Comrade March Oyinki
The ongoing voters card collection exercise by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is an exercise in futility that is incapable of achieving any tangible results. The exercise, which started on the 12th of December 2022 and is scheduled to close on the 12th of January 2023, has experienced many hitches, indicative of the likelihood of the body not delivering on its promise to distribute millions of uncollected Personal Voters Cards (PVCs).
If the experiences of the recent visit by some members of the Movement For Change Worldwide (MFCW) to the INEC Office in the Eti Osa Local Government Council in Lekki is anything to go by, then the entire exercise is nothing short of a hoax and a poorly executed image laundering exercise by INEC that will end up disastrously, without been able to deliver up to 10 percent of the millions of voters cards already lying in its offices across the country..
The first sight to behold a visitor to the INEC office in Eti Osa, is the large crowd of people, numbering over five hundred, standing outside the peripheral of the local government council, waiting to collect their PVCs.
Frustrated members of the public, some of whom claimed they came from as far as Awoyaya, spending long hours in traffic and arriving at the council’s gate as early as 7:00am, and had to wait till 10:00am when the INEC office was opened. After every one hour of waiting under the scourging sun, an INEC official will come to the gate with just about five cards and the entire crowd will rush towards the INEC official in almost a stampede to listen if their names will be called.
At 4:00pm when work closes at the council, only about thirty names of available PVCs would be announced and of these number, less than half of the people who were able to wait, collected their cards. This is a typical scenario that plays out every day. A middle-aged man, who was unable to collect his card, complained bitterly, that that was his tenth visit to the INEC office, and yet again his card was not produced.
The exercise, beyond causing frustration to the public, takes a large toll on their finances travelling to and from to the INEC Office for several days without been able to collect their PVCs. At the current average PVC collection rate of about fifteen persons each day in Eti Osa, at the end of the month-long exercise, only about four hundred and fifty PVCs would have been issued, out of the hundreds of thousands of cards waiting to be collected in the Eti Osa office alone.
This same experience is replicated in most INEC offices in Lagos State visited by members of our support group. This exercise is bound to fail the way it is currently been handled and millions of legible voters will be disenfranchised.
We at Movement For Change Worldwide, call on the presidency, the national assembly and all other stakeholders to exert pressure on the INEC Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, to look into ways of enhancing service delivery by its personnel and speed up the rate of PVC collection before the exercise closes on the 12th of January 2023; failing which, it will spell disaster for the entire electoral process and render meaningless all the purported successes so far recorded by the Buhari administration.
Comrd. March Oyinki is the President, Movement For Change Worldwide (MFCW).
