108,000 Kogi voters won’t participate in November 11 election – REC

Atleast 108,000 registered voters will not vote during the November 11 governorship election in Kogi State.

This was disclosed by the State Resident Electoral Commissioner for the Independent National Electoral Commission, Gabriel Longpet.

According to The PUNCH,  the Kogi REC further revealed that as at the close of the collection date on October 9, 2023 only 20,000 PVCs had been collected out of the outstanding 128,000 uncollected before the general election of February 2023.

The figure represents the number of registered voters who did not show up during the four-week window INEC opened for the collection of Permanent Voter Cards during the last collection exercise which lasted from the September 10, to October 9, 2023.

Longpet disclosed, “The last day was 9th October for collection of PVCs, and we identified the number yet to be collected to be 128,000 uncollected PVCs in Kogi State. So, the Commission thought it wise to give more people the opportunity to come forward and collect theirs, since the majority of those affected were those who have requested for transfer and those who have defaced their cards.

“We have since gone through, and I am sad to say that within the period of four weeks, we are not able to distribute to people the number of PVCs we estimated because people didn’t come to collect their cards. Actually, just about 20,000 out of the 128,000 were collected during the period of the four weeks,” he noted.

It would be recalled that Kogi is one of the states whose Governoship election is conducted off INEC’s regular election season.

 The state does not conduct its elections at the same time with the general election due to an earlier political crisis which led to court injunctions that ensured that the then Governor, Alhaji Ibrahim Idris spent extra nine months in office even after the expiration of his two-term of eight years in 2011.