ACROSS the country, many citizens, who trooped to their wards to collect their Permanent Voters Cards, PVCs, yesterday, expressed fears that they may not be able to vote during next month’s presidential election and other polls.
A resident in Abuja said,”Getting our PVCs has become a tug of war. We are not sure that we will get the cards. The crowd is too much. INEC has been telling people to go and collect their PVCs without making it easy for people to do so.  I have been going to the Local Government for days without success”.

In Lagos, another resident put it this way: I registered at Ago, the collection centre was at Oshodi Local Government. How many people will go that far to collect their PVCs? But I went two times and couldn’t collect my PVC. The crowd was unbelievable and INEC officials were not organised. I have tried but INEC appears to be disfranchising people. I fear I’m one of them because I went to the ward at Isolo on Friday and still couldn’t collect after spending seven hours. I don’t think I’ll go back there.”

To quicken the process of collecting the cards, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, started distributing the cards at the Ward level, yesterday.  But it was still clumsy in many areas as the Ago resident pointed out. The ward-level exercise would only last between January 6 and 15, 2023, after which the exercise reverts to INEC local government offices till January 23. Going by our findings, many will not collect their PVS before the collection deadline.