Poor voter card collection

The 2019 general elections are only 5 months away, but the omens are not good. Firstly, the election umpire, Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), does not, as yet, have its budget approved. Discussions are still at the committee level in the National Assembly. Even here, the budget suffered a major setback Monday when the joint committee on election matters forced the elecotoral body to cut the budget, down from N189 billion to N143 bn.
However, that setback pales in significance to another problem that potentially could undermine the polls’ credibility. Unfortunately, it is a matter that INEC cannot force. It is the very low level of the collection of the voter card by people who have registered to vote. Last week, the election body revealed that it had registered 13 million new voters in addition to the 68 million already on the register as of March 2015. This means that, barring deaths, some 91 million Nigerians should vote in 2019. But here is the bad news: only 17 million had collected the permanent voter card (PVC) as of July 2018.
The statistics contrast sharply against the 2015 figures. That year, an election year, INEC registered 68, 833, 476 people to vote and the number that collected the voter card before polling day was 56, 431, 255. That was 89 percent of the number on the register. Today, more than half-way in the lead-up to the 2019 vote, more than three-quarters of cards unclaimed. This, indeed, is worrisome.
Mr. Oluwole Osaze Uzi, INEC’s director of voter education, recently expressed the commission’s worry over the matter. He said, in some cases, it had tried to appeal to Nigerians to pick up their cards but some said outright that they were not keen to vote. “We do not distribute PVCs. They are collected. The onus is on those collecting. There are quite a few cases where the cards have not been printed but that is not the main issue. The issue is the collection. We have over (millions of) cards in our offices, uncollected.”
While we agree that INEC cannot deliver the cards to their owners at their doorsteps, at least, it can up its voter education and publicity campaign a notch. It is heartening to hear the commission is doing that and more. “We are simplifying the process, ensuring maximum publicity so that people will know the importance of collecting the PVC. Automatically, they are disenfranchising themselves when they do not pick up their cards.”
It is a big pity that political parties that have a greater stake in the elections are not doing much to sensitize their members to the importance of the PVC. Instead, they are contented to wait for the day of polling to buy votes for their candidates. We saw this happen in Anambra, Edo, and Ekiti States just last July. If they have so much money to spend, they should use it to improve the electoral process, not bastardize it through vote bribing. Let them use the money to mobilize voters to go collect their PVCs.
Mr. Uzi said something that cannot be ignored. He said some people, called upon to collect their cards, simply said they were “not interested”. We call this voter apathy. One and only one thing is responsible for it: growing voter disenchantment with governance in this country. Unless the quality of governance improves, getting people out to not only collect their PVCs but also vote will be like rolling a heavy truck uphill.