Nigeria Content Online

The Oyo State
Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), Ayo Adakeja, on Thursday, said
the people caught with electoral materials in Ibadan, the state
capital, on Wednesday, were working for the commission.

Mr Adakeja, who
spoke with journalists at the commission’s office in the state during a
meeting with heads of security operatives over Saturday’s National
Assembly election, said the national headquarters of the Independent
National Electoral Commission (INEC) was aware of the development.

His defence came
shortly after the state commissioner of police, Salihu Hashimu,
informed journalists that the suspects had been interrogated and found
not to have gone foul of any law.

The INEC chief
explained that the commission’s chairman, Attahiru Jega, gave the
printer the go-ahead to contract the printing of some electoral
materials to private hands to forestall the kind of crisis their
shortages caused in the botched national assembly election of last
Saturday.

He said the men
were detained by the police till evening and were only released after
he came to identify them. The six men were arrested in a hotel in
Ibadan in possession of a DDC machine and electoral materials.

Measures by INEC

Speaking on the
measures put in place to address the problems of missing names
experienced by eligible voters last Saturday, Mr Adakeja said they have
resolved to use manual register in addition to the electronic register
to ensure that no registered voter is disenfranchised for the elections.

He explained that
many of the problems came after the registration as some of the Direct
Data Capture (DDC) machines crashed and the information in them could
not be retrieved because there were no backup for them.

The REC also said the remaining ballot papers for the National Assembly elections are intact and in safe custody.

He said the
commission had used 277,787 ballot papers for the House of
Representatives election in the state during last week’s botched
ballot, adding that they are still left with a total of 2, 164,126
papers for this Saturday’s election.

For the Senate, Mr Adakeja said only 46, 219 ballot papers were
used for last week’s election, while 2,326,974 are still intact. Heads
of security agencies in the state, including the Army, State Security
Service (SSS), Police, Immigration, Customs Service, Prisons, Civil
Defense Corps and the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC), were all in
attendance.