NIGERIA ELECTIONS: 2019 Elections Will Be Festival, Not War – Ononamadusion

As Nigerians gear up for the presidential election this weekend, a set of people who are really under intense pressure to perform are the various Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) in the States . Enugu State REC, Emeka Ononamadu, in this brief declares that the election will turn out to be a festival, and that Nigerians, not INEC, will decide who their leaders are. TONY EZIMAKOR brings the excerpts:

How ready would you say INEC is for the February 16 and March 2nd elections?

I will say INEC is on top of the game. The commission is practically determined to make a remarkable improvement in the election. That improvement is predicated on the positive conviction of the commission that thing should be right . Secondly, what are the expectations of Nigerians upon the success of 2015 general elections? We have been working round the clock, nobody is catching any sleep because we want our democracy to work. We are crossing all the Ts and dotting all I”s , making sure all the logistics are in order. We mean business and we hope Nigerians will equally mean business by playing their own role; comply will all the electoral law and what the constitution saw about elections.

From your position as REC of Enugu State, how ready would you say you are?

We are ready, we have all the major sensitive and non-sensitive materials we need for this election in place . Those are to be distributed before election has been distributed, those that are to be distributed just on the day of the election are available. The period for the collection of PVCs have been extended and concluded. What informed that is that the commission is a listening commission. If we want stick to what the law says we would conclude the PVC collection on February 8. That would have created a lot of confusion. We call on people to use the window to go collect their PVCs. PVC should be the tending asset.

Why is the collection so cumbersome?

It is not supposed to be if the people are willing, it is about being patient and sequencing your movement. But you discover that Nigerians will never get to doing anything until it is the dying minute. I checked my record of PVC collection and you find that a staff will be in a ward for a whole day only to give out ten, 15, 20 and they return. Sometimes, we move to other wards we think we will get people. I think there is a fundamental problem we need to deal with as a nation. This is the first time the commission has invested over a year and 8 months in a continuous voter registration exercise, not the normal one month, two months. During this extension, we doubled the staff per ward and gave additional incentives and given the number the over 200,000 uncollected PVCs, we had before the exten