Ondo election will go on despite fire incident – INEC

Spokesman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Festus Okoye says election in Ondo State will proceed despite the setback caused by the fire incident which destroyed more than 5000 card readers on Thursday night.

Mr Okoye, who was in Akure for preparations for the governorship election scheduled for October 10, told NAN that the inferno would not affect the conduct of the polls.

He said card readers would be collected from other states which are not conducting elections.

“This is just one state election. What we are going to do is to mop up smart card readers from other states and use them for the conduct of the election while investigating what happened,” he said.

“The cost of 5,141 smart card readers is so much, but we are not going to dwell on that now.

“What we are going to dwell on is to mop up smart card readers from other states that are not conducting elections and use them to conduct Ondo governorship election.

“We will dwell on other issues regarding the configuration of the card readers.”

Fire incidents at INEC offices close to election day are becoming commonplace as about 4,695 smart card readers were destroyed by fire that razed INEC facilities at its headquarters in Awka, Anambra in February 2019 barely four days to the general elections.

There was also similar incident in 2019 at the INEC office in Plateau State and Abia State where its facilities including card readers were destroyed by fire.