136 groups seeking registration to join 68 existing political parties —INEC

Just months away to the 2019 general elections, 136 groups have applied to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) seeking to be registered as political parties.

This is despite the fact that the country currently has 68 registered political parties.

The development was revealed by the chairman of INEC, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, during the commission’s 2nd regular consultative quarterly meeting with political parties in Abuja on Wednesday.

He said, “As we approach the 2019 general elections, we need your support in many ways, especially voter education and sensitisation.

“With 68 political parties and 136 applications being processed, we need to raise the awareness of citizens on the manifestos, logos and acronyms of political parties.

“Similarly, we need to find different ways of managing the ballot papers for the general elections. As a proactive step, the commission has been working on a number of options regarding the design of the ballot paper and the management of the ballot box. We shall demonstrate a number of options to this meeting for consideration and suggestions.”

Yakubu at the meeting said that INEC is currently focusing more on Ekiti State’s July 14 governorship election, reassuring that the commission “shall remain focused on the goal of delivering free, fair and credible elections.”

On the allegation in certain quarters that INEC officials are involved in deliberately perverting the processes and procedures for partisan considerations, Yakubu reiterated that such was no longer possible in the present INEC.

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He said, “I wish to assure you that our electoral processes have gone beyond the capacity of our own officials to manipulate.

“The procedures are robust. The claim that the Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) are cloned and Smart Card Readers pre-loaded is simply ludicrous. The Card Readers are only configured to specific polling units 72 hours or less before an election, set to operate only on election day from 8am and is manually shut down for accreditation after the last person on the queue has voted or automatically by 8pm.”

The INEC chairman said that the consolidated figures of Continuous Voter Registration as at June 22, 2018 shows a PVC collection of 576,346, fresh registration of 9,922,619, those requesting for transfer 489,354 and request for replacement of PVCs 766,435.

 

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