The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has promised to give Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs) to all the registrants who participated in the last batch of Continuous Voters Registration (CVR), before December 2022.
Festus Okoye, INEC commissioner for Information and Voter Education stated on Arise Television on Monday that those who registered between the 15th of January 2022 and the 30th of June 2022, according to the chairman of INEC, Prof. Mahmud Yakubu will get their PCVs in October, and for.
“Those who registered between the 1st day of July 2022 and the 31st of July 2022, their PVCs will be ready for collection in November. When these PVCs are ready, for those who have email addresses, we will send a message to them to tell them. We will contact those who provided their phone numbers through a bulk Short Message Service (SMS).
“We are going to make announcements on radio and television. We are also going to realise with community leaders, traditional leaders, religious leaders, women-based organisations, opinion leaders and the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) to assist in mobilizing and sensitizing people, and to also make sure that people come to collect their PVCs,” Okoye said
He added, “We have designed protocols on how to make people collect their PVCs without them going through difficulties. We want the PVCs collection to be seamless and we have designed protocols. So many Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and the NBA have volunteered to assist the commission when it is time for PVC collection. We also contacted the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) to assist in the PVC collection. We are confident that all those who registered will collect their PVCs on or before December 2022 by the protocols that we have.”
Meanwhile, the electoral body has also given reasons why the CRV exercise cannot extend.
“We projected that we should give enough time for all eligible voters to get registered and that was why we spaced out the voters’ registration exercise over a period of thirteen months to enable all registers even for prospective voters to stray into our local government offices and get registered.
“Unfortunately, the surge started building up when it was just two weeks to the closure of the registration exercise and based on the deluge, we extended the voters registration exercise by another one month. It is not only that we also deployed additional staff to all registration areas. We also deployed additional machines to all the registration areas. We also increased the duration of the registration exercise from 9 am in the morning to 5 pm in the evening, and we included Saturdays and Sundays.
“Unfortunately, we had to bring the process to an end because our electoral process is constitutionally and legally circumscribed and we continue with this continuous voters’ registration exercise, it will do damage to our timelines and schedule of activities for the 2023 general elections,” he said.