Election may not hold in three states, Professor Attahiru Jega, Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has reiterated.
Jega while speaking at a forum organized by the African Policy Research Institute at Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja on Monday said if attacks on Permanent Voter Card (PVCs) centres are sustained by the insurgents, election will not hold in Adamwa, Borno and Yobe and other trouble spots in the North-East
Prof. Jega said: “A place like Borno State that is being ravaged by insurgents, and unless something drastically is being done to the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) there to return, the state governorship may be difficult, if not impossible under the circumstances.
“To be realistic, we must say that it may be impossible to conduct elections everywhere, in every local government, in every constituency in those three insurgency affected states”, he said.
According to Jega, the electoral body has made alternative plans for Internally Displaced Persons to vote designated places.
The Chief Press Secretary to the INEC boss, Mr. Kayode Idowu, in an earlier interview on a national television monitored in Abuja, reaffirmed that the Commission had always expressed its readiness to conduct elections in all states of the federation, including the three troubled states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe.
Idowu however said the Commission was optimistic that the security challenges in the three states would be appropriately handled by the security forces for elections to hold there.
He said: “The commission’s position has always been that the security of every staff to be deployed, either adhoc or permanent, has to be guaranteed by the security agencies and that is why the commission has always said that it will work in close collaboration with the security agencies to make sure that for it to deploy its staff to these areas, the security agencies will have to be on top of the game.”