· Says attacks on facilities won’t stop elections
· Commission joined in 791 court cases
· To test run BVAS with mock accreditation exercise
The chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, has declared that the 2023 general election belongs to the Nigerian youths who made the highest number of registered voters in the over 93million list released by the commission.
INEC had at a meeting with leaders of the 18 registered political parties presented them with a voter register of 93.4million with the young people dominating with over 39 percent.
Professor Yakubu, who made the declaration while speaking at the Chatham House in the United Kingdom on Tuesday, said records have shown that youths will dominate in the election
Giving a breakdown of voter registration and collection of Permanent Voter Cards in Nigeria, the INEC boss expressed his satisfaction with the turn-out of registered voters to collect their PVCs, adding that over 600,000 eligible voters collected their PVCs in Lagos alone within the last one month.
The INEC boss stated that there are currently 93.4 million registered voters in Nigeria out of which 37 million, that is 39 per cent, are young people between the ages of 18 and 34.
“And then they’re closely followed by 33.4 million or 35.3 per cent middle-age voters between the ages of 35 and 49.
“Put together, these two categories constitute 75.39 per cent of registered voters in Nigeria. So, actually the 2023 election is the election of the young people, because they have the numbers. Even the majority of the PVCs collected are collected by young people.
“So, out of the 93.4 million, 70.4 million registered voters are between the ages of 18 and 49,” Yakubu disclosed.
He, however, noted that the collection of the PVCs would end on January 29, adding that “we have to end it because, before the election, we will publish number of PVCs collected on polling unit by polling unit basis nationwide.”
The INEC chairman, who maintained that the 2023 election would be held as earlier scheduled, noted that the commission would not be deterred by the series of attack on its facilities across the nation, even as he decried the increasing spate of attacks on INEC’s facilities in form of arson but reassured his audience that the commission would go ahead with the elections as scheduled.
While regretting that the commission has suffered over 50 attacks targeted at its facilities in different locations in the country within the last four years, he, however, noted that INEC, in collaboration with security agencies, had increased security presence in some of the attack-prone locations.
“In four years, 50 facilities (have been) attacked in various parts of the country. The implications of the attacks are that we have to rebuild facilities and replace materials. The commission and security agencies have increased their presence in some of these locations.
“The last attack happened on Sunday last week but because of the cooperation between the military and the electoral commission, we were able to respond and the damage was limited to just a section of the building in a local government office.
“But in spite of these attacks, we will rebuild facilities and replace damaged and lost items, the elections will hold,” Yakubu assured.
Yakubu also lamented that the commission is currently battling with about 791 court cases which it is joined with from the political parties and their candidates.
“While the Commission has the core responsibility to conduct free, fair and credible elections based on the law, the Judiciary is responsible for the interpretation of the law and adjudication of electoral disputes.
“In the discharge of our responsibilities, few public institutions in Nigeria are subjected to more litigations than INEC. In the 2019 general election, the Commission was involved in 1,689 cases, made up of 852 pre-election, 807 post-election and 30 electoral offences cases. The Commission is committed to the rule of law without which democracy cannot thrive.
“Towards the 2023 general election, the Commission has been joined in 791 Court cases as of Friday 6th January 2023, involving intra-party elections and nomination of candidates by political parties. These are not cases involving elections conducted by the Commission or litigations initiated by it, but purely intra-party matters involving candidates and their political parties mainly due to the absence of internal democracy within parties. In fact, the Commission is only a nominal party in these cases but nevertheless has to be represented by lawyers in court proceedings.
“The Commission will continue to obey clear orders of Courts because of the plethora of conflicting judgements from Courts of coordinate jurisdiction on the same subject matter, particularly those involving the leadership of political parties or the nomination of candidates for elections,” said Yakubu.
Meanwhile, Mahmood Yakubu also disclosed that INEC will conduct mock accreditation nationwide ahead of the 2023 general elections to test the workability of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS).
He said the mock accreditation would be conducted across selected polling units in the country before the main elections begin in February.
He further stated that every BVAS machine deployed across the 774 local government had already been tested, adding that the functionality of the machines was impressive.
Yakubu also stated that back up machines have been readily provided in case of system glitches, adding that with all preparations on ground, the commission is really “comfortable and happy.”
He said, “We have the machines for the 2023 elections but we didn’t want to take chances. Each and every machine has been tested and confirmed functional. For the last two weeks our officials were in the 36 states of the federation testing these machines, and the functionality is simply encouraging.
“The second thing we’re going to do, and pretty soon, is to conduct mock accreditation exercise nationwide ahead of the elections. We won’t wait until the main elections come, we will test the integrity of these machines with real-life voters in selected polling units across the country.
“We did so in Ekiti and Osun, it was fantastic and we’re going to do so nationwide. Increasingly our people are becoming more excited about the deployment of this technology and we’re really happy.
“Also in terms of the numbers of these BVAS machines, we always make provision in case of malfunction or glitches. There is always a back up. We have IReV technical support that will fix the machines in the unlikely event of any glitches.
“However, where it fails to function completely in a polling unit, from previous experience there were isolated polling units, the law has a remedy that the commission should re-mobilise and re-conduct elections in the affected polling units within 24 hours, so we are really, really comfortable where we are.”