FCT INEC Administrative Secretary, Abimbola Oladunjoye, says the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is fully prepared for the February 21, 2026 Area Council elections in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
In an interview with ARISE News on Monday, Oladunjoye said the Commission had concluded virtually all arrangements for the polls across the six Area Councils, 62 wards and 2,822 polling units.
“I’ll tell you that we are very ready for the election come Saturday, 21st February, 2026,” he said. “We are virtually done with everything we need to do for the election. Right now, we’ve received all our non-sensitive materials. Everything has been batched and sent to the Area Councils.”
He disclosed that sensitive materials would be collected from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) ahead of the election and transported directly to the Area Councils.
“By Thursday morning, we’ll be at the CBN to pick up our sensitive materials and we’ll move them straight to the Area Councils. So we are virtually ready. The registers of voters have been printed for the election. BIVAS has been configured. We’ve done training of our poll officials. So I think everything is fine,” Oladunjoye added.
On the deployment of technology, particularly the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BIVAS), Oladunjoye said the Commission conducted a mock accreditation and election process two weeks ago to test the system.
“Two weeks ago, we had our technology tested. We had a mock accreditation and election process where the BIVAS was put to test and it worked very, very well,” he said.
“In fact, it worked — it was perfect. It was 99.9% good, I must say. It worked very well. The few challenges we had were not about the technology; it was rather about the process.”
He explained that the main issue observed during the mock exercise was that some voters were unsure of their designated polling units.
“Because we realised that some voters in the city didn’t know exactly where their polling units are. We had the mock election in just 239 polling units, so people came there with their cards and wanted to be part of the process. But because their names were not in those particular polling units, they could not test the system during the process. So that was a challenge we saw.”
To address this, INEC will publish the voters’ register at polling units ahead of election day.
“In the next few days, we’ll have the register of voters for every polling unit in the city pasted. We’re going to paste the register days before the election so that people can go and check and identify the particular polling units where they belong.”
He also urged voters to take advantage of INEC’s online portal.
“We also have technology that can be used to verify and know your polling unit. That’s cvr.inecnigeria.org/pu. Visiting there will take you to your polling unit and show you on Google Map where your PU is. So it’s going to be easy. We want everybody to actually identify their PU. That was the only thing we observed during the mock election.”
On voter participation, Oladunjoye acknowledged that turnout trends remain low, hovering around 10 per cent of registered voters.
The FCT currently has about 1.6 million registered voters.
“What we usually observe — the trend has always been like 10% of the current registration figures. Ten per cent of that figure is what we actually expect,” he said.
“It’s actually a little below 10% registration that we had during the last election. In the last election, it was about 10%. So nothing has really changed when it comes to voters showing interest in the election. We’ve not had anything more than what we usually have.”
Despite the modest turnout projections, Oladunjoye said INEC has intensified voter education and stakeholder engagement to build public confidence in the electoral process.
“We’ve been doing quite a lot of engagement in the FCT to ensure that people know that their votes count and for them to know that with technology and with the improved processes that we have, that the votes will keep counting,” he said.
“We’ve been meeting with youth organisations and youth groups in the FCT. We’ve been meeting with persons with disabilities. We’ve had meetings with virtually every sector of the community. We’ve been telling them the election will go free — free of rigging, if you like.”
With preparations in top gear, Oladunjoye expressed confidence that the February 21 Area Council elections would be conducted smoothly across the FCT.
Boluwatife Enome
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