INEC postpones elections, New election date emerge

I believe this will be a shock news to Nigerians to hear that The presidential and National Assembly elections, and The governorship and state legislative elections has been postponed by INEC.

Meanwhile, INEC listed some reasons for postponing the 2015 election date. Here are the reason why INEC postponed the election dates;

• Over 45million PVCs collected
• Non-guarantee of security
• Training manual not ready
• Presiding Officers yet to be trained
• 700,000 ad hoc staff not recruited yet
• PVCs still being printed abroad
• RECs yet to print Voter Register
• Printers for Register still in Abuja
• No full complement of ballot boxes
• Fake printing ink sent to states from headquarters rejected
• Many states yet to get balance of Card Readers

New election date has been announced. Here is the schedule list

New date for 2015 Election in Nigeria

This shift in dates was announced yesterday by Professor Attahiru Jega, National Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC.

He made the announcement at a world press conference, invoking the provisions of the following in the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as amended: Section 76(2), Section 116(2), Section 132(2) Section 178(2).
He also quoted Section 25 of the Electoral Act 2010 as amended.

The Commission Chairman explained that INEC was prepared but the security challenge and the need not to deploy men and materials when the security agencies had issued an advisory.

Jega made it categorically clear that “we are not being forced by anybody to take this decision. “This is a decision that we had to take by ourselves. They were not pleasant decisions to take but we had to take the decisions. Nobody has forced us; nobody has coerced us. We stand by this decision”.

Interestingly, the Chairman admitted that with the new dates, the Commission stands a better opportunity of fine-tuning some of its processes.

Apart from the security challenges presented to INEC, Sunday Vanguard has been reliably informed that some of its vendors did not meet deadlines.

Consequently, timelines that Jega and the Commission had set could not be met.

Sunday Vanguard was made to understand that whereas “there was unanimity on the part of the commissioners to postpone the elections, the point of divergence of views was the reasons to give to Nigerians”

Sources at the Commission disclosed that the security situation, as presented by the National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, dampened the morale of the Commissioners.

Indeed, the reason for the long delay by Jega to announce his postponement was the disagreement between Commissioners on what the excuse for the postponement should be.

It was learnt that whereas some Commissioners wanted the election management body to come clean, explain to Nigerians the true reasons for the postponement, especially based on its own serious challenges, some Commissioners simply wanted the security situation to be the sole excuse.

At Jega’s press briefing, he burnished the real reasons the elections had to be postponed.
But he was unfazed by some of the questions regarding his integrity.

He lampooned those calling for his resignation on spurious allegations of orchestrating an agenda to favour one candidate over another.
Although he made it categorically clear that the level of preparedness of INEC this year was far better than what obtained in 2011.

In fact, Jega charged that he “believes that the security agencies will do their best in ensuring that the new dates are sacrosanct”, pleading that there was need to keep hope alive.