PDP Governor says INEC is not ready for 2015 Elections

            

The Peoples Democratic Party Governors Forum held an interactive section with the Media and civil society Organisation on Tuesday in Lagos in which the Governors kicked against the card reader and blame INEC for it unpreparedness for the 2015 elections of March 28 and April 11

At the end of the interactive section tagged.‘Sustenance of Democratic Values and National Development,’ the Governors sent a letter to INEC chairman detailing their observation of the Card reader mock test held on Saturday.

Governors at the Lagos forum were Godswill Akpabio (Akwa Ibom); Liyel Imoke (Cross River); Seriake Dickson (Bayelsa); Babangida Aliyu (Niger); Sule Lamido (Jigawa); Bala Ngilari (Adamawa); Ayo Fayose (Ekiti) and Olusegun Mimiko (Ondo).
Others were Ibrahim Shema (Katsina); Jonah Jang (Plateau); Mukhtar Yero (Kaduna) and Ibrahim Danwambo (Gombe


The Chairman the Governor forum,Akpabio expresses his dissatisfaction with INEC preparedness.
he said:
 in our own opinion, INEC appears ill-prepared for the 2015 elections. For example, at the time the polls were shifted due to security concerns, over 23 million registered voters had yet to collect their PVCs and you know there are some countries with populations of about just three million.

“Twenty-three million would amount to disenfranchising more than five West African countries in their own elections.“It will be recalled that even the INEC chairman(Prof. Attahiru Jega) admitted on the floor of the Senate that over one million PVCs had yet to be printed in far away China.

“According to the INEC chairman, the postponement was a blessing in disguise. How then can Nigerians reconcile the purported readiness of INEC for the February 14 election with the testing of card readers more than a month after the postponement? More than three weeks after the elections have been shifted, they are then testing the card readers that would have been used. Given the failure rate of the card readers during the recent mock exercise, it is apparent that many Nigerians will be disenfranchised even when they are registered to vote.

“We re-assert that on no account should any registered voter be disenfranchised for non-possession of PVC even when the person has a TVC when it is not due to one’s own personal fault; even when the card reader has rejected or refused to recognise the thumbprint or the battery is dead and there is no electricity in that area to charge it.
We don’t want anyone disenfranchised and we are pleading also that elections should not be shifted again because the impression is that we were not ready for elections even though we know that we would have won the elections if they had been allowed to hold.”