In recent weeks, there has been increased discontent among political stakeholders, particularly in Southern Nigeria on the large number of invalid registered voters released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) from the region, ahead of the 2023 general election.
The Commission had said the invalid registrants were detected after it applied the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) data cleaning exercise.
INEC has come under heavy criticism from stakeholders and political leaders in the South since the final figure of voters were announced for the 2023 general election.
They accused the commission of showing favouritism in the registration of voters ahead of next year’s polls and working to disadvantage the region’s voting strength, particularly the South-South and South-East.
The Continuous Voter Registration (CVR), which was commenced in June 2021, ended in July 2022, despite agitations from some Nigerians and civil society groups for extension.
In several parts of the country, thousands of Nigerians could not register due to alleged sharp practices by some officials of the INEC, who often colluded with corrupt politicians to frustrate attempt of eligible voters from registering to enable them get their Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs), in areas, where they or their parties are not popular.
Equally, avoidable lapses such as inadequate capturing machines, late resumption of INEC officials and sheer dereliction of duties hampered the smooth conduct of the exercise in several parts of the country.
In its final assessment of the exercise, INEC said Bayelsa, Ebonyi and Rivers top the list of states with the highest number of invalid registered voters.
The INEC data shows that 59. 8 per cent of the total new registrants were delisted in the South-East state.
Although Nigeria’s voter population increased by 9,518,188, a total of 2,780,756 were consequently delisted from 12,298,944 new voters who completed the Continuous Voters Registration (CVR) exercise.
Interestingly, the South-South state of Bayelsa, which is one of the states with the smaller population in the country, leads with the number of invalid registered voters.
The Commission said out of the 444,652 new registrants that completed their CVR exercise in Bayelsa State in the, 307,513 of the number were declared invalid.
This means 69.2 percent of the people that participated in the exercise committed one of the infractions frowned upon by the electoral body.
Ebonyi State took the second spot as only 161,447 registrants satisfactorily scaled INEC’s Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) data cleaning exercise out of the 401,510 registrants who completed the registration.
Also Rivers had 33 percent of its total CVR registered voters after the INEC data cleaning phase.
The valid new voters in Abia were 196,683 while 72,657 have been declared invalid. At least 61,261 of the 243,565 total registered voters in Enugu were also invalid according to INEC data.
In the South West, the total registration is 2,039,982, invalid 399,608, (10 per cent), valid 1,640,374 with a register of 17.5 million.
This is a sharp contrast to the figure in the North, where states like Zamfara, Kwara, Abuja, Plateau and Kaduna recorded the lowest percentage of invalid registration.
For example, of the 238,649 registrants in Zamfara, only 11.2 percent were invalid.
For North Central, the total registration stood at 2,314,368, invalid 345,324, (14.9 per cent), valid, 1,969,044, and register 15.0 million.
Total registration in the North East is 1,531,070, invalid, 272,508, (17.8 percent), valid 1,258,562, registered 12.5 million.
The total number of registration stood at 12,298,944, invalid 2,780,756, (22.6 per cent), valid 9,518,188, while the total register is 93.5 million.
In the last few days, there have been divergent views from observers and political leaders in the South on the implications of the development.
Many people in the region are wondering how the zones with high literacy rates will record more invalid registration than the Northern parts of the country with lower literacy rates.
President, of Middle Belt Forum, Pogu Bitrus said he would not know how INEC arrived at the figures, saying other reasons apart from double registration could have informed what happened.
He, however, urged those whose registrations had been cancelled in the South East and South-south to come out if they know that they were duly registered, and testify that they have been short-changed and that INEC is being partial.
“Certainly, in this country today, we have so many foreigners; the majority of hawkers in Abuja and other parts of Nigeria are from Niger Republic and Chad and this may have increased the Northwest number of registrants,” he said.
Similarly, some are of the view that the average voter in Northern Nigeria has much voter education and awareness and are often curious to take part in the electoral process compared to people in the South.
“The average voter in the North is aware that power is the driver of any country and they take it very much more seriously than those in the South, therefore they cannot be blamed for having higher numbers of valid registration.
“Until the politicians in the South begin to mobilise the people and educate them properly on the importance of registration, and how to register, then numbers of invalid registration will reduce,” Adelaja Adeoye, former national publicity secretary of the Action Democratic Party (ADP), said.
Meanwhile, some stakeholders are saying that a thorough analysis of the reasons for the invalidation of PVCs must be undertaken; they say those that can be remedied, must be given a chance as the objective must be to get all eligible voters to register.
Ndubuisi Enechionyia, candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) for Enugu West senatorial zone told BusinessDay Sunday, that the recent elections conducted by INEC in Osun and Ekiti States showed that the Commission was ready for the task ahead unlike in the past.
According to him, “I am absolutely going to give INEC the benefit of the doubt for this election.
“A lot of what has happened in the off-season elections has shown we have an improvement in the conduct of INEC on elections. We must remain vigilant and supportive to ensure we do not revert to the old ways
“Another important aspect must be voter education and sensitisation to ensure that people come out to vote, and voting is not based on primordial sentiments. This is where there is an important role for INEC, our orientation agencies and political parties.
