Ime Akpan
The minister of state for aviation, Senator Hadi Sirika has advised the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmood Yakubu not to blame poor weather for the postponement of the general elections which were scheduled to start on Saturday, February 16 with the presidential and national assembly polls.
It would be recalled that Yakubu had, while briefing stakeholders on the reasons for shifting the poll blamed it partly on bad weather which, according to him, affected flight services.
“Unfortunately, in the last one week, flights within the country have been adversely affected by bad weather. For instance, three days ago, we were unable to deliver materials to some locations due to bad weather.
“We therefore had to rely on slow-moving long haulage vehicles to locations that can be serviced by air in spite of the fact that we created five zonal airport hubs -Abuja (North Central), Port Harcourt (South South and South East), Kano (North West), Maiduguri and Yola (North East) and Lagos (South West) to facilitate the delivery of electoral logistics,” he said.
But Sirika, in his reaction told the INEC chief to “say something else” while contending that the weather was good for flights to take-off and land on the eve of the election.
“INEC should say something else as weather was good for flight operations on the eve of elections; similarly all airports were directed to open 24 hours during the election period,” said Sirika in a tweet.
He also stated that that all airports were directed to operate for 24 hours during the election period.
But the commission, in its reaction, maintained that the weather was bad some days before polling day.
It said it did not claim that the weather was bad either on Saturday or Friday.
“Did we say weather was bad on Saturday or Friday? No, we said days before the election and we stand by that,” said INEC spokesman, Mr. Oluwole Osaze-Uzzi.
