Quick one on 13 October
On Freshly Pressed with Shopsy today, we talked, as usual, on a variety of topics. I found the following story quite interesting. From the stables of INEC about the fact that 95 million people will be registered voters next year. As usually happens in Nigeria, we have focused on the wrong metrics.
The INEC boss is keen to point out that 10 million new people have registered, up from 85 million in 2019. The 95 million figure, of course, presupposes that no one from 2019’s 85 million has died or japa-ed. One big issue is turnout. There has been a decline in voter turnout nationwide since 2003. In the 2011 presidential elections, voter turnout came in at 54 percent, down from 58 percent and 69 percent in 2007 and 2003, respectively. By 2015, it had fallen to just 44 percent. In the 2019 presidential elections, it was just 35 percent. At the time, much was said about the fact that Muhammadu Buhari was re-elected president by a paltry 18.5 percent of all registered voters. In effect, less than one in five registered voters backed Buhari in his re-election for a second term. When you consider that the number of registered voters as of last election (82.3 million) is less than half of the entire Nigerian population, it can be safely inferred that just over one in 20 people in our country voted for Buhari.
But all of this is beside the point. The real issue in the build-up to next year’s election is how many of our people have been able to collect their voter cards.
Back in June, SBM Intelligence surveyed PVC collection trends and polled 4000 people in eight states. As of then, 64% of newly eligible voters had started the CVR process, but of those people, only 41% had been able to collect their PVCs. A key factoid in this is that only 23% of our respondents managed to get their PVCs on the first attempt.
If we extrapolate this to the 10 million new voters that INEC says have registered, then it would mean that only 2,624,000 have collected their PVCs, and only 603,520 got their PVCs at the first attempt. One thing that we know for certain is that fewer people make repeat attempts to get their PVCs. INEC needs to give a bit more detail rather than these headline figures. The devil is, as always, in the detail.
Edit: someone asked me to expand on the suggestion I made on the show this morning.
So many people that I know have not been able to collect their PVCs. Such PVCs may be ready. Some are not. Many, we’ll never know. What I do know is that I know many people who registered last year, but are yet to get their PVCs. I also know many, including Tunde Leye, who has tried to move his PVC, for over a year now, and is yet to get the new PVC.
Meanwhile, there have been not a few complaints of people going to INEC offices, not finding their PVCs, but seeing many wasting away on the ground. What we don’t appear to know how to do in Nigeria is to take advantage of situations. What is so hard in cataloguing the PVCs that have arrived at various centres? Heck, we’ve had our students idle for eight months now. Why couldn’t we get some students to go to various INEC offices, pick up each PVC, and put in an envelope that has the name of the recipient, then arrange the whole thing in alphabetical order, so that people who come into said office would upon display of an ID simply pick up their PVC from where it is stored. Why do we make stuff that is so simple and so logical look so damned hard?