THE Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Mahmood Yakubu, said, Friday, that the 2023 general election will be the best ever conducted in Nigeria.
Yakubu gave the assurance when he engaged members of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE) at their forum in Lagos, stressing that: “Apart from being free, fair, transparent and credible, next year’s election will have an additional feature, it will be verifiable.”
The INEC Chair dismissed the claim by the Coalition of United Political Parties (CUPP), which alleged through its spokesman, Ikenga Ugochinyere, of the existence of fictitious names in the INEC voter register.
Ugochinyere had displayed extracts from the national voters register which it claimed were part of at least ten million fake registrations done by one of the political parties.
“The names were sourced from both within and outside Nigeria including some African countries such as Ghana, Cameroon, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Togo, Guinea, Gambia and countries outside Africa including Jamaica, Brazil and New Zealand,” he claimed as he displayed a purported register of voters at a press conference.
But Prof. Yakubu dismissed the claim as total falsehood, wondering where they got the so-called register of voters when INEC is still cleaning up the register and therefore does not have any valid voter register at the moment.
The INEC chairman confirmed that no fewer than 97 million voters had been captured in the INEC database, stressing that this number is huge compared to the volume of voter registers in other countries in the ECOWAS sub-region.
He described the Nigerian election as huge in comparison to elections in other parts of Africa. He said the cumulative voter register of the other 14 countries in West Africa stands at about 70 million, far short of the number in Nigeria.
