No Nigerians Denied Obtaining PVC — INEC Clarifies Disenfranchising Voters

By Adadainfo

All eligible Nigerians were provided a level playing field to obtain their permanent voters’ card, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) said.

INEC’s national commissioner and chairman, information and voter education committee, Mr Festus Okoye, stated this on Monday in Abuja.

There have been reports that over seven million Nigerians who applied for the PVC online during the last continuous voter registration were denied the opportunity. This led to calls by some stakeholders to make the exercise continuous, considering that there are millions of eligible Nigerians who could not obtain the cards due to malfunction of INEC gadgets.

Mr Okoye said those complaining should be blamed.

In his words, “INEC introduced the online pre-registration on June 28, 2021. Citizens were given the opportunity to start the registration online and then book appointments at their convenience to complete the physical biometric registration at designated centres.

“It was a novel idea leveraging on technology to ease the registration process. For the online pre-registration, 10,487,972 began the process.

“By the deadline of the exercise, 3,444,378 registrants completed their pre-registration physically at the designated centres in line with laid-down procedure.

“Some 7,043,594 applicants did not complete the registration and INEC made the information public. This is what some people are now holding on to, to claim that they were denied the opportunity.

“They failed to either complete the online enrolment or failed to appear physically at the designated centres to complete the process.”

He said out of the 7,043,594 that failed to complete the exercise, 4,161,775 attempted but failed to complete the processes.

He added that, “The remaining 2,881,819 registrants completed the online pre-registration but did not show up to complete the physical biometric registration at designated centres before the expiration of the deadline.

“No Nigerian was denied the opportunity to complete the online pre-registration.”