Governor Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun State, yesterday, raised the alarm that no fewer than 600,000 fake Permanent Voter Cards, PVCs, had been uncovered in the state.
Amosun, who held a closed door meeting with officials of Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, in the state, including the Resident Electoral Commissioner, Timothy Ibitoye, later addressed newsmen, saying, over 600, 000 PVCs are currently lying fallow in the state.
He explained that 625,000 PVCs which carried the state code but the photographs on the cards did not match the faces of registered residents in those wards where the cards were displayed.
Amosun specifically mentioned Ward 11 Ita-Eko, where former President Olusegun Obasanjo and the governor belong, that a lot of PVCs brought there for distribution had the state code but no one could identify the images on the cards.
Suspecting foul play in the distribution of PVCs in the state, the governor expressed shock at the slow distribution of the cards in the state by INEC.
Amosun said that initially, about 1.8 million people registered during the exercise but INEC removed over 500,000 people for double registration and other reasons.
He noted that after the registration exercise was re-conducted, about 450,000 registered but Amosun noted that only 159,000 PVCs had been brought and distributed.
He said that currently only 40 per cent of the 1.8 million people who registered have got their PVCs in the state.
The governor alleged that some one in Abuja was behind the slow distribution of the cards.
“In the last election, we had about 1.8 million, they came back to say after post AVIS, removing what they call double registration and a lot of anomalies they said they took away about 500,000 and reduced Ogun State to about 1.3 million and we said ‘no problem, if you said there will be opportunities for people to re – register, which they did, when they did that, from their record, it was almost 450, 000 of the new registration and if you add that to the 1.3 million, it takes us back to about 1.8 or thereabout.
“But as we speak, the cards they brought originally, we have two or three issues now. The first one is that the 1.1 million in November, on my honour, about 600, 000 of those cards do not belong to Ogun State, and that is the problem.”
Vanguard
No comments:
Post a Comment