“I witnessed it first-hand last week.
I went to the Aguata registration centre at a remote location at Ekwuluobia to register. I saw a lot of young people hanging around, I asked if they were not registering, and I was informed that INEC said they can’t register because they were 18 at the point of the last registration and they did not register. They can only register if they can prove that they weren’t around in the last registration exercise by providing a copy of their international passport. I found the demand strange.
I requested to see the Oga, I was told he went out. I waited! He came back after about an hour plus, and arrogantly addressed the youth to go home and get their passport copy if they want to register. I queried him, he insisted that this was order from above. Funny enough, I was following INEC twitter handle and pulled up the criteria for him to see (see attached), we both reviewed and he still insisted that they must produce their international passport even accused them of registering before. I argued that he can’t do that, it is left for the system to flag up double registration since 10 finger thumbprint is needed to register.
On my own registration as a first timer since the introduction of PVC. They insisted that I must provide my international passport. I offered a soft copy on my phone, it was rejected. I had to drive to Eke-Ekwulobia to send my passport to a business centre email address to print out for me. Once that is done, I went back and got registered. The whole process took me about 4hours.
The questions that I asked and no one bothered answering are as follows:
• How does int. passport (bio page) prove that I was not in Nigeria at the point of previous registrations?
• Those without int. passports are disfranchised, why?
• Are they demanding same in the northern part of Nigeria?
• Is this bottleneck not working against us?
My conclusion; we are still infants in this election game. Those up north are ahead of Ndigbo”.
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