INEC increases number of RECs for Kano supplementary election

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Kano State says it is ready to conduct the governorship re-run election across 28 affected Local Government Areas (LGAs) in the state.

The state INEC Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), Riskuwa Arab-Shehu, disclosed this while briefing journalists on Thursday in Kano ahead of the Saturday’s re-run election.

According to him, across the 28 LGAs, there are 75 Registration Centres, 207 polling units and 279 voting points with the total number of 128,324 registered voters.

Mr Arab-Shehu explained that the governorship election was cancelled across 15 LGAs due to violence and 116 polling units were affected, adding that in these affected areas, the total number of voters is 73,173.

He further said, “In 23 LGAs, the election was cancelled due to over voting and violence which disrupted the election process in those areas.

“In these affected areas, we have a total number of 55,151 registered voters in 92 polling units across the affected Local Government Areas.

“Earlier, we have 29 affected Local Government Areas, but we later realised that one of it, Bunkure where card reader was not used in one of the polling units, therefore it was declared as Invalid instead of cancelled”, he said.

Mr Arab-Shehu added that the commission after the conduct of the elections on February 23, had reviewed all the affected polling units and came up with the above as the authentic and the exact number of local government areas affected.

According to him, the electoral body had received all the sensitive and non-sensitive materials for the re-run pointing out that the distribution of the election materials would commence on Friday, February 22.

He assured all the political parties that INEC will do everything possible to ensure a free, fair and credible supplementary election in the state.

Mr Arab-Shehu disclosed that three other RECs from Ogun, Kebbi and Zamfara States were deployed to Kano to support him in the conduct of the re-run election on Saturday.