Fire broke out on Friday morning at the Election and Party Monitoring Department and the Media Centre of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Abuja.
INEC National Commissioner and Chairman of its Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, has confirmed the incident.
Mr Okoye said no critical document was lost in the fire except computers and photocopying machines.
He disclosed that some documents relating to political parties were burnt but the important ones were stored in fireproof cabinets.
“The fire started around 11 am, it was at the Media Centre outside the INEC headquarters, the headquarters is intact, there is no cause for alarm. The main documents relating to our monitoring of political parties are still intact, they have been moved out before the fire,” he said.
“What you have here are just correspondences. But we have lost public properties and our working equipment We are still trying to find out what happened.”
Controller of Federal Fire Service, Abuja Command, Braimoh Mommoh, said the level of damage was minimal due to the efforts of the firemen “otherwise the whole house would have been razed down.”
INEC’s headquarters is the third public building to witness fire outbreak in recent times after the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation and the headquarters of the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC).
