Two opposition political parties, the African Democratic Congress and the Labour Party have queried the authenticity of the claim by the Independent National Electoral Commission that the South-West accounted for the highest percentage of the pre-registration numbers in its ongoing Continuous Voter Registration exercise.
The electoral umpire, however, dismissed the claims as unfounded, noting it was based on a lack of historical understanding of past voter registration trends.
The ADC in a statement issued on Thursday by its Acting National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, had questioned the registration process in the South West, stressing that the figures from Osun State in particular contradict both historical trends and demographic realities.
According to INEC’s figures, Osun State recorded nearly 400,000 new registered voters, a claim faulted by the ADC which called for a forensic audit of the figures. “The African Democratic Congress has viewed the first set of data released by the Independent National Electoral Commission on new Continuous Voter registrations with great concern.
“According to INEC’s figures, Osun State alone recorded 393,269 pre-registrations in just one week. To put this in context, Osun added only 275,815 new voters between 2019 and 2023, a period of four years. In other words, Osun has now supposedly registered more people in seven days than it managed to do in an entire electoral cycle of four years.
“Even at its highest point of political mobilisation in 2022, Osun has never produced more than 823,124 votes cast in the Governorship Election. Now, by some miracle, nearly 20 percent of all eligible adults in the state have rushed to register. This is not just unusual, it is statistically implausible.
“The anomalies become even more glaring when viewed in the context of the overall registration report. Across the six geopolitical zones, the South West alone accounts for 848,359 pre-registrations, an astonishing 67 per cent of the national total. By contrast, the entire South East recorded just 1,998 pre-registrations.
“To further illustrate, three states Osun, Lagos, and Ogun make up 54.2 per cent of all pre-registrations in Nigeria, while five states combined Ebonyi, Imo, Enugu, Abia, and Adamawa barely recorded 4,153, or 0.2 per cent, while the entire North East recorded just 6.1 per cent,” the ADC statement read in part.
Speaking in a telephone interview with punch reporters, the Interim National Publicity Secretary of the Labour Party, Tony Akeni urged Nigerians to be vigilant, saying the claim by INEC should not be taken lightly.
He said, “We are tired of INEC’s shenanigans. Even their claims of having registered prison inmates is an open fraud. They are just giving us advance notice that the forthcoming elections would be as fraudulent or more fraudulent than the past. Nigerians should be vigilant as they go out to register so that we will not see names like Michael Jackson and Donald Trump in our voter register in 2027.”
But the All Progressives Grand Alliance dismissed ADC’s reaction to the South-West figures, noting that the David Mark-led party was simply being alarmist.
Speaking with our correspondent, the National Publicity Secretary of the party, Ejimofor Opara said the credibility of INEC is not in doubt.
He said, “Figures don’t lie. To what extent has the ADC gone to mobilise their members to register across the states of the federation? If the data is showing that there are more newly registered voters in the South-West than any other geo-political zone, the much we can say is that we don’t have the data with us.
Punch.
