•Youths make 69.7% as commission registers 6.8 million new voters
The Independent National Electoral Commission says it has registered 6.8 million new voters between June 2021 when it started the continuous voter registration and now.
It noted, however, that about 4.8 million of the new registrants, representing 69.7 per cent, were youths, and that the majority of them were students, business persons and housewives.
Speaking on Thursday during the commission’s first Twitter Spaces, with the theme ‘Importance of youth participation in the electoral process’, the Deputy Director of ICT at INEC, Mrs Bimbo Oladunjoye, stated that it would seem many young people were ready to vote in the forthcoming elections.
The programme was attended by INEC National Commissioner and Chairman of its Information and Voter Education Committee, Mr Festus Okoye; the Chief Press Secretary to INEC Chairman, Mr Rotimi Oyekanmi; Executive Director of YIAGA Africa, Samson Itodo; the Programme Manager, Democracy and Rule of Law, European Union Delegation to Nigeria and ECOWAS, Mrs Laolu Olawumi, and several youths.
Oladunjoye noted that out of the 2.5 million new voters that had registered as of January 2022, the duplication process ran on the exercise showed that about 1.1 million were invalid.
She added, “Since that January, we have been registering people. As of 6pm (on Thursday), we have had about 19.7 million applications on the system, meaning people who visited our portal and office to either do a transfer, request for the reprint of the PVCs, done their full registration, reviewed their data or carried out an update on their record.
“Out of the 19.7 million applications, 6.8 million of such applications have been completed, out of which almost 4.8 million are youths. That represents about 69.7 per cent of the 6.8 million registrants. And it’s almost equal in terms of gender. We have 49.6 per cent females and 50.4 per cent males.
“In terms of occupation, we realised that about 2.3 million of the 4.8 million youths that registered are students. That’s about 50 per cent of the youths that registered during this particular registration. That is followed by business persons, which is about 14 per cent. Interestingly, we have housewives at 11 per cent, which means 11 per cent of youths who have newly registered are housewives.
“This implies that the youths are already on the move to ensure that they get to vote in the forthcoming elections. Also, Nigerians can do a lot of things on the CVR portal; you don’t need to go to INEC office to transfer your voting station, retake your picture, update your details, like change of name after marriage, change of address, lost PVCs, review or registration or to identify where INEC machines are. These can be done on the portal.”
This implies that as of Thursday, the number of registered voters has risen from 84,004,084 in 2019 to about 90.8 million.
Meanwhile, INEC said on Wednesday that 20 million permanent voter cards had yet to be collected.
Speaking on the need for people to register, collect their PVCs and vote, Itodo said he was fascinated by the percentage of youths that had registered, noting however that they need to collect their PVCs and vote.
He added, “The truth is that 2023 election is very important for a lot of reasons. While young people are registering to vote, not a lot of them come out to vote. Before 2019, there were about 51 per cent of young people on the voter register, but the sad part is that we have not made our number as young people count in elections. In the 2019 elections, only 28 per cent of young people showed up in the presidential election and 29 per cent in governorship elections.
“The 2023 elections present us an opportunity to participate in the process and get the leaders we want. Without sounding like a cliché, the 2023 election is about the battle for the soul of our country. A lot of young people are angry about the leadership at different levels. They want a new form of leadership and they want young people in office, so there is that determination.
“But the only way we can get the leadership we want as young people is by registering to vote and voting. Staying away won’t help us. I say with all sense of responsibility that votes now count in Nigeria. Gone are those when voters would be at the polling units and results would be declared in Abuja.
You cannot compromise the process like before. There are new technological innovations, like BVAS and IRev, that INEC has introduced that helps in protecting the sanctity and integrity of the votes,” he added.
He challenged the youths to rise up and “salvage the country from the hands of the oppressors and bad leaders that have held us hostage at every level”, adding that people should elect competent people, devoid of every form of ethnicity and religion. “If we fail to seize the opportunity that 2023 presents us, we will have ourselves to blame,” he added.
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