Following various speculation and skepticism surrounding the forthcoming elections in Nigeria on March 28 and 11th April , the INEC boss Attahiru Jega has said that electoral body is now more than prepared to deliver a free, fair and credible election in the country, with confidence that the elections will be better than that of 2011. But from Jega’s account, about 12 million PVCs are yet to be collected nationwide about 12 days to the election.
Jega said this at a town hall meeting in Abuja where he also reeled out some of the benefits of using the card reader and the security of lives of the electorate. Speaking on the use of the card reader, he said that the postponement of the elections was an opportunity to do a public demonstration of the card reader since it is a new technology.
He said the use of the card reader will eliminate cheating in any guise: “In a country like ours where there are a lot of people who use their hands whether they’re rural farmers or artisans, we hope that with this, no cloned card will be used in the electoral process because it will only read cards that have been produced and issued by INEC”.
The INEC boss however added that since the card ready will keep information, this will help INEC to audit accreditation information in the case of fraudulent alteration of accreditation of results which is very important because “in the past one of the fraudulent activities associated with elections in Nigeria was the alteration of figures for accreditation”, he said.
On the issue of collection of PVCs, he added that there is the prohibition of collection of voters card by proxy. This he said has become necessary because if collection by proxy is formalised then politicians and other people will arrange syndicates to be collecting cards.
“We are doing everything possible to make sure that every registered person has his/her card before the date of the election”. He added that there are currently 68. 8 million people on INEC’s register and over 67.8 million PVCs have been produced and taken to the states but the level of collection nationwide is about 56 million out of the 68.8 million.
“There are millions of cards out there that people have not collected meanwhile there are under a million; about 700,000 cards that have not been produced. If we get to the date of the election and those cards have not been produced and made available for people to collect we’ll be the first people to admit that we have disenfranchised those people. But If you have produced cards and made them available and people do not come to collect them you cannot talk of INEC disenfranchising those “, he said.
