INEC to hold Kogi, Bayelsa guber elections in 2019 – Yakubu

Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu has said that governorship elections in Kogi and Bayelsa states will hold before ending of 2019.

Yakubu made this disclosure on Monday during the commission’s quarterly meeting with the media in Abuja.

The INEC boss at the occasion denied that the commission has released the timetable for 2019 general elections, explaining that it only released principles of how 2019 elections would be conducted.

“Believe it or not, the Bayelsa and Kogi elections are coming up at the end of 2019. We are going to have 1,560 constituencies to conduct elections on.

“INEC has not released the timetable for the elections. The electoral commission requires time to plan, the media also requires time to plan. We reckon that 2019 is going to be a year full of elections for the commission. We are going to have the general election.

“With our economy in recession, we also need to get our budget properly sorted out so that we can approach the executive and National Assembly for appropriation. We are going to submit a proposal to the National Assembly.

“In the last general elections, INEC recruited over 700,000 ad-hoc staff. The requirements for recruiting, training them and providing logistics for forwarding election materials are so enormous and so we have to plan early to sort out these logistics.”

Read also: INEC fixes 2019 Presidential election for Feb. 16

According to Yakubu, INEC has in the last one year, conducted 167 elections.

INEC had on Thursday March 9, announced February 16, 2019 as the date for the presidential elections in Nigeria.

It said the National Assembly elections will hold on the same date, while, governorship and state House of Assemblies, as well as the FCT elections will hold two weeks later on March 2, 2019.

Bayelsa and Kogi states are among the states in Nigeria where governorship elections hold after the general elections due to court cases in the past that affected governorship election outcomes in those states.

Other states whose governorship elections come later after the general elections include Edo, Ondo, Ekiti, Osun and Anambra.

 

 

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