The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof. Mahmud Yakub, has announced that the commission will recruit about one million ad-hoc members of staff to assist in conducting the 2019 general elections.
He made this known to the Senate Committee on INEC on Wednesday, October 18.
According to him, the ad-hoc workers to be deployed for the polls, which will begin in 484 days, will be about 300 higher than the 700 engaged for the 2015 general elections.
He said,
“The projected increase in the number of ad hoc (members of ) staff to be engaged in the elections by the commission arose from the need to make provisions for adequate manpower for the exercise on a general template and, specifically, to take care of peculiar needs for that purpose in some polling units across the federation.”
Prof. Yakub, at the interactive session with the lawmakers, also disclosed that the commission was planning to make the five categories of disfranchised Nigerians participate in the 2019 general elections.
The five categories are the 16,000 INEC personnel, members of the civil society organisations who serve as election monitors and observers, the media, security personnel and prison inmates.
He also stated that;
“Controversies and challenges raised on the smart card readers in the 2015 elections, to us in INEC, were over magnified because the problem was not technological on the part of the device but attitudinal on the part of the users due to lack of adequate training.
“Thus, because the problem is more of attitudinal than technological defects, solid steps are being taken by the commission to bring about robust interface between the machine and those to use them in terms of practical trainings before the elections,”