Festus Okoye, the Commissioner for Information and Voter Education of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), has pleaded with Nigerians to assist the commission in the processes to help clean up the voters’ register.
Okoye made the call on Monday during an interview he had on Channels TV Politics Today. He was reacting to questions about INEC’s alleged involvement in registering children as young as 10 on the voters’ register so that they can vote in the upcoming election.
The question was in response to leaked pictures of some children in northern Nigeria being registered as older than 18 years old. Pictures that trended not only on Twitter but gained traction on all other social media platforms and the conventional media.
“I have seen these pictures,” Okoye said. “As you pointed out, the essence of putting out these is for Nigerians to help the commission further clean up the voters’ register.”
He explained how far the commission had gone to sanitise the voter registration process, agreeing that it had addressed the problems that had created much of the underage voter challenge in the past.
Read also: How INEC deregistered voters in S/S, S/E raises concerns
“Now what the commission did was that at the end of the continuous voters’ registration exercise, a total of 12,298,949 persons completed their registration. Out of this particular number, the commission declared invalid a total of 2,780,756 persons, leaving a total of 9,518,188 persons.
“So what the commission has done is to integrate this number with the existing number on the voters’ register, which stood at around 84 million, giving us a total of 93,522,272.
“So that is what we have put out there as a preliminary register that people should check. Now we want people to look at the register and assist the commission,” he said.
He, however, presented the steps that Nigerians can follow to help the commission address this issue.
“One, check whether their names have been properly spelled,” he noted. “Whether their personal particulars have been properly captured. Whether some pictures are upside down so that we can correct them. Whether there are still names of deceased persons on the register. Whether there are obviously underage persons on the register.”
He also added that the commission has displayed “the register in the 774 local governments of Nigeria and in the 8,809 registration areas across the federation.”
Okoye also said that to make the process easy, they have also uploaded the voters’ register on their website and made it so easy that any person can go on our website and raise an objection relating to the presence of any individual on the register.
He said that the moment the person raises an objection and makes a claim, the person will be given a slip and given an indication of where these claims and objections will be heard because that is what Section 19 of the Electoral Act provides.
He promised that with a collective effort, the commission and Nigerians could wipe out the issue of underage voting in our electoral system and make our system “authentic, robust, and a register Nigerians can be proud of.”
However, on the issue of identifying the genesis of this underage voting, which has become very notorious in the northern part of the country, Okoye responded by saying that the current steps taken by the commission will help solve this issue.
He added that the commission has decided to merge the two registers it has so far to help identify these registered voters.
He said, “The point I am making is that what we have to do is integrate two registers.
“The one resulting from the continuous voter registration exercise that occurred between June 28th, 2021, and July 31st, 2022, with the register originating in 2011.
“So what we have done is integrate both of them and put the entire thing out for people to take a look at.”
Despite the errors, Okoye pleaded with Nigerians to trust the commission, as it was working really hard to restore faith in it.
“Well, we cannot claim that in all honesty the register does not have errors,” he said. “If the lawmakers believe that the register should not have errors or should not have challenges, we couldn’t have provided Section 19, Subsections 1 to 3, that such a register should be displayed for people to make claims, objections, and also lay complaints.”
“And because it is not perfect, that is why we have this for claims and objections.
“Because the lawmakers believe that the commission can clean up the voters’ register to an extent, we use our automated biometric identification system (ABIS) to remove multiple and double registrants, and then we also do what we call “manual adjudication” to remove obviously underage persons.
He admitted that they were underage voters. “Apparently, there are still obviously underage persons on the voters’ register, and we expect Nigerians to take a look at the voters’ register—both the ones we displayed at the various registration centres and local governments and also the ones at the websites—and assist the commission in pointing out these things so that it can further clean up the register.
“So all these things people are pointing out are the essence of the display. And we want to encourage Nigerians to scrutinise the register and identify individuals who are clearly ineligible to be on it, and we will definitely take action.”
The commissioner, fearing that Nigerians’ trust in the system might have gone down, pleaded once again for Nigerians to trust it.
“We are pleading with Nigerians to trust this commission to give us the benefit of the doubt. Let them point out those who are not supposed to be there and see whether we have the capacity and the courage to do the right thing,” he said.
On the compromised INEC staff, he said, “Some INEC staff are complicit in what has happened, and the good thing is that each INEC staff member that was involved in voters’ registration was given a code, and the moment the person gets online and registers any individual, we can identify that particular staff member.
“So we are going to look at that voter register, look at the claims and objections, identify the staff involved, and definitely proceed against them.”
