By Henry Umoru
ABUJA — AHEAD of 2019 Presidential and general election, Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, assured, yesterday, that card readers would be effectively deployed to avoid pitfalls of  2015 polls.

•Card reader

The commission also said it would engage no less than one million adhoc staff for conduct of the election.

Speaking in Abuja when he appeared before the Senate Committee on INEC, Chairman of the commission, Prof.  Mahmood Yakubu, said the smart card readers would function very well as users would be adequately trained on its usage before the election.

He said: “Controversies and challenges raised on the smart card readers in the 2015 elections to us in INEC were over magnified because the problem was not technological on the part of the device but attitudinal on the part of the users due to lack of adequate training.

“Thus, because the problem is more of attitude than technological defects, solid steps are being taken by the commission to bring about robust interface between the machine and those to use them in terms of practical trainings before the elections.”

On the method the commission intended to use for the 2019 general elections in the rural areas, he said specific machines would be deploy to specific communities.

“We will deploy specific machine to the specific community and we will also provide additional machines, speak to the community leaders. We will treat all states equal,’’ Yakubu said.

He said the commission would engage at least one million adhoc staff for conduct of the election, stressing that it was putting everything in place to enable election monitors, observers, Civil Society Organisations, CSOs, journalists, among others, vote before the stipulated days for general election.

Yakubu, who also disclosed that the commission had suspended Anambra voters registration until after the governorship election, said the one million targeted ad-hoc staff would be about 300,000 higher than the over 700,000 ad-hoc staff engaged for the 2015 general elections.

He said:  “The projected increase in the number of ad- hoc staff to be engaged in the elections by the commission arose from the need to make provisions for adequate manpower for the exercise on a general template    and specifically to take care of      peculiar needs for that purpose in some    polling units across the federation.”

On the issue of INEC involvement in party primaries, Prof. Yakubu noted that there was nothing the commission could do about the party imposing a candidate, saying “we have problems with party primaries but INEC has no power to disqualify a candidate of a party.

‘’There is nothing the commission can do about it but we promise the country that INEC can never go to court to defend any candidate after election.”

Professor Yakubu said conduct of the governorship elections in Anambra State next month and those of Ekiti and Osun states next  year, would show Nigerians how prepared the commission was for the 2019 general elections.

He said the commission was also planning on how to make the five categories of disfranchised Nigerians participate in the 2019 general elections.