From David Onuoja
The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Joash Amupitan, has warned that anyone who threatens, intimidates or harms the Commission’s ad-hoc staff, National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members, or permanent personnel will face the full weight of the law.
Professor Amupitan issued the warning on Saturday, October 31, 2026, in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, at the South-South Zonal Readiness Assessment and Interactive Staff Engagement ahead of the 2027 General Election.
According to him, “Insecurity may pose a challenge, but our collective constitutional resolve is far stronger,” he declared.
The Port Harcourt meeting is the fifth in the series of zonal assessments after South-West, North-West, South-East and North-East. The Chairman said his physical presence in each zone reflects the Commission’s field-first approach, stressing that “true electoral integrity is forged in the field” across the 123 Local Government Areas of the six South-South states.
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On security, Amupitan said INEC has moved from reactive, election-day deployment to a proactive, intelligence-led architecture called the ‘ICCES Tentacle’, which extends inter-agency coordination from national and state headquarters to Local Government Areas and Registration Area Centres.
The framework rests on three pillars mapping threats, ensuring safety, and guaranteeing access to provide a protective umbrella for personnel, BVAS devices, and voters, and ensure every polling unit remains a safe sanctuary.
He disclosed that the South-South security arrangement relies on about 60 major operational formations under the Inter-Agency Consultative Committee on Election Security (ICCES), comprising military, naval, air, police and intelligence agencies. “Together, this integrated multi-agency network represents the operational backbone that guarantees intelligence-led protection across every riverine creek, coastal axis, and land-based polling unit in the Niger Delta,” he said.
The INEC boss also noted that the South-South is the fourth largest voting bloc with 15,823,550 registered voters (15.30 per cent of the national register), with Rivers alone accounting for 3,736,434 voters. He said the Commission has executed nine of 14 milestones for the 2027 poll involving over 103 million voters and 176,846 polling units, with presidential election set for January 16 and governorship for February 6, 2027.
He added that INEC has signed an MoU with Maritime Transporters Union for riverine deployment, distributed operational vehicles, migrated staff to the Consolidated Election Management Body Salary Structure and increased state overheads by 150 per cent.
Warning against sabotage, the Chairman said late opening of polls and technical glitches fuel disinformation, stressing that “when our field execution is flawless, no digital algorithm can displace the physical reality of a transparent vote”. He cautioned that partisan leaning, negligence, financial impropriety or absenteeism would attract swift sanctions, reminding staff of the Oath of Neutrality under Section 26 of the Electoral Act 2026.
