From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mahmood Yakubu, has expressed satisfaction with the performance of the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) during the mock accreditation exercise held across the country on Saturday.
He expressed optimism over the performance of the accreditation technology after visiting some polling units in the two Area Councils of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja to monitor the functionalities of the BVAS machines ahead of the February 25 presidential and National Assembly election.
The electoral umpire boss equally explained that INEC wants to use the ongoing mock accreditation to ensure that the machines are functioning optimally before the main election date.
Fielding questions from newsmen, Yakubu admitted that: “We are satisfied with the test carried out in our office, but we need to test them again on the field in order to give Nigerians confidence on what we are doing to ensure that the elections are going to be free, fair and credible.
“We identified 437 polling units nationwide to test run the BVAS machines. This is on the basis of two for Senatorial District and four for each Local Government Area while all in all per state is 16.
“We are happy to see voters been accredited and authenticated with the INEC BVAS machines working accurately.
“There is no problem of any kind in the two Area Councils we have visited. Again, the results we are getting from the exercise nationwide gave us joy and hope that everything is going on well.
“Our staff are on the ground to attend to any machine failure in case of unforeseen circumstances but thank God, we have not heard of any failure so far,” he noted with enthusiasm.
Speaking further, Yakubu assured that “as early as 2 o’clock, today (Saturday), all the accreditation data and the results will be on the INEC website for everyone to see.”
He first visited polling unit 018 by the post office, Area 10, Garki, Abuja Municipal Area Council before moving to polling unit 003 by Esu Chief Palace in Bwari Central; Bwari Area Council where he also confirmed from the voters the smoothness of the exercise accrediting with the BVAS machines.