The House of Representatives Committee on Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has urged the electoral body to relocate its offices from local government headquarters to more neutral and secure locations.

The House recently resolved that INEC’s current practice of using local government headquarters poses a significant threat to electoral integrity following a motion by Hon. Sunday Nnamchi.

The matter was referred to the House Committee on INEC for further legislative action.

The chairman of the committee, Adebayo Balogun, during a public hearing at the National Assembly Complex, called on the state governors to provide land for the Commission to build their offices across the country.

Balogun said: “There must be a communication between either INEC or the committee, through members or through the state governors to provide land. Because you have to put this on the front burner. If people are talking about it, it will happen. Because yes, I know Mr. Chairman is a very conservative person when it comes to issues like this, but we need to talk.

“People will only listen to you when you talk and the pressure is on the ground. There is so much demand from every department and every ministry. Sometimes it is when they hear you that action is being taken and I think with this motion, I want to use the opportunity to thank the mover of this motion because I never knew we had this kind of situation until this motion came. Even in Lagos I never knew we had this situation in Lagos. I mean, Alimosho, Apapa, Oshodi and Eti Osa. And I think we should be able to solve these problems very, very fast,” he said.

Chairman of INEC, Prof Mahmood Yakubu, said over time, they built some of the local government offices in places that were not surrounded by buildings, but with urbanization, they became surrounded.

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He said: “The places became like in the middle of the city, like our office in Abeokuta South, for instance. At that point, we had to work with the security agencies to actually relocate the shops that enveloped the office. We strongly suspect that it was from one of these locations that someone somehow threw some device that burnt down the local government office.

So it’s catch-22 for us. We don’t want to locate the offices in the middle of built-up areas so that people can have immediate access to them. But at the same time, we don’t want to build it far away from where people are because security becomes an issue on Election Day and every day actually when you use facilities.

So we look at these issues. Right now there may be some offices that require relocation. Fortunately, we have another office in Abeokuta, so we moved the Abeokuta South office to our previous state office. That’s where they are operating from. But you don’t have that luxury elsewhere,” he said.

©CDA News