Abuja Residents Storm INEC Office, Declare PVC ‘Matter Of Life And Death’

The office of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Wuse, Abuja, was on Monday besieged by a teeming number of registrants seeking to collect their Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs).

The PVC collection which started on Monday, December 12, 2022, and is scheduled to run through January 22, 2023, witnessed a large number of eligible voters standing under the sun and waiting in line for their voters’ cards.

Aliyu Bamidele, who said he arrived at the INEC office at 7 am, told THE WHISTLER that obtaining the PVC was of a matter of “life and death” to him.

“Collecting this PVC is a matter of life and death for me, I couldn’t vote in 2019 because I couldn’t complete my registration on time, but this time around I am ready to give all it takes, I will wait for as long as I have to,” he said.

Another registrant, who gave his name as Chukwuebuka condemned the process of the PVC collection.

He said, “The process is not properly organised, during registration they made us queue and it was really rowdy, not to get PVC again, you have to wait for hours under the sun, what stops INEC from producing the cards at the point of registration? Or why can’t they send the cards to our respective polling units, why must everybody come here, it’s not properly planned and the citizens are suffering it.”

The FCT Resident Electoral Commissioner, Yahaya Bello, told newsmen that the commission is working round the clock to ensure that the process of PVC collection is seamless and efficient.

“We have put measures in place to ensure people get their PVCs with ease, a lot of people here are supposed to go to their respective local governments because we are decentralizing the collection of the cards to manage the crowd. I don’t want people standing under the sun like this, we just started today, so the process is going to get better as we go forward.”