Unions Sign MoU with INEC To Lift 1m Personnel, 100,000 Vehicles, 4,200 Boats

The transportation unions, which comprises of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW), National Association of Road Transport Owners (NARTO) and Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to enhance forward and reverse logistics during the 2023 general election.

Mahmood Yakubu, the INEC chairman, at the signing ceremony in Abuja on Tuesday, said over 100,000 vehicles and about 4,200 boats that will be accompanied by naval gunboats were required for the movement of election personnel and materials.

Yakubu said the 2023 elections would involve nationwide deployment of over one million personnel and massive materials twice, within a period of two weeks from INEC state offices to 774 local government areas, 8,809 electoral wards and 176,846 polling units across the country.

He said that was a huge undertaking that must be accomplished in the next 66 days to give Nigerians a pleasant voting experience, assuring that the commission is determined to open all polling units nationwide at 8.30am during the elections.

Yakubu said in order for personnel and materials to be at polling units on election day awaiting the arrival of voters rather than the other way round, INEC requires large numbers of vehicles, including motorcycles, tricycles, boats and canoes in the riverine areas which cannot be met from its internal resources.

“It was for this reason that the commission signed the first MoU with the NURTW in January 2015. In order to expand the pool of our service providers to meet the requirement for the increasing number of vehicles, the MoU was reviewed in December 2018 to incorporate NARTO.

“Over the years, the commission has come to rely on the partnership with the NURTW and NARTO to provide vehicles for the successful deployment of electoral personnel and materials. However, we did not incorporate the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN) within the ambit of the MoU, a situation which has often resulted in logistics nightmare in the deployment and retrieval of personnel and materials to the riverine areas of the country.

“This oversight is now addressed by the revised MoU to include MWUN comprising of sailors, dockworkers and those in related trades in our electoral logistics planning and delivery,” he said.