Developing: INEC shifts governorship, state assembly elections to March 18

The Independent National Electoral Commission has postponed the governorship and state assembly elections until March 18.

The exercise was previously scheduled to hold on March 11, but INEC, citing a logistics crisis stemming from BVAS configuration and transportation, said the election could not hold as scheduled.

The decision followed a meeting of its executives on Wednesday evening.

“The elections were postponed to allow one more week for preparations,” an official familiar with the meeting was quoted in a report by Peoples Gazette.

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It further quoted the source to have said: “We should be able to get everything in order before March 18.”

The meeting was still underway at INEC headquarters in Abuja as of the time of filing this report.

The commission had convinced the Abuja Division of the Court of Appeal to vary its order granting Peter Obi of the Labour Party and PDP’s Atiku Abubakar permission to inspect the election materials on the premise that it had to reconfigure the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) for the conduction of the polls this Saturday.

Recall that THE CONCLAVE had reported in the morning of Wednesday the possibility of a shift in the date of the polls by a few weeks.

THE CONCLAVE report was entitled: “Dark clouds over INEC’s ability to deliver March 11 governorship, state assemblies’ polls further thicken as usage of BVAS machines is tentative”

The report said that the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, had entered a confusion mode over its planned conduct of the March 11 governorship and House of Assemblies’ elections.

The confusion, as reported, stemmed from the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, machines that were to be deployed in states for the March 11 polls, which have now been shifted.

The INEC had hitherto been restrained from touching and tampering with the BVAS by the Court which had granted the prayers of the presidential candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party PDP, and Labour Party, LP, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, respectibely that the BVAS should not be tampered with by the Commission.

The Commission needed to use the BVAS machines for the guber and state assemblies polls, and that would require that it reconfigured the machines for the purpose of capturing the units and delivering a timely upload of results to the IREV portal.

Realising that it could not proceed to reconfigure the BVAS machines with the court order still in place, the Commission had proceeded to the Court of Appeal with a prayer to vary the court order that had tied its hands.

The Court of Appeal had ruled on Wednesday, granting permission to INEC to reconfigure the BVAS machines..

The commission had convinced the Abuja Division of the Court of Appeal to vary its order granting Peter Obi of the Labour Party and PDP’s Atiku Abubakar permission to inspect the election materials on the premise that it had to reconfigure the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) for the conduct of the polls this Saturday.

The Commission was able to convince the Court that it would save up all the information on the BVAS to its backend server and that none of the information would be lost.

Although counsel to Peter Obi, Dr Ikpeazu, SAN, had insisted that the Commission’s application should not be granted, the Court assured him that the Commission should be given the benefit of the doubt that it would save up all the information in the nschinez in its backend servers.