Apparently dissatisfied with the collection rate of Permanent Voters Cards PVCs in the South East, Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC, Prof. Joash Amupