Gov. Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun State, has raised the alarm over about 600,000 Permanent Voter Cards, brought to the state by the Independent National Electoral Commission, which he said do not belong to people in the state.
The governor who raised the alarm on Wednesday after visiting the state Resident Electoral Commissioner, Timothy Ibitoye, in his office at Magbon, Abeokuta, also lamented that only 40 per cent of the registered voters in the state had collected their PVCs, stressing that this was far from being encouraging.
“As we speak today, the cards (PVCs) they brought originally, we have two or three issues now.
“The first one is that the 1.1 million cards they brought in November, on my honour, about 600,000 of those cards do no belong to Ogun State, and that is the problem.
“They don’t belong to Ogun State, you will see them quoting the polling units, the cards are not our own in Ogun State, which means, somebody somewhere doesn’t want us to vote in Ogun State.”
“In Ogun State, we’ve just managed to collect about 40 per cent; it was about 36 per cent before and as of today, only about 40 per cent has been distributed.
“I have been interfacing with INEC and I have had cause to write a letter to the Chairman of INEC on December 19, 2014, and I enumerated all that have been happening as Ogun State is concerned in the run off to this election.
“Unfortunately, I have been here since morning and they still have no good story to tell us. Let me tell you, somebody somewhere, I don’t know who, probably do not want us to vote in Ogun State, they want to make sure that at least, 40 per cent or more than that, do not vote,” he said.
Amosun said during the 2011 elections, the state had about 1.8 million registered voters and they later removed 500,000, alleging double registration through post AVIS.
“When they did that, they took away about 500, 000 and reduced Ogun State to about 1.3 million and we said ‘no problem, if you said there will be opportunities for people to re- register’, which they did.
“When they did that, from their record, it was almost 450, 000 of the new registration and if you add that to the 1.3 million, it takes us back to about 1.8m, 1.9 million or thereabout of registered voters.”
Still talking about the 600,000 strange PVCs, he said residents had gone to polling units in their areas, the names on them were not known to them.
“Our people have been going there everyday, we have demonstrated that, we have sent our people to all the polling units. They don’t even know those names, they don’t know who they are.
“If they said they’ve removed almost half a million. In my ward, Ward 11, in Abeokuta North, people are going there everyday and people, who were born there, don’t find their names; they just saw fictitious names. Those cards are not Ogun State cards.”