Governor Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun State has disclosed that over 600,000 fake permanent voter cards, PVCs, have been uncovered in Ogun State.
Amosun, made this disclosure yesterday during a closed-door meeting with officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, in the state, which had in attendance among others Timothy Ibitoye, the state Resident Electoral Commissioner.
The State Resident Electoral Commissioner in a chat with journalists after the meeting affirmed that no fewer than 600,000 PVCs in the state have not been collected.
He further stated that the electoral body in some wards identified about 625,000 PVCs carrying the State Code but the photographs on the cards is not in consonance with the faces of the registered voters.
The number one citizen of the Sate mentioned Ward 11 Ita-Eko, where he and the former president Olusegun Obasanjo belongs, specifically stating that most of the PVCs brought for distribution had issues of identification as the cards have the State Code but the photograph on them bears no semblance with registered voters in the ward.
Amosu, who could not hide his disappointment at the slow pace at which the cards were being distributed said he suspects something funny in the distribution of PVCs in the State.
The Governor alleged about 1.8 million people initially registered but the electoral body in the State removed over 500,000 names for what it called double registration among other irregularities.
After the registration exercise was re-conducted, no fewer than 450,000 people were registered but only 159,000 PVCs are ready, Amosu said.
He continued that only 40 per cent of the 1.8 million registered voters in the State have received their PVCs, even as he alleged that the slow distribution of the cards is being facilitated by somebody in Abuja.
According to the Governor,“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,” he posited.
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