The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has embarked on the formulation of its Election Project Plan (EPP) in preparation for the 2027 general election.
This was disclosed on Saturday by a top official of the commission.
The official revealed that lessons learnt from the 2023 general election were being applied to the planning for 2027.
He revealed that the commission was already updating its election templates for the upcoming election cycle, with the goal of improving the efficiency and reliability of its processes.
The INEC official said, “The formulation also includes the production of the 2027–2031 Strategic Plan to replace the current 2022–2026 Strategic Plan, which ends in December next year.
“An important aspect of the current effort is the preparation of another critical document that will act as a bridge between 2026 and 2027—the general election year—which the current 2022-2026 plan does not cover. This particular document will provide the foundation for the 2027 EPP document.
“While the 2022-2026 Strategic Plan prioritised the institutionalisation of the commission’s processes for the delivery of its mandate, focussing on capacity building, promotion of professionalism, encouraging synergy among departments, and improving efficient mobilisation and utilisation of resources, among others, over a four-year cycle, the EPP is a comprehensive document that focusses solely on a general election.”
It was gathered that the EPP was first produced for the 2015 general election. Since then, EPPs were produced for the subsequent 2019 and 2023 general elections.
Following the issues encountered during the 2023 general election, INEC is improving its protocols to ensure smoother operations in future elections.
According to sources, the commission encountered a few logistical and technical challenges during the 2023 general election while handling a voter base of 93,469,008 registered voters spread across 176,846 polling stations.
Over 1.5 million people, including poll workers, supervisors, and security officers, as well as 182,491 vehicles, were deployed to assist voting across Nigeria’s different terrains during the election.
According to reports, despite great preparations, one of the major challenges during the 2023 election was the difficulty of publishing presidential election results to the INEC Result Viewing portal.
While the system successfully processed uploads for the National Assembly elections, the presidential election results were delayed owing to technical issues.
The fundamental cause of the problem was identified as a configuration flaw that prohibited the system from properly mapping presidential results, which are national rather than state-specific elections.
The INEC later resolved the issue with software changes, and the first presidential election result sheet was correctly published later that evening on election day.
