results forms were being printed, INEC was distributing and deploying them to different locations throughout the country.
Mr Yakubu revealed this on Tuesday in Chatham House, London, while addressing the world on the country’s preparations for the coming general elections in February and March.
The head of INEC stated that in making its preparations, the commission has taken lessons from the 2019 election, notably the painful experience of having to postpone that election a few hours to its commencement.
He said that among the lessons learned are the importance of starting early with proper planning, resource allocation, and system testing, as well as early selection of election management tools, particularly the main election tools.
