JUST IN: INEC shifts governorship, state assembly elections to March 18

The Independent National Electoral Commission has postponed the governorship and state assembly elections till 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 again as scheduled following 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 told Peoples Gazette by telephone on Wednesday night. “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.