Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has revealed that a total of 87,209,007 Nigerians out of 93.4 million registered citizens are eligible to vote, being the number of collected Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs).
This represents about 93.3 per cent of the total registered voters in the country with about 6.2 million registered voters failing to collect their PVCs.
INEC chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, who presented the figures at the daily briefing held at the national collation centre in Abuja, said about 13.6 million new PVCs were printed for those who registered newly or applied to transfer their PVCs or requested replacement.
Yakubu assured Nigerians that the Commission was adequately prepared for the election.
“We remain fully committed to a free, fair and credible process. I want to once again declare that our allegiance is only to Nigeria. Our commitment is to ensure that in this election, we put everything in place for free choice, fair contest and credible outcome,” he stated.
Yakubu also provided clarification on news making the rounds on social media about existence of preloaded Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), which was alleged to rig the elections.
The INEC chairman said he does not know about the existence of such a device. “I don’t know what that means. I’m not sure what that means. The BVAS can’t be operated before the election. It would only start working by 8:30a.m. on election day.”
This is as the Federal Government last night ordered the closure of Nigeria’s borders for the conduct of the elections. This was made known in a communiqué from the office of the Comptroller General (CG) of the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS), Isah Idris.
Idris stated that Nigeria’s land borders will be closed effective 00:00 hours (midnight) on Saturday to 00:00 (midnight) hours on Sunday.
