No Going Back On February Polls – INEC…Says There Won’t Be Room for Rigging

Contrary to the claims by the nation’s National Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki (rtd), that over 30 million Permanent Voters Cards (PVC), were yet to be collected, thus calling for the shift of the February elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), has declared that there was no operational reason, including the concerns over the distribution of the PVCs, to postpone next month’s general election.

The commission further added that there was no communication from the presidency to postpone the election over complaints of the PVCs distribution.

The chief press secretary to the INEC chairman, Kayode Idowu, said: “We have not received any official or unofficial communication to that effect. From the point of our operation, the commission has not seen any good basis to postpone the election.”

Kayode, however, pointed out that information available to the commission with regards to what transpired at the London meeting was contrary to what the NSA was quoted to have said.

He stated that the claims that 30 million uncollected PVCs were not true, noting that there has been accelerated distribution and collection of cards since the decentralisation of the process.

According to him, rough estimates indicate that the collection process has surpassed 70 percent since the decentralisation of the distribution of the cards at the ward level.

Kayode said: “Where are the 30 million cards that have not been collected? Statistics are cold; they are not flighty. By the commission’s rough estimation, even though we have not collected the raw data from the states, we have cases of over 26,000 PVCs collected in states in a space of three days, and this could be the trend across the country.

“I can assure you that the percentage is much higher than 70 percent.

What we do is that immediately the cards come in, we move them to the states. We just moved four million cards recently.”

He assured that before the end of the month most of the PVCs would have been distributed and collected.

Similarly, the commission has asked politicians, who are preparing to rig the election to bury the idea as the commission had device strategies that would not give room for such.

Speaking during a stakeholders’ meeting with political parties and their candidates in Enugu State, the commission’s Resident Electoral Commissioner, Prof Chukwuemeka Onukaogu said this year’s election would not be business as usual.

He expressed dismay that electoral irregularities had dealt a big blow to the nation’s electoral exercises in the past years, stressing that for the country to be able to enthrone good governance, it must be able to first address the electoral process.

“It is not going to be business as usual; that era is gone for good.
Anybody, who is planning to engage in any form of rigging is merely deluding himself as the strategies already device by the commission would checkmate such anti-democratic practices.

“If we must live like our counterparts in the developed nation’s, then good governance should be the norm and this can not be attained if we do not have a viable and credible electoral process that commands national and international acceptability,” he said.

He said the commission had acquired enough card readers that would serve all the electoral booths across the country, and therefore urged politicians to campaign vigorously to get the support of the people, as there would be no short-cut to getting victories at the election.

On the raging controversy over the poor distribution of the Permanent Voters’ Card (PVC), Onukaogu said the commission had taken steps to ensure that all electorates have their cards.

He said despite the initial challenges that trailed the distribution of the cards, the commission had recorded 77 per cent distribution, expressing hope that before the end of the month, all the PVCs would have been fully distributed.