Abuja — Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Attahiru Jega, yesterday made a volte face in the figure he demanded to conduct the 2011 general elections, saying in real terms, what the commission needed was N74billion and not N72billionmachine for voter registration.

Prof. Jega made this clarification yesterday when he faced the Senate Committee on Electoral Matters.

He demanded that the funds be made available to INEC by August 11 at the latest as the electoral body was now operating under a very tight time frame, and declared that the current voters' register cannot guarante credible elections.

"The best option in the circumstance is fresh voter registration, but if Nigerians feel they can manage the one available, fine," he said.

Briefing the senators on the urgent need for the funds and the sudden increase, Jega said the amount was justified considering the new option of deploying direct data capture machine for voter registration.

"With regards to direct capture alone, if you want the best machine, which is laptop-based, and not hand held, which has a very good high resolution camera and very good standard finger printing accessory, and which has an extra power pack, just in case of the battery running down.

"Now if you take all these into consideration, the cost of the direct capture machines alone, the unit cost from what we have got so far, and that is not going through the vendor, the unit cost is about $2000. If you calculate $2000 by 120000 units of machine at N152 per dollar, you will get about $240 million. That alone gives you N36.8 billion just for the equipment alone. If you are going to go through the vendor, which is an option we are trying to avoid, then you have to factor at least 30 percent profit margin.

"So that in self raises the cost of the equipment to N55 billion. And then, if you take the cost of the training, which we have costed, the cost of voter education, which we have done, the logistical requirement in terms of transportation and also the allowances that have to be paid to the personnel, whether they are for training purposes or for actual exercise, it comes to a lot of money. So from our own calculation, clearly we will need N74 billion.

computation on all of these, we used about four days during the retreat that we had in Uyo in other to really be very detailed in the computation of these cost elements", he further said.