Nigeria : State Governor’s Election Postponed

The election of new governors for 28 of Nigeria’s 36 states will now be held on March 18, 2023. The move will allow more time for voting machines used in last month’s presidential and legislative elections to be reconfigured and deployed for the upcoming vote. The announcement to shift the elections that were slated for March 11 to 18, 2023 was made public by the spokesman for Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Festus Okoye. The gubernatorial vote is part of Nigeria’s general elections for four-year single terms for major political positions, including last month’s presidential vote won by the ruling All Progressives Congress candidate, Bola Tinubu. 
A few days to the election, the Presidential Election Petition Court sitting at the Court of Appeal in Abuja on March 8, 2023 approved the electoral body’s request to reset the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines, the new technologies heavily used this year in Nigeria elections to make them more transparent. Because the court ruling came too late for the machines to be reset in time for use in the March 11 election, the INEC was forced to extend by one-week the date of the elections. “This decision has not been taken lightly but it is necessary to ensure that there is adequate time to back up the data stored on the over 176,000 BVAS machines from the Presidential and National Assembly elections and reconfigure them for the coming elections”, Okoye reiterated.
For the past weeks, some observers have criticized the...