A former Deputy Speaker of the Oyo State House of Assembly, Mr. Femi Emmanuel, says the large number of uncollected Permanent Voter Cards nationwide may have been abandoned by unscrupulous politicians who wanted to use them for rigging.

He said dishonest politicians had, in the past, encouraged their followers to do multiple registrations with the aim of using the cards for multiple voting and rigging.

Emmanuel, who is now a Senior Pastor of Living spring Chapel International, said, “There are many people whose PVCs have been ready but they have not gone to collect them. I will tell you why that is so.

“In politics, the way we have been playing it in Nigeria, it is political godfathers and political platforms that mobilise people for registration. Where I registered in the GRA, I know people who live around there but we saw miscreants coming for registration. We knew they didn’t live there because people who live there don’t look like them. They were mobilised to register. And that is what they do all over.

“In the previous elections where there was no biometric data, cards were collected by those who mobilised thugs to register. On the day of the election, they will give them to different people.

“What this means is the process of rigging elections begins at the point of registration. But now that there is biometric data, it is difficult for those who did multiple registrations to collect the cards. They therefore abandon them at Independent National Electoral Commission offices.”

On INEC tracing the defaulters and bringing them to book, Emmanuel said it would be difficult to trace the culprits, saying, “Even the addresses they would put down would be fictitious. These people, who I refer to as ghost voters, are lured with money because of the illiteracy and poverty in the land. Those cards are abandoned there forever because of the political antics and intrigues behind them.”