Obo Effanga, Resident Electoral Commissioner Rivers State, has reacted to a petition against him over the list of local government collation officers.
It was alleged that some of collation officers he enlisted were card carrying members of the PDP.
Read his statement below:
Our attention was drawn to a petition about the list of LGA collation officers for the governorship election in Rivers State wherein four of the listed persons were alleged to have partisan inclination.
We have since updated the list by removing the said persons whom we had no prior knowledge of their alleged partisanship.
The said officers were selected from the lists sent to us from INEC Headquarters as lecturers in the University of Port Harcourt as well those other lecturers who attended the training we held for academic staff of the University of Port Harcourt.
We took every reasonable step to ensure that the proposed collation officers were without any partisanship, even as we requested each person to disclose any such interest which may not be known to us and we had no such information.
We have since briefed the Chairman of INEC on this following his request for response by us.
Obo Effanga, Esq
Resident Electoral Commissioner
Rivers State