By Oluwaseye Ogunsanya
Claim
A twitter user @ImmanuelAliu made a comment accompanied with pictures of underaged children holding PVCs under a video shared by Channels Television. He claimed that over 4 million PVCs have been distributed in Kano adding that underaged children have their PVCs.
Full Text
A twitter user @ImmanuelAliu made a comment accompanied with pictures of underaged children holding PVCs under a video shared by Channels Television. He claimed that over 4 million PVCs have been distributed in Kano adding that underaged children have their PVCs.
The tweet has garnered 14 retweets and 11 likes as at the time of writing this report.
Have INEC distributed over 4 million PVCs to Kano voters and where did those pictures of underage voters emanate from?
Conclusion
The claim that Kano have over 4 million voters is true. According to the state by state breakdown of the total number of registered voters and collected PVCs for the 2019 general elections released by INEC, 4,696,747 registered voters in Kano state collected their PVCs.
While the pictures of the underaged voters was from 2018 during Kano local government election.
Verification
Checks by FactCheckElection using google reverse image shows that the pictures of underage voters was taken in 2018 during Kano state local government election.
INEC has since distanced itself from the pictures, it said the pictures do not relate to any election it conducted or had responsibility for.
“As far as we can ascertain, they (the pictures) relate to a local government election conducted at the weekend (in Kano)” the commission’s spokesperson, Oluwole Uzzi stated.
Meanwhile, further verification shows that as at 2019, 4,696,747 registered voters in Kano State collected their PVCs while 5,457,747 voters registered to vote.
Continuous Voters Registration (CVR) Exercise
INEC said it is targeting at least 20 million new voters for the 2023 general elections and has since commenced the continuous voters registration (CVR) exercise which would be suspended on June 30 2022.
The commission had earlier suspended the online voter pre-registration exercise late last month in order give time to those who registered online to complete their registration physically and also enable it to clean up the registration data, print the permanent voters’ cards (PVCs) and compile the register ahead of the 2023 general elections in February and March.
Clamour For INEC To Extend Voters Registration
As a result of the unprecedented surge in the number of citizens that wish to register as voters and the challenges they face across the country, there have been calls by many Nigerians and civil society organisations for INEC to extend the voters’ registration deadline.
The House of Representatives has joined this call by asking the commission to extend the deadline by 60 days and deploy additional staff and registration machines across the country.
Last Friday, chairman of INEC’s information and voter education committee, Festus Okoye, announced that in response to the development, 209 additional machines will be deployed across seven states to ease congestion at centres for voter registration.
He added that the Commission will monitor the situation over the next few days. Thereafter, it will meet to review the progress of the exercise.
In the same vein, the commission’s chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu has said an extension of the deadline for voter registration may be considered.
He made this known last Saturday at an event tagged ‘Youth Vote Count 2.0 Mega Concert’, organised by YIAGA Africa, a civil society organisation, in partnership with the European Union and INEC.
“We have heard your requests loud and clear. You will soon hear from us on extension of CVR registration,” Yakubu said.
“Please assure me that you will register, pick your PVCs and vote. I also assure you that your votes will count.”