Less than two weeks to the commencement of the 2019 general elections, 222,247 registered voters have not collected their Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) in Niger State.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) state resident electoral commissioner (REC), Prof. Sam Egwu, disclose this yesterday at a press conference on the commission’s preparedness for the forth coming elections.
Amidst outcry of non-collection of the PVCs nationwide, Egwu said that that 2,167,788 eligible voters had collected their PVCs out of total registered voters of 2,390,035.
Egwu lamented that of the 22,839 voters that requested for transfer, only 28 percent of them have been collected by their owners even as he said “we are using this medium to appeal to the owners to come forward to collect their PVCs.”
While hinting that the commission had trained corps members as ad-hoc staff for the election, he said that, “we need no fewer than 33,000 workers at the polling unit level which is for NYSC members.”
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He, however, lamented that “there are only 8,000 youth corps members in the state, so we have to go for final year students in federal tertiary institutions after engaging youth corps members that served from 2017 and 2018.”
Egwu said that there was no provision for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs’) voting in Niger because there was no officially recognised IDPs camp in the state.
The REC revealed that 31 candidates are contesting for the 2019 governorship election in Niger while 37 others are vying for three senatorial seats in the state.
According to Egwu, “two female candidates will slot it out with 29 males for the governorship seat of the state. Also 37 candidates, of whom four are females, are contesting for the Senate while 117 males and nine females making a total of 126 candidates are contesting for the House of Representatives’ seats.”
He said that 361 candidates have also been cleared for the state House of Assembly elections, of which 28 are females.
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