The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, says it has commenced disciplinary action against 23 of its registration officers identified to have engaged in “fictitious” registration of voters during its Continuous Voter Registration exercise.
INEC Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, who disclosed this on Wednesday at the Third Quarterly Meeting with Political Parties in Abuja, stressed the commitment of the commission to continuously protect the integrity of the voters’ register as it is a national asset and pivotal to credible elections.
Yakubu said the culprits were easily traced as each registration machine is operated using an access code tied to a dedicated e-mail assigned to a staff; and that there is an audit trail that gives the total number of persons registered by each official involved in the registration exercise.
According to him, “the commission deployed thousands of diligent staff for the CVR exercise and the vast majority of them discharged their duties conscientiously. Unfortunately, a few of them did not. The fictitious registrations were carried out by some of our Registration Officers involved in the field exercise and could easily be traced. Each registration machine is operated using an access code tied to a dedicated e-mail assigned to a staff.”
The INEC boss disclosed that at the end of the CVR, 9,518,188 new voters were added to the existing register of 84,004,084 voters, adding that the preliminary register of voters in Nigeria now stands at 93,522,272.
The INEC chairman explained that the voter register is “preliminary because Section 19(1) and (2) of the Electoral Act 2022 requires the Commission to display the hard copies of the register of voters for each Registration Area (Ward) and Local Government Area (and simultaneously publish the entire register on the Commission’s website) for a period of two weeks for scrutiny, claims and objections by citizens not later than 90 days to a General Election.”
He said 12,298,944 Nigerians successfully completed the registration as new voters but after a rigorous cleaning-up of the data using the Automated Biometric Identification System, ABIS, a total of 2,780,756, representing 22.6 per cent were identified as ineligible registrants and invalidated from the record.
He noted that among those invalidated were double/multiple registrants, underaged persons and outrightly fake registrations that fail to meet INEC business rules.
Yakubu gave a demographic breakdown of the 7.2 million new voters as follow: “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. Hard copies giving the full details of the distribution of the new voters are included in your folders for this meeting. The soft copy has already been uploaded to the Commission’s website and social media platforms.
Speaking further on the 2023 election, he said “Working with political parties and other stakeholders, the Commission has so far successfully implemented nine of the 14 activities for the General Election.
“Only last week, we commenced the training of master trainers on election technology to ensure a seamless process. Beginning from tomorrow, we will commence the same training at zonal level and subsequently train all the ad hoc staff for the 176,846 polling units nationwide.
“On this note, let me once again reassure Nigerians that there is no going back on the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for voter accreditation. There is no going back on the transmission of results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) in real-time on Election Day.
There will be no Incident Form that enables ineligible persons to vote using other people’s Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs) during elections. We are committed to ensuring that the 2023 General Election is transparent and credible, reflecting the will of the Nigerian people,” he said.
On his part, the National Chairman of Interparty Advisory Committee, IPAC, Engr. Yabagi Sani, reiterated IPAC’s commitment to its longstanding cooperation and mutually beneficial relationship with INEC.
Sani reaffirmed “the confidence of IPAC in the leadership of INEC for its consistent demonstration of diligence, uncommon zeal and patriotism in the pursuit of the agency’s statutory mandate.”
According to him, INEC has been well on track, even as he condemned what he described “emerging antics and smear campaign by certain shadowy and cowardly figures who have embarked on the treacherous and unpatriotic conspiracy of reversing the outstanding landmarks, the INEC has recorded in recent years in the annals of the nation’s electoral history.”
“The real target of the machinations is the circumvention of the deployment of the Biomodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, the Electronic Transfer of results and the other security devices INEC has deftly and painstakingly put in place to enhance the integrity of the electoral process.
“The spurious allegations they are orchestrating especially in the online platforms are part of the strategies to prepare the grounds for their planned onslaught to achieve their nefarious goal within legal frameworks.