CVR: Poor Internet Service Mars Exercise In Kwara

The in-person continuous voters registration (CVR) exercise kicked off on Monday at designated centres across Kwara State.

Though there was an impressive turnout of the eligible residents, the exercise was marred by poor internet service in some registration centres visited by LEADERSHIP.

At the Ilorin West local government area office of the Independent National Electoral Commissioner (INEC) at about 12:40pm, people were seen at the gate of the office waiting to be attended to.

When asked why they were standing at the gate, one of them said, “we were asked to come back on Wednesday.”

Further inquiry made by our reporter confirmed that the exercise kicked off slowly due to bad Internet issue.

Also, at the commission’s headquarters in Ilorin, prospective voters were seen being attended to by the commission’s staff as they were being allowed into the premises in batches of five.

The exercise took place simultaneously with a stakeholders meeting at the INEC headquarters in Ilorin, with representatives of political parties, civil society organisations, media and security agencies in attendance.

The resident electoral commissioner (REC) in the state, Dr. Hale Longpet, warned against underage registration, saying that the commission has put in place mechanism to detect such.

On the issue of internet network challenges, the head of information technology at INEC office in Ilorin, Engr. Yunusa Musa, confirmed that the commission had received a lot of complaints of hiccups occasioned by network glitches.

He, however, gave the assurance that the excersie will improve as soon as the service providers rectify the situation.

“INEC don’t have its own network, we rely on our service providers for network,” he stated.