• Stakeholders Ponder Commission’s Threats To Arrest Underage Voters • It’s Mere Threat, INEC Has No Manpower To Stop Offenders — TMG • Chriced Seeks More Collaboration With Security Agencies When in 2018, photos and videos of underage voters as young as eight went viral on social media during the Kano State local council elections, […]
• Stakeholders Ponder Commission’s Threats To Arrest Underage Voters • It’s Mere Threat, INEC Has No Manpower To Stop Offenders — TMG • Chriced Seeks More Collaboration With Security Agencies When in 2018, photos and videos of underage voters as young as eight went viral on social media during the Kano State local council elections,…• Stakeholders Ponder Commission’s Threats To Arrest Underage Voters• Chriced Seeks More Collaboration With Security...
The report of the fact-finding team set up by INEC dismissed the photos and video footage as products that emanated from Kenya. The Chairman of the committee, Engr. Abubakar Nahuce, who was also the INEC National Commissioner for Kano, Jigawa and Yobe, during the presentation of the report said: “All we have seen in the social media are pictures and videos that are not verifiable; some of them are not even from Nigeria, they are from Kenya elections, which people are attributing to Nigeria.
No doubt, electoral offences remain a major threat to credible, free and fair elections in Nigeria, as they often heighten political tension and trigger violence. It would be recalled that after the publication of the preliminary register of voters for the 2023 elections in November last year, claims of double registration and underage voters trailed the lists. The preliminary register, containing 93,522,272 registrants, has the name, picture, date of birth and Voter Identification Number of each registered voter.
“The essence of putting out this is for Nigerians to help the Commission further clean up the voter register. …We want people to check whether their personal particulars have been properly captured; whether there are still names of deceased persons on the register; whether there are obviously underage persons on the register so that we can correct them.
The 1999 Constitution and Electoral Act of 2022, provide that a person must be 18 years and above to be registered as a voter and be eligible to vote. Nigerians raised objections that photographs of some of the registrants do not match their age. Describing the warning from INEC as a welcome development, he said even if all those that might be arrested cannot be prosecuted, some should be used to serve as example for future crime enablers.
“However, you can use some people as example. In each state, for instance, INEC can choose a manageable number and prosecute them. So it is possible and I support the idea of getting those underage persons arrested. If their parents are found complicit, they can also be charged to court and punished if convicted.”
But chairman of Transition Monitoring Group , an election think-tank, Auwal Rafsanjani, described INEC’s threat to arrest underage voters as mere threat to put fears in the mind of anyone planning to perpetrate such crime.
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