Parties may incur high costs as INEC prepares for 95m voters in 2023

The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, in Lagos disclosed that the commission is preparing for 95 million voters and 1.4 million ad hoc staff for the 2023 general elections in the country. The INEC had also created 56,872 new Polling Units (PUs) across the country, increasing the total of polling units to 176,846 from 119,974 PUs as in the 2019 elections. The 2023 elections would be contested by candidates of the 18 registered political parties.

Political parties may be required to recruit more representatives to monitor the electoral processes at the 176,846 polling units in all the local governments across the 36 states of the Federation.

Each of the 18 parties may require assigning a minimum of one representative to each polling unit at certain remuneration. On a minimum of N1,000 per representative at a polling unit, a party may be spending N176,846,000 on an election day, the big parties may be paying double the amount.

Again, the electoral arrangements could affect the deployment of security personnel across the country.

While INEC would be assigning 1.4 million ad hoc staff, the police with a total number of 370,000 officers in Nigeria may be overstretched on election days. This may be for the army and the paramilitary agencies.