By Daniel Tyokua
Ahead of the February 12 Area Council elections in the Federal Capital Capital Territory, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has disclosed that a total of 593 polling units in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) have no registered voters.
Chairman of INEC, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, said on Thursday in Abuja during the FCT Expanded Security Stakeholders meeting organised by the FCT Administration.
He stated that 1,328 polling units have between 0-50 voters, while 546 polling units are with over 1,000 registered voters.
The electoral umpire, who was invited to the meeting by the FCT Minister, Malam Muhammad Bello, over the Area Councils Election slated for Feb. 12, said the commission had already informed political parties, Civil Society Organisations, the Media and Security agencies at the national level about the development.
He said that INEC had decided that no election would take place at the polling units where no voters were allocated.
According to him, no materials have been produced for those units and no personnel would be deployed to them.
Yakubu, however, said that voting would take place in all the other polling units, noting that for congested polling units, INEC would deployed more than one BVAS to facilitate a speedy accreditation of voters.
He also said that the commission would deploy additional staff to those locations, adding that the commission agreed with the security agencies to deploy more personnel to ensure peace and order.
According to him, for transparency, the commission is making the hard copies of the details locations to these polling units to all stakeholders at this meeting.
“In addition, soft copies have also been uploaded to our website. By doing, so, we want to achieve two objectives.
“First is to ensure that voters in the FCT and indeed all Nigerians are aware of these polling units and the arrangements made for them on election day”
Earlier, the Minister of FCT, Mallam Muhammad Bello, said the security meeting which first held in 2022, brought all the 17 graded chiefs in the territory to review the 2021 and look at focus for 2022.
