Caritas Nigeria Expresses Concern Over Disenfranchisement Of Voters

Catholic Caritas Foundation of Nigeria has expressed concern over alleged disenfranchising of voters because of the late arrival of both sensitive and non-sensitive election material in some polling units across the county and the delays recorded as INEC ad-hoc and regular staff were not present at their assigned polling units at the scheduled time of 8.30 am.

Speaking during the 2023 General Elections Situation Room Preliminary Report in Abuja, the chief executive officer of Caritas Nigeria, Rev Fr Uchechukwu Obodoechina lamented the arrival of materials and INEC officials across the country.

He said that remarkably, logistics issues around the inability to duly sort and deploy materials from the INEC national office, especially from the ward collation centres in the various local government areas as expected were spotted.

“There are reports signalling sabotage as some state officials made the arrival of materials difficult. For instance, in Kogi State (Northcentral), the roads leading to some opposition strongholds in the state were cut off by the state government alleging that it would help prevent threats to security in the areas.

“In Enugu State (Southeast), it was alleged that some corps members already trained as ad-hoc officials declined to participate in the process due to threats of attacks and violence at the polling units.

“In fact, at Recreation Club opposite stadium (PU Code: 14/04/13/016, Ogui Township Ward/RA) Enugu, and in so many other areas, this move affected the turnout of officials as the PUs were only mounted and set up by 12:42pm.

“This made many eligible voters vacate their PUs without voting. In Abia North, Abia State, no single INEC official had arrived in almost all the PUs as of 12:05 pm. This is also the same for Nnewi, Anambra State, and in most parts of Warri, Delta State,” he said.

He said that the same situation was noticed in Okota, Okpebi, and in Lagos Island (Southwest) where many of the PUs had no INEC officials in place to attend to the teeming electorate just as reports from other parts of the Southwest reflected very gloomy turnouts of ad-hoc staff as there were long queues for accreditation and verifications of voters.

“In most of the polling units where the arrival of materials and ad-hoc staff were on time, the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System has worked fairly with minor hitches recorded so far. Voters whose fingerprints were not duly captured were authenticated with the facial recognition feature of the BVAS.

“However, there is an urgent need to deploy more BVAS machines in some PUs where the queued voters are more than 1,000 persons waiting to be accredited.

“For example, in PU 022 Durumi 2 Primary School (Abuja), only one BVAS machine was deployed to more than 3,000 electorate who had been online waiting for accreditation since 7am.

“In PU 11, Oku/Borum/Njua Ward, Boki LGA of Cross River State, voter accreditation was disrupted by some thugs who forcefully snatched the BVAS machine from the presiding officer. According to some of our observers in the PU, this had happened because of the absence of Police and other security personnel in the area,” he said.

Obodoechina further said that there were many odious and irregular happenings across the polling units in Nigeria, with reports of vote-buying, inducements and threats amounting to violence.