Hours to the presidential and National Assembly (NASS) elections, the Benue State government and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) are trading blame on the disenfranchisement of over 1.98 million Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the forthcoming elections.
This is even as the executive secretary State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) Dr Emmanuel Shior, said of the over two million IDPs in the state only a fraction of about 2,000 IDPs got their PVCs to vote, describing the act as violation of their human rights.
Shior, who disclosed this in Makurdi during the monthly distribution of relief materials to the IDPs lamented that thousands of the IDPs who registered, could not collect their permanent voters’ cards (PVCs), alleging deliberate plot by INEC to disenfranchise the displaced persons.
He informed that relief materials to be distributed include food and non-food items like mattresses, 10 trucks of yams, 10 trucks of rice, indomie noodles, condiments among many other items.
But in a swift reaction, the INEC public relations officer (PRO) Terkaa Andyar described the allegation as false, maintaining that such allegation is borne out of ignorance.
According to him, “Everybody is entitled to their opinions. We have records of IDPs. The phenomenon of IDPs is not in Benue alone. There is a national policy of IDPs voting and this will be adopted in Benue. So, Benue INEC will not do anything different or outside the policy. The fact that someone is displaced from his original abode makes him vulnerable.”
Speaking further, Andyar said, “The commission went round to capture all IDPs who had voter cards. The commission profiled them in such a way that the cards could be printed for them. Unfortunately, most of them are rural dwellers. The information we harvested was not good enough to print cards for them.
“So, the fault was not from the commission but from IDPs as they could not give sufficient information to enable us print cards for them.”
He claimed that the commission did not make any deliberate plan to disenfranchise the IDPs in the state even as he asked what it will benefit the commission after spending money and time to disenfranchise the IDPs?
The commission’s spokesperson who had earlier asked LEADERSHIP to call him back in an hour to get the total figure of IDPs that will vote during the election, said the head of statistics department was still trying to assess the figure of the IDPs that will vote in the forthcoming elections.
