There Is A Reason For The Problems With The Distribution of PVCs - INEC

 

The seemingly poor handling of the permanent voter cards distribution in some parts of the country by the Independent National Electoral Commission has elicited reactions from various stakeholders and eligible voters. The stakeholders described the exercise as deliberately programmed to fail so as to deny millions of Nigerians the right to elect their leaders in the much awaited 2015 general elections.

 

In an interview with Punch, the Chief Press Secretary to Prof. Attahiru Jega, the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Mr. Kayode Idowu, debunks insinuations that the commission has hidden agenda about the distribution of Permanent Voter Cards exercise in Lagos and other states.

"Before we started the exercise, information was provided that, there would be no distribution of PVCs in nine local governments area in Lagos State. It happened in Rivers, it happened in Nasarawa. What is the issue? The simple fact is that the cards were not fully ready. And INEC does not make pretences about the realities. This INEC comes clean with information" He said.

 

"Actually, it is happening in every state, where you have people who were registered in 2011 but whose fingerprints were not captured. When we wanted to print the voter cards, we discovered that even though we wanted to capture 10 fingerprints, the fingerprints were not there. And because the PVC has an embedded chip that contains fingerprint, we discovered that it would not be useful to print their voter cards without those fingerprints being there. That is why we brought up the business rule to say that in printing voter cards, if we discovered that your data has less than four fingerprints – two on each hand – it will suffice. But if we have less than that; it means the card will not be readable with the card reader and there would be no point printing the cards."

 

In response to to the allegation by the APC that INEC deliberately caused the delay so that there would not be time for the commission to sort the problems before 2015, this was his response: "I don’t want to respond to individual parties because that would narrow the issue down to individuals or to particular entities. But from the explanation that I gave generally, I would have thought it would explain that. For instance, I did say that we were looking at high population states to be in the third phase and the reason is because we wanted more time for the cards to be printed. Doesn’t that make sense? So, it was to buy more time and to be able to get the things ready. While the commission was delivering the less populated states, the commission was having more time to print the ones for the high population states."