By JIDE AJANI & OKEY NDIRIBE

INEC National Chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega, explained, at a press conference, in Abuja, yesterday, how a vendor who should have delivered the electoral materials well ahead of yesterday’s National Assembly polls frustrated the electoral body’s plans. Jega tendered his unreserved apology for the lapse.

What assurances can INEC give Nigerians that on Monday, April 4, there would not be another disappointment for Nigerians?

I want to assure Nigerians that all the materials are now in the country.
In fact, some are already being distributed to the states.
It is just that there is no sufficient time for them to reach the polling units before accreditation ended and the process of voting commenced.As I speak with you now, all the materials are in the country. Some have even reached the states.

We are left with today and tomorrow to ensure that all the materials reach the polling units so that on Monday, April 4, 2011, we will be able to conduct the election with all the materials in the field and without problems.

Who is responsible for this failure?

Unfortunately, we have been disappointed by a vendor.

A vendor was supposed to deliver these materials latest by Thursday, late afternoon.
We were confident from the assurances that we had that this was going to happen and that once these materials were delivered, we had sufficient time between then and today to deliver the materials to the states and the polling units. Obviously they did not deliver on Thursday and they gave us excuses.

There was a problem in Japan. And, many Boeing 747 were being diverted so as to deliver relief materials to Japan and Qatar and they claimed that that affected some of the agreements they had for transportation and they assured us that the materials would arrive by 5:30 p.m. yesterday, which was Friday.

The assurances they gave us, again, we thought, as honourable men, they would stick by it and it would stand.

We were fully mobilised and we got the Air-Force to be on ground.  Over 10 aircraft were on ground on the tarmac by the Air-Force, waiting for the materials to arrive for onward delivery to the polling units.

We were so confident that if the materials had arrived by 5:30 Friday, we would still have been able to deliver the materials.

But the materials never arrived on Friday. We were told they would arrive by 2 a.m.

The materials only arrived this morning by 9 a.m. in Lagos.

Even though the Air-Force planes were ready to distribute the materials, there was no way they would have been able to get them to the polling units before the finish of the accreditation exercise and that was the situation that we found ourselves and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it.

We’ve done our best.

We’ve done everything possible.
But we’ve been disappointed.
Nobody likes it. I apologise to Nigerians for what has happened.

I take responsibility for it because it is a major lapse but there was nothing we could have done about it to prevent it from happening.

I am happy that the materials are now in the country as I speak with you.
Some materials have already been taken to the states and some have already arrived in the states.

We believe that we now have sufficient time between today and Monday morning to be able to ensure that everything is deployed to the field for the election to take place.

 Materials that caused the postponement

The materials that caused the postponement covered the North-East and North-Central geo-political zones. Senatorial ballot papers for these zones were also supposed to be delivered by the same vendor.

The materials were in the same aircraft which came late.

If that was the only thing, we would have isolated the senatorial elections in these zones and gone ahead with the election into the House of Representatives.

But we could not do that because there were no result sheets.
That was why I said the fundamental problem was the late arrival of result sheets and we consider it to be a terribly unfortunate emergency and unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it.
I apologise to Nigerians for what has happened.
I take responsibility for that.

Will Monday be declared public holiday?
I believe that as you are all aware there is always restriction of movement on election days.
I do not know if a public holiday would be declared, but in effect if there is a restriction of movement it would amount to that.
I leave the authorities to speak more appropriately on that.
May be it would be a work-free day.

What happens in areas where process of voting had commenced?
Well, in places where the process of voting had commenced, remember that there is accreditation and then the actual voting. Once this decision was taken, it was appropriately communicated to our Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) across the country even before the formal announcement.
There is nowhere in this country where voting has commenced.

The stoppage of the exercise has not really affected the process of voting.

With regard to the number of states that do not have the sheets, it is virtually every state.
What we did in the distribution is that we ensured that all the vendors were also involved in the distribution to all the states.
It was to avoid a situation whereby materials would arrive in some areas and they would not arrive in others.

But unfortunately now, because this has happened, substantial number of states has now been affected by this late arrival of materials by one vendor.

Does this mean that we, in Nigeria, are incapable of conducting free and fair elections?

That is far from the truth.

What we’re doing now is in spite of the challenges and difficulty and the weighty nature of the statement that we have to make, we are saying that if we want free, fair and credible elections, there are certain things that are unacceptable.
We cannot proceed with this election if we want them to be free, fair and credible without result sheets.

What we are doing is to ensure that that commitment to free, fair and credible elections is actually satisfied and that is why we are doing this.

We cannot bury our heads and say there are no problems and say that people should continue with the electoral process when we know that results would not be properly tabulated on properly printed result sheets.
It is regrettable. It’s unfortunate. It should not have happened.
Under normal circumstances, these kinds of things don’t happen.

It’s really terribly unfortunate that it has happened but man proposes and God disposes.
We’ve done our best under the circumstances and that does not mean we are excusing ourselves from blame. The most serious problem is the absence of the result sheets.

There were only two states that did not have problems with the result sheets.
Once again, I apologise to Nigerians.

We had done our best to bring about free, fair and credible elections.