The Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC] has announced that a total of 1.8 million Permanent Voters cards are yet to be collected by the voters.
Lagos State Resident Electoral Commissioner, Akin Orebiyi, announced the news yesterday while visiting Governor Babatunde Fashola to demonstrate how INEC card readers would be used during the elections, The Sun reports.
“As at yesterday (Thursday), the total number of cards collected in Lagos to date is three million six hundred and ninety three thousand out of 5.5 million cards that we collected so far from Abuja. At the moment, we are still expecting another 430,000 cards which should arrive by next week. But meanwhile, we still have in our custody 1.8 million cards yet to been collected.
This morning (Friday) we have again deployed our staff to all the 8,462 polling units across the State to make the collection much more accessible rather than stay at the local government offices where we have been for the past three weeks”, he stated.
He also denied reports that some non-indigenes of Lagos were denied their PVCs.
“Collection of cards was done practically by every Nigerian who registered in Lagos, we didn’t register people based on ethnicity and we are not also distributing card on the basis of ethnic groups.
If indeed there have been issues of delay in collection of cards in certain parts of the State where perhaps non-indigenes populate, it is not a deliberate act, the cards are coming and they belong to the remaining 430,000 cards yet to be received from Abuja.
But principally, our register has shown that Nigerians from all walks of life and different ethnic groups have been collecting their cards.
We have quite a number of INEC staff who are non-indigenes , out of the twenty electoral officers, five of them that’s a quarter, are non-indigenes. The Head of voter education is from the South-East, my deputy is from South-South, I am from South-West but I’m married to a south-easterner, so we should discourage such insinuations,” he said.
