Ahead of the forthcoming 2015 general elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, says it has distributed well over 80 per cent of the Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) to registered voters across the country.
This is also as the electoral body has promised to explain to Nigerians the computation error that caused discrepancies of about 83,645 voters in the total registered voters of 68,833,476 which it has maintained are the certified registered voters in its data bank.
National Commissioner in charge of Information and Voter Education and Chairman of Voter Education Publicity Committee, VEP, Dr. Chris Iyimoga told a world press conference, yesterday, in Abuja while presenting the commission’s readiness to test-run the card readers to douse the fear of skeptics on the ability of the device to function effectively.
According to him, the PVCs collection as at Tuesday, March 3 stands at 55,232, 875 representing 80.2 per cent PVCs of the total number. He, therefore, urged other voters yet to collect their PVCs to do so within the remaining few days before March 8.
Iyimoga further revealed that the commission had taken delivery of the remaining one million PVCs from the producers, adding that arrangements are being made to distribute them to their respective areas for easy collection by their owners.
He, however, said while the commission was working to conclude the distribution of the PVCs by March 8, it might also need to look at the possibility of a final date of the PVCs distribution owing to the latest delivery of the outstanding one million cards which the commission has just taken delivery of.
“Let me make this very clear and I want you to take me by my words, the commission has made the commitment that by the 8th of this month which is Sunday we are likely to say collections of PVCs should stop.
“The commission is also going to be in position to make a categorical statement about when this PVCs are to be distributed finally because we have told this nation that we still have about a million which we expect this week and in fact, I spoke with the director ICT and he said he has gotten in and we will see what time we will give for those who are yet to collect theirs to do so.”
On computation error
On the computation error, Iyimoga argued that arithmetical computation on the Microsoft Excel-sheet are ordinarily expected to meet precision but added that there may have been a mix-up somewhere which made the computation not have come out well.
“Well I do not know, I do not want to answer this but I know when people use Excel sheets, arithmetical computations should be exact, with this observation, the best I can do is to get in touch with the ICT so that they can give us an explanation for that.
” I won’t dare tell you a lie on what I do not understand. I want to believe that it is a computation that did not come out well. We will look at his please.”
If INEC is yet to receive the last batch of PVCs how come they were insisting that they were ready and even adamant in conducting elections three weeks ago?? Ogun state still has 500,000 pvcs undelivered, talk less of distributed. As at February 14, the Northwest had 13m pvc distributed whilst the South east only had 4m distributed. Lagos and the whole of the Southwest at that time only had 6m distributed. How come INEC was efficient in the north, but not so in the south? I'm sorry for this country. The Southwest appear intelligent, but cannot really think deeply.
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