The Chief Press Secretary (CPS) to the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mr. Rotimi Oyekanmi, has said that the total number of uncollected Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) nationwide would be announced by the electoral empire after the deadline for collection of PVCs, just before the 2023 general election, The Guardian.
In a chat with newsmen, yesterday, he maintained that it is only when the INEC stops giving out PVCs that it can tell Nigerians the accurate number of uncollected PVCs across the country.
“At the moment, we have two sets of uncollected PVCs. The first is the 2019 set, that is, uncollected PVCs as at February 11, 2019. At that time, we had 84,004,084 registered voters. A total of 72,775,502 or 86.63 per cent collected their PVCs, while 11,228,582 did not.
“So, we had a carry-over of 11,228,582 uncollected PVCs from 2019. We now have the second set of voters that registered between June 2021 and July 2022. As of August 1, 2022, when the Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) was suspended, we had 12,298,944 completed registrations.
“But we had to clean up the voters’ register to delete those who registered twice while retaining their first registration; and those who were not supposed to be there by virtue of being foreigners or due to death. So, we produced a preliminary register of voters and displayed it for claims and objections all over the country for about two weeks.”
He added that all the PVCs for the 2021/2022 set had been printed and are now available for collection through state offices across the country. “We are happy that Nigerians are coming out to collect their PVCs and we will continue to improve our services where they encounter any challenge.
”Therefore, we cannot give an accurate number of uncollected PVCs nationwide now because people are still collecting them every day.
“If we give you a figure today, it will be different from tomorrow’s figure because some people would have collected theirs. Tomorrow’s figure will also be different from the figure for the day after tomorrow since more people would have collected.”
Meanwhile, a graphic on uncollected PVCs being circulated on social media which data was attributed to the INEC reveal that about 7.92 million PVCs have not been collected across the country with the South West having the largest chunk of the uncollected cards.
The data showed that the South West accounts for 43.9 per cent of the PVCs waiting to be collected at various INEC offices in the states. While the South West has the highest uncollected PVCs, the North East has the least uncollected voter cards.
Also, for the three political zones in the South, there are 5.61 million PVCs waiting to be collected at INEC offices, whereas the three geopolitical zones in the North have 2.31 million voter cards uncollected.
This implies that the three geopolitical zones in the South of the country account for 70.8 per cent of the uncollected PVCs.
A breakdown of the uncollected PVCs across geopolitical zones revealed that there are uncollected 3.48 million cards in the South West; with South South coming to a distant second with 1.28 million uncollected PVCs; North Central has 1.2 million uncollected voter cards; South East has 850,000 uncollected voter cards; North West has 740,000 PVCs yet to be collected while the North East with the least has 370,000 uncollected voter cards.
