From Aloysius Attah, Onitsha
Leading South-East based civil rights group International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety) has given a shocking revelation that about 77.7 million Nigerians have been disenfranchised by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) from participating in the election process during the upcoming 2023 general election.
Board Chairman of Intersociety Emeka Umeagbalasi who disclosed this in a 27-page document released in Enugu that documented alleged illegalities and sundry scientific rigging plots ahead of the February 2023 presidential poll, disclosed that political actors have hatched 50 rigging plots for the election with 27 out of the 50 plots already executed successfully during the 2022 Continuous Voters Registration and 23 other plots currently ongoing.
The special report said the exposed rigging plots included different segregating and discriminating technicalities applied by INEC leading to the disenfranchisement of a whopping 77.7 million registered and unregistered voters, among them are the destroyed 18.2m new voters’ registrations arising from the 2022 CVR, over 20 million registered voters denied PVCs since 2019 after having been registered, 9.5 million newly registered voters captured during June 28th 2021-July 2022 CVR who are yet to be issued with PVCs and 30m citizens of voting age never registered by INEC as voters in Nigeria, especially during the 2021/2022 CVR exercise; totalling 77.7 million.
It said many, if not most of these tens of millions of Nigerian citizens of voting age, numbering 77.7 million are strongly believed, from investigations to have been massively disenfranchised by the Electoral Body on ethnic and religious grounds.
The group said its cardinal objective of releasing the Special Investigative Report was to ensure that Nigeria holds crisis or turbulence-free, participatory or inclusive and credible general elections with a particular focus on the February 25, 2023, presidential poll.
“Such Elections cannot credibly and popularly take place without massive enfranchisement through voters’ registration and issuance of Permanent Voters’ Cards to citizens of voting age without discrimination as to their religion, ethnicity and class.
“It must be noted here that Intersociety has nothing against Muslims in the North or South but seriously frowns at them being given undue advantage ahead of others-despite the heterogeneous ethno-religious composition of the country.
“Nigeria is also going to perform a major transfer of power to the next sets of leaders at national and sub-national levels on 29th May 2023 and as a result, requires popular and credible General Elections to heal its protracted wounds fuelled by deep-seated ethnic and religious divisions and protracted violence against persons and properties orchestrated by murderous state actors and non-state actors following long years of bad leaders and leaderships in power.
Umeagbalasi said the report is also backed up with a list of 55 references noting that Intersociety had since June 2021 carefully compiled or documented relevant INEC’s publications and pronouncements regarding the Commission’s preparations ahead of the 2023 general elections.
Intersociety said its investigative findings on arriving at the 77.7 million total number of disenfranchised citizens are strengthened by using the 2022 UN population estimates that identified about 55% or 120 million of Nigeria’s estimated 218.7m as of 20th Dec 2022 as citizens of voting age; out of which, INEC claimed that “it had registered a total of 93.5 million as voters ahead of the 2023 general elections.