Go on, get your PVC

Beginning from today, 12th December, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) will be making Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) of registrants available at its 774 local government area offices for collection. By Section 47(1) of the Electoral (Amendment) Act 2022, a person who intends to vote in any Nigerian election “shall present himself with his voter’s card to a Presiding Officer for accreditation at the polling unit in the constituency in which his name is registered.” That is to say, you must get your PVC ready if your intend / desire to vote in the imminent 2023 general election comprising the national elections into the Presidency and National Assembly seats on 25th February, 2023, and state elections into the governorships and houses of assembly on 11th March, 2023.

The first of those elections is just 74 days away, and anyone yet to collect his/her PVC has no time to lose doing so. Many of the PVCs, according to INEC, are for persons who registered or transferred their data to new polling locations between January and July, this year. But there are also many meant for registrants since 2011 who haven’t gotten round to collecting their voter cards. The electoral body lately announced a schedule for PVC collection by registrants that will last six weeks – from 12th December, 2022 to 22nd January, 2023. Within that period, valid registrants can pick up their cards from 9a.m. to 3p.m. daily, inclusive of Saturdays and Sundays. In-between this schedule, the points of collection will be taken closer to the grassroots for greater ease of access by registrants. INEC spokesman and National Commissioner, Festus Okoye, said in a statement that collection points would be devolved to the 8,809 registration areas / wards nationwide from Friday 6th January to Sunday 15th January, 2023. “Those that are unable to collect their PVCs at the local government offices of the commission can do so at the registration areas,” he stated, adding: “After 15th January, 2023, the exercise will revert to the local government offices of the commission until 22nd January, 2023.”

It is INEC’s duty, of course, to smoothen the process of PVC collection and save prospective collectors harrowing experiences. And the commission apparently isn’t unaware of this responsibility, as it said its Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) in the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory as well as Electoral Officers (EOs) in the 774 local government area offices have been directed to parley with critical stakeholders in their respective jurisdiction to brief them on modalities for collecting the PVCs, and sensitise the public towards ensuring a seamless exercise. RECs and EOs, according to Okoye, are also under instruction to “set up help desks to assist registrants with complaints about their PVCs or with the PVC collection procedure for immediate redress.” The commission will be judged on how these directives add up to ensuring a stress-free process for PVC collectors.

With the measures as outlined, however, no one has an excuse for not picking up his/her voter card. INEC will be held to its promise of a smooth exercise and any dereliction should be readily flagged and brought to the commission’s attention through its multiple public interface platforms. But the primary responsibility is that of registrants to go get their PVCs, so to be eligible for participation in the 2023 poll. There is a Nigerian factor whereby people wait till the closing days of a scheduled exercise and register a huge turnout when the curtains are about being drawn, only to demand an extension of the deadline, which once granted – if granted – there would again be a slump in turnout until the new deadline dawns and another surge recurs, on which basis fresh deadline extension would be sought. By all means, this is a pattern that must be avoided regarding the PVC collection schedule. 

We do not need INEC to tell us that extension of the deadline might not be feasible for at least two reasons. One, the set dates for the 2023 elections aren’t going to change, and the electoral body would likely have to draw a firm line on PVC collection since most of the personnel involved will be the same to be deployed on election day-related operations few weeks down the line. The intervening weeks between PVC collection and the elections, predictably, would be for the commission to reverse personnel from PVC dispensing duties and debrief them before they are reassigned to core electoral operations. Secondly, the sheer logistics of taking PVCs out to collection points, like other logistical operations relating to elections, invariably come with huge cost implications. In other words, it takes a sizeable chunk of public funds committed to INEC to post personnel at collection points, more so when the exercise is devolved to the registration area level. Prolonging the exercise by extending deadlines would drain away more of those public funds – incidentally, avoidably so. You could bet it is mainly for reason of cost that INEC didn’t schedule collection all through at the registration area level, but rather took 10 days of the six-week duration to move closer just in case there are registrants who genuinely can’t go up to the local government level to pick their cards. Prospective voters owe it as a civic duty to make the most of the time frame scheduled for the exercise by the electoral body to go collect their cards.

“PVC collection: We do not need INEC to tell us that extension of the deadline might not be feasible.”

And why is it imperative to pick up your card from INEC anyway? Besides that it is the PVC that empowers anyone to vote in elections, there has always been a livid dread of the use uncollected cards could be put in perverting the process. As it were, neither political actors nor the electoral body itself is presumed above board in this regard by many members of the public. Only last week, INEC had to allay fears stoked by a viral video showing its personnel at FESTAC Town, Amuwo-Odofin council area office in Lagos extracting Voter Identification Numbers (VINs) on uncollected PVCs into their phones. The commission explained that contrary to insinuations that the harvesting of VINs was being done to undermine the 2023 poll, it was in line of an approved policy to take inventory of cards not collected towards sensitizing intended holders to come pick them. According to Okoye, the cards that the VINs had to be manually harvested were old ones that predated Guidelines for the Management and Collection of PVCs approved by the commission. “For the newer PVCs, that is those from the Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) that took place between January and July 2022, the VINs were harvested automatically and made available online. However, for the older uncollected PVCs that predate the new guidelines, their VINs must be harvested manually and painstakingly for upload to the PVC collection portal (www.voters.inecnigeria.org),” he said inter alia. Sources within the commission further explained that uncollected PVCs affected were those for registrations done between 2011 and 2021 December. And here’s the point: whereas eyebrows are raised that INEC had certain work to do with old stock of uncollected voter cards, such work would never have been warranted in the first place had designated holders picked up those cards since the time they got registered. If we do not want political actors to pervert elections with uncollected PVCs, designated holders must go pick up those cards.

Coup plot in Germany

No fewer than 23 persons were detained in a sweeping raid across Germany last week over a suspected plot by far-rightists to overthrow the state. Investigators said the far-right group, many of whom were members of the movement Reichsbuerger (Citizens of the Reich), planned to install aristocrat Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuss as leader of a new state. They also said they found evidence that some group members planned to storm the German parliament and seize lawmakers. Heinrich, 71, a descendant of the royal House of Reuss who worked as a real estate developer, was arrested in the financial capital, Frankfurt, on Wednesday. 

Modern Germany has been a democracy since 1949 following the collapse of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in World War II. It used to be West Germany until 1990 reunification with communist East Germany to become the Federal Republic of Germany. If Germany’s democracy that is more than 60 years old can be threatened, we must not be careless about diligently nurturing our nascent democracy in Nigeria.