Nigeria 2015: INEC Needs 11,000 Ad-hoc Staff In Gombe, Says REC

INEC-OfficalsThe Independent National Electoral Commissioner, INEC, on Monday said that it needed more than 11,000 ad-hoc staff for the conduct of the 2015 general elections in Gombe State.

The INEC Resident Electoral Commissioner, REC, in the state, Kassim Gana-Gaidam, made this known in an interview in Gombe.

ā€œWe need over 11,000 ad-hoc staff; these are going to be corps members, students of federal tertiary institutions, staff of federal ministries and staff of state institutions, if necessary.

ā€œThis excludes security agents that are going to be part and parcel of the process. In every polling unit, we are supposed to have, at least, three security personnelā€, he said.

Mr. Gana-Gaidam said that more than 7,000 security personnel would be needed to man the polling units and voting points across the 11 local government areas of the state.

He said that recruitment, screening and selection of the ad-hoc staff would be done in the local government areas of the state.

On the distribution of the 172,288 remaining Permanent Voter Cards, PVCs, across the state, he noted that the distribution was ongoing at the ward level.

The REC said that 2,420 voting points would be created out of the 2,218 existing polling units in the state to facilitate efficient voting.

ā€œIt is not that we are creating new polling units.

ā€œIf a polling station has 1,500 voters, for instance, we are going to make it two voting points and they are going to be in the same place but different queues so that elections will be fasterā€, he said.

He gave the assurance that all stakeholders would be carried along in the plan to relocate polling units from private houses to public buildings.

ā€œWhere there are no public building within the radius, we are supposed to use an open space; a canopy can be used for election process to take place.

ā€œWe donā€™t want voters to be confused because it should be clearly within the vicinity of the old polling unit; in some cases there may be no need because some of them are already located in public buildingsā€, he said.

The REC said that he had undertaken a tour to all the local government areas in the state where he met with stakeholders who assured him of their support to ensure success of the exercise.

(NAN)