On Monday, the Independent National Electoral Commission disclosed that it delayed printing Permanent Voters’ Cards (PVC) for new registrants due to its robust cleaning up of the voters’ register.

INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, explained that this is to ensure that the commission adds genuine registrants to the voters’ register.

“The reason why we have not made the PVCs available is because of the robust system of cleaning up the registration to ensure that only genuine registrants are added to the voters register using the Automatic Bimodal Identification System (ABIS) for fingerprint and facial clean up,” he said.

Mr Yakubu, in his keynote address at the opening ceremony of the five-day induction retreat for INEC’s national commissioners in Lagos, said the response of citizens to the ongoing Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) was encouraging.

The chairman said that INEC had completed the ABIS for the first and second quarter of the CVR, adding that the commission would meet next week and precise dates and locations for the collection of PVCs would be announced.

On the importance of the retreat, he said that the burden to conduct free, fair, credible, acceptable and inclusive elections was upon the commission, hence the need for each commissioner to be ethical and knowledgeable.

Mr Yakubu reassured Nigerians of INEC’s commitment to credible polls in 2023, saying that the commission had concluded work on the Strategic Plan 2022-2026 and Election Project Plan for the 2023 general elections.

He stated that INEC would soon finalise work on the regulations and guidelines for elections considering the provisions of the Electoral Act 2022.

“The three documents will be published and presented to the public next in April.

“May I also seize this opportunity to reassure Nigerians that we have identified the challenges associated with the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) during voter accreditation,” Mr Yakubu said.

(NAN)