“Our biggest challenge is a failure of leadership at all levels. It is in all our enlightened self-interest that votes count and elections work. Nigeria needs to work, and it must start by freely electing our leaders and holding them accountable”.
Speaking to BusinessDay Sunday, Martins Onovo, a former presidential candidate, said the current leadership of INEC would not conduct free and fair polls next year.
He cited the recent removal of the Christian head of the INEC ICT unit, stressing that it was done to pave the way for the manipulation of the outcome of the 2023 polls.
“We have long concluded and announced that it is unreasonable to expect free and fair elections from the current INEC Chairman going by the 2019 elections. Currently, INEC has continued to show bias against Christians.
“It looks obvious that the removal of the Christian head of the INEC ICT unit was calculated to create the opportunity for prior manipulation of the elections”, Onovo said.
Onvo added that the manipulations were aimed to suppress votes in the South.
“They are using the same old method of suppressing votes in the Christian South and unlawfully boosting votes in the Muslim areas of the North were used to fix the elections in 2015 and 2019.
“This time, INEC must take note that the overwhelming majority of Nigerians will reject any fixed election,” he added.
An observer, who spoke to BusinessDay Sunday on condition of anonymity, said he smelt a rat that something untoward may be going on.
“With the assurances by the INEC that the election would be transparent as the results would be electronically uploaded from the polling unit, rigging is bound not to happen in that front; the new battlefront is the rigging before the exercise by reducing the voting strength of the people. What we are seeing now may not be far from that. It may be a grand plan. Are they telling me that those illiterate folks in the north are more enlightened than all of us here in the north? For me, it is ‘the more you look, the less you see’. That’s how I see it.”
The observer further said: “I heard that part of those INEC said it deregistered were underage registrants. I will only clap for INEC if I do not see children queue up to vote in Kano and other places in the North where they use underage children to rig elections. Is INEC saying that it has sanitised the system that such things would no longer feature? That would be the miracle of the century. We are watching.”
While there are protests and condemnation that INEC allegedly remove 30 percent (or so) number of voters from South West and South East from the present 93.5 million registers of voters, the Commission adduced reasons for the expulsion across the country.
INEC had said it invalidated 2.7 million ineligible registrants from the record of the 12.2 million newly registered voters.
According to Mahmood Yakubu, INEC chairman, the removal was due to double/multiple, underaged and fake registrations that failed to meet the business rules of the last Continuous Voters Registration (CVR) exercise.
Yakubu said: “At the end of the exercise, 12,298,944 Nigerians successfully completed the registration as new voters. All along, we have repeatedly assured Nigerians that our process of cleaning up the register is robust.
“After a rigorous cleaning-up of the data using the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), a total of 2,780,756 (22.6percent) were identified as ineligible registrants and invalidated from the record. Consequently, the number of valid registrations (post-ABIS) is 9,518,188.
“In terms of demographic distribution, 7.2 million new voters or 76.5% are young people between 18-34 years while there is a slightly higher number of female (4.8 million or 50.82%) than male (4.6 million or 49.18%) voters. In terms of occupation, 3.8 million (40.8%) are students.”
The INEC chairman explained that fictitious registrations were carried out by some of the Commission’s registration officers involved in the field exercise and which was easily traced.
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He said each registration machine was operated using an access code tied to a dedicated e-mail assigned to a staff, hence there was an audit trail that gives the total number of persons registered by each official involved in the registration exercise.
Yakubu said in some case, some of the officials made as many as 40 attempts or more to register one fake voter, adding that INEC has so far identified 23 officers involved in that unethical conduct and disciplinary action has commenced.
The commission has gone ahead to publish the 93.5 million preliminary voters’ register for the 2023 general election on beginning from Saturday, November 12 to 25 2022.
The physical copies of the register are displayed in all the 8,809 Registration Areas (Wards) and 774 Local Government Areas on a polling unit basis nationwide while a soft copy is to be published on INEC’s website.
Festus Okoye, national commissioner and chairman, information and voter education committee said the display of the national register of voters is for claims and objections by citizens as required by law.
Okoye appealed to Nigerians to seize the opportunity to scrutinise the register and draw INEC attention to any corrections in their personal particulars and any malicious registrations, multiple registrants, non-Nigerians or any other person not qualified to be on the register.
“As earlier announced by the Commission, the entire preliminary register containing 93,522,272 registrants will be published. The exercise will last for 2 weeks, from 12th -25th November 2022.
“The physical copies of the register will be displayed in all the 8,809 Registration Areas (Wards) and 774 Local Government Areas on polling unit basis nationwide. For the first time, the soft copy of the entire register will also be published on the Commission’s website (visit www.inecnigeria.org/display_register and follow the instructions).
“The register will give the name, picture, date of birth and Voter Identification Number (VIN) of each registered voter. However, for data protection and security reasons, critical information such as biometric details, residential addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses of voters will not be made public on both the physical and soft copies.
“During the display, any person may make a claim that the name of a registered voter has been omitted, make corrections on his/her personal details on the register, raise an objection against the inclusion of any person not qualified to vote or the name of a dead person on the register.”
