Tomorrow’s election is the nearest opportunity that the residents of the federal capital have to determine who governs them as the Minister who acts as governor of the territory is appointed by the president.
Elections are to be held in 639 polling units in the 62 electoral wards in the six Local Government Areas that make up the FCT. The area council elections in the FCT are by law conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC.
Head of Public Affairs/Political Parties Monitoring of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, FCT, Mr. Okezie Nwankwo while confirming the agency’s readiness for the elections said it has created 3,054 voting points for professional efficiency, adding that a maximum of only 300 people will vote in each voting point.
“We have 639 Polling units and we have created what we call Voting Points which total about 3,054 and the idea is that where you have concentration of people, so we map out a system where only 300 people will vote in a voting point,” he explained.
Ahead of the election, Nwankwo disclosed that the commission held many interactive sessions with various stakeholders including leaders of the political parties and their candidates, security agencies, the media and civil society organizations so as to have free, fair and credible elections throughout the territory.
He also revealed that the voters’ register had been reviewed and non sensitive materials made available and delivered to the six council areas stressing that the sensitive materials would be delivered to the various units before the election date.
He said, “We have reviewed and cleaned up the voters’ register, so as at now, we have a clean copy of the voters register and they have been distributed to the 13 Political Parties. It is now in the public dormain.
“The materials were available three weeks to the election and as we are talking now the non sensitive materials are sitting in our various area councils, we will soon take delivery of the sensitive materials. And of course, there have been training and retraining of staff including the ad-hoc staff, they are all ready for the elections,” he stated.
The FCT Head of Public Affairs of INEC said that out of the 46 Chairmanship Candidates, only six will emerge as winners and out of 223 Councillorship candidates from the 13 Political Parties that have been cleared by the commission to contest in the elections, only 62 are expected to be elected.
Nwankwo said that there will be restriction of movement on Election Day.
The Political Parties that are participating in the elections are Accord, Action Alliance, All Nigeria Peoples Party, Action Congress of Nigeria, Labour Party, Peoples Democratic Party, Congress for Progressive Change, Social Democratic Mega Party, All Progressive Grand Alliance, United Peoples Party, Progressive Peoples Alliance, National Conscience Party and the Citizens Popular Party.
