INEC Chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega who expressed the concern while defending the commission’s budget before the Senate Committee on INEC observed that the funds earmarked for it was for two levels of elections before the amendment of the Electoral Act. The 2010 Electoral Act was subsequently amended to provide for three levels of elections, National Assembly, Presidential and Gubernatorial/House of Assembly.
He said: “The funds that we have are not enough do the elections. There are funding gaps and there were some consumables that were underestimated. The provisions in the 2010 budget were for two elections, but after the amendment of the Electoral Act, we now have three elections.”
The earlier version of the Electoral Act had provided for the National Assembly and the Presidential elections to be conducted on the same day before the amendment that brought the National Assembly forward.
A stir was also raised by the committee over the separate budgetary proposals submitted by Jega and the Budget Office.
Whereas Jega claimed that N51.7 billion was the Commission’s budget for 2011, the Committee claimed that the actual figure for the commission was N45.3 billion.
Repeated meetings
He told the Committee that the figure of N51.7 billion was arrived at following repeated meetings with the Budget Office and the Ministry of Finance. He was unable to defend the N45.3 billion estimate for the commission that came from the Budget Office. The
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