By Tony Oraeki, Awka
Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, National Commissioner and Chairman Information and Voter Education Barr Festus Okoye, said that as at the 25th of July, 2022, a total of 276,767 registrants have completed their registrations in Anambra state.
Okoye disclosed this at the weekend during an interactive session with journalists at the Anambra state INEC office, while supervising the last lap of the Continuous Voters Registration, CVR, exercise.
He further explained that at the local/domestic level in Anambra, the Commission also has a figure for all registrants especially in relation to the four quarters of this registration process.
“For the fourth quarter of this particular registration exercise in Anambra, and the quarter for the 26th day of July, for fresh registrants, we recorded a total of 133, 009 fresh registrants. Those who carried out transfers stood at 3,601 and those who came for the update of their own personal details stood at 1,423.
“Those who came for replacement of PVCs stood at 11, 533 and the figure for persons with disability stood at 7. This is for the fourth quarter of this CVR exercise and the period ending on the 26th day of July 2022”.
Okoye noted that the registration process slowed down in some states in the Southeast on security considerations, but quickly added that INEC took steps to remedy this situation.
He said, “Our office in Anambra did a device mitigating measures to control the surge that started rising almost a month ago. They developed a model of isolating biometric measures by training some of our staff to assist those who are coming for registration.
“Those who are fresh registrants were isolated, those coming for transfer, update, replacement of damaged or lost PVCs were isolated. And then, we trained some of our staff to assist these people to do their update, do their transfer and also to carry out other services that do not require any biometric measure. And that is how we have been able to mitigate some of these issues”.
According to him, there are complaints relating to the performance of INEC staff and also some challenges experienced in the field, but the state office developed what they called a ‘complex desk’ through which people can file their complaints and also speak out on the challenges they encounter in terms of accessing our registration officers and the registration proper.
“Therefore, we have this complex log matrix and almost on daily bases, we look into this log matrix and we had over 50 complaints and we dealt with the complaints using our log matrix and complex desk”, he added.
