The All Progressives Congress, APC, has urged the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to avail Nigerians of the exact number of eligible voters for the 2023 general election.
Babatunde Fashola, the Director of, the Election Planning and Monitoring Directorate, APC Presidential Campaign Campaign, PCC, said this at a news conference on Tuesday in Abuja.
Mr. Fashola said that providing the figure would allow Nigerians to follow the process from the beginning to the end.
“We are prepared, we have trained our agents.
“We are in the home stretch of the election and we think it is important that INEC, the regulator, should let us know all the political parties on the ballot and how many people actually collected their Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs), ahead of the election.
“I think is very important for the credibility of the election results and the elections.
“We have been acquainted with how many people registered, but we don’t have the number of how many people collected PVCs and that is a very important,” he said.
He said it was necessary to have a breakdown of the numbers of PVCs collection per state, per Local Government Area, LGA, and up to polling unit levels.
This, he said, was a very important piece of information that would help INEC to reinforce the credibility of the exercise that it was undertaking.
“Other than that, we are busy doing what we do best, preparing and planning.
“Our candidate is also campaigning in Lagos at this moment, other teams are working on details of the last few hours of the election.
“We remain very optimistic that we will be victorious in this contest,” Mr Fashola said.
He added that the party had trained its agents, saying that the training started long before the new naira re-design and cashless policy became a problem.
He said the enthusiasm from the party’s agents and its supporters was very inspiring and comforting, adding that they had promised to work in any situation to deliver all the party’s candidates.
Mr Fashola emphasised said if INEC had acquainted the public on other issues and data, including dates of elections, it should as well provide the total number of those who collected PVCs and number of political parties on the ballot.
“Because, we are the Election Planning and Monitoring Directorate, we have all of the other data, but we don’t have that data.
“It is a crucially missing data in which to close our planning and projections, so, we asked that, that data be made available in the shortest possible time.
“Hopefully, not later than the close of business today or certainly not later than 24 hours from now,” Mr Fashola said.
