This came after the commission had verified all complaints and confirmed that six cases of irregularities had been reported, with culprits having been arrested and ready for trail.
INEC further warned that any person who had registered and did not have his ten finger prints captured by the Direct Data Capturing, DDC, Machine, had done a futile exercise, stressing that such registration was invalid.
INEC added that the last batch of 26,000 DDC machines would be flown in today for onward distribution to polling stations.
Chairman of INEC, Professor Attahiru Jega, who disclosed this when he appeared before the House of Representatives Committee on Electoral Matters chaired by Hon. Musa Sarki Adar, PDP, Sokoto, however, said those who had one form of disability or the other regarding their fingers would be allowed special concessions.
He said: “Right now the major concern nationwide is whether we will be able to register everybody within the 15 days. We believe there is no cause for alarm as we will make appropriate reviews of this exercise and if it becomes clear that we have to take additional period to make sure that more people are captured, we will definitely do so, but only when its is absolutely necessary.
“Over eighty percent of the machines on the field have already been reached and they are being re-configured and that is why in the last two days many are saying there is a remarkable improvement in the registration. We have been able to reduce the average time of registration.”
On those that had been registered but did not get finger print of the ten fingers captured, he said that INEC had automatically invalidated their registration, but assured that they could still return and repeat the exercise.
His words: “We have devised guidelines now and have informed all our officials on the field. Whoever has not been registered correctly has to go back and re-register and all the ten fingers must be registered. It is unfortunate that they have done this and are causing additional inconveniences to the people. But what is worth doing is worth doing well.
“The reason for capturing ten fingers is to make it near impossible for double registration and as I have said, capturing ten fingers as we have planned it will ensure only the possibility of one duplication in five million voters. So we have to go back to that otherwise the moment we register people without ten finger prints, it creates additional problem of checking double registration.
“We have also found out that because people have discovered that there is no way they can do multiple registration on one machine, they now go to another polling unit to register. But we have mechanism in place to check double registration at the state level.
“In our earlier configuration, the average time of registration was about seven minutes but presently, the average time of registration is four minutes.”
On manipulation of the exercise, Jega said: “We are using this opportunity to also warn Nigerians because we have information from some states that some politicians are using vehicles to move people from place to place to do double registration.
“The security agencies are already helping us to apprehend these people and we will prosecute them because clearly, it is electoral offence that they have committed. A few of our officials are conniving with politicians. They are moving machines from one place to another.
But, luckily, they are very, very few. So far, out of the 115,500 machines that we have deployed, only six of these cases have been reported and they have been apprehended. And we assuring you that they are going to be prosecuted.”
Vanguard
Advertise on NigerianEye.com to reach thousands of our daily users
No comments
Post a Comment
Kindly drop a comment below.
(Comments are moderated. Clean comments will be approved immediately)
Advert Enquires - Reach out to us at NigerianEye@gmail.com