Ten days to the general election beginning with the presidential poll on February 14, 2015, a good number of Nigerians may be disenfranchised on account of the inability of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to make available their permanent voter cards (PVCs), BusinessDay can authoritatively report.
The commission said it had dispatched the last batch of the PVCs last weekend, adding that those who may have a problem getting theirs could be those who were not captured in INEC’s biometric register. It also debunked the insinuation in certain quarters that poor funding must have impaired its activities. Our correspondent, who visited some distribution centres in Lagos Monday morning, said there were huge crowd of people with frustration written all over their faces as a result of their inability to collect their PVCs, despite several visits to the centres and to INEC offices.
At Shitta Surulere INEC office, our correspondent met with angry prospective voters who complained that although they had their temporary voter cards which they used in the 2011 general election, they were told that their PVCs were not yet ready. “I have been coming here for the past two weeks now”, said a retired civil servant in his late 70s who spoke with our correspondent on condition of anonymity. According to him, “Each time I come here (INEC office), they would tell me the cards are not ready. I voted in 2011 with my temporary voter’s card. I had expected that my PVC would be ready when they started distributing them, but that was not to be; since then it has been one excuse or the other. Is it a crime to want to vote in ones country’s general election? I don’t really understand what is going on.”
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Speaking with one of the senior officers of INEC at the Surulere office, who also asked not to be quoted, BusinessDay was told that the national headquarters of the commission was yet to send more cards to them. He, however, denied any insinuation of shady deals by INEC, attributing the challenge to logistics. Emphasising that the problem was not with their local office, the officer opened some registers, showing our correspondent that many wards under its jurisdiction were yet to receive single PVC. “You can see that we are compiling the individual names and wards that are yet to receive the PVCs and we are sending the list back to Abuja. It is not our fault. We have been distributing the ones sent to us. I believe that this will be sorted out before the election,” said the officer, who was sweating profusely, ostensibly as a result of the hard time he was having pacifying desperate eligible voters hurling unprintable names on the institution.
However, Kayode Idowu, spokesperson to the INEC chairman, Attahiru Jega, said Abuja had sent all the PVCs to the state offices and that there were no other consignment being awaited from anywhere. “You see there is no PVC being expected from Abuja. The last batch left Abuja over the weekend. If you like I will give you the number of the REC so that you can con- firm. The REC should have better information on that. What happened is that they may be doing the sorting by now,” Idowu said. Debunking the insinuation that the challenge might have to do with funding, Idowu said: “INEC has never said it has issues with funding. The only issue we had was timeline, but that has been sorted out now.”
On the complaint by many prospective voters that they could not find their PVCs despite the fact that they voted in 2011, the INEC spokesperson said: “That they voted in 2011 does not guarantee their name being in the register. They are only guaranteed once their names were captured in the biometric register. So, for those in that category, their PVCs must have been among the last batch that has been sent out.”
