By Agbenu Oyale, Abuja
As Nigerians expressed concern over the failure of President Muhammadu Buhari to assent to the Electoral Act 30 days after it was passed by the National Assembly, The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Monday said that no budgetary allocation for direct primaries.
Recall that the governors and the lawmakers have been on each other throats over these direct primaries believed to have been imposed into the electoral act by the lawmakers.
The INEC National Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, who was before the Senate Committee on Appropriations to table before the National Assembly, N305billion as projected expenditure for the 2023 general elections, pointed out that the commission doesn’t make budgetary provisions for activities that are not provided by law.
“In submitting the executive proposal to the National Assembly, the sum of N140billion was made available to INEC as a one-line item in the budget and as usual we broke it down and submitted same to the committee that oversights INEC in both the House and the Senate.
“The N140billion was broken into two, we take it that N40billion is our regular budget as an agency of government and N100billion was the first tranche of the 2022 budget and we have gone ahead to make provisions accordingly.
“For the N40billion annual budget including in that are also elections that we are supposed to conduct particularly off-season elections. It may interest the committee to know that we have eight bye-election pending; three Federal constituencies and five State constituencies. In fact, the last vacancy occurred only last Wednesday following the death of a member representing Jiwa west in Kaduna State.”
Speaking on what must be done before 2023, the INEC Chairman said, “what we have done is to look at the activities that we have to conduct before the general election.
“There are activities that must be concluded. For instance, if you are going to replace some of the critical facilities like ballot boxes, voting cubicles, these things must be done before the election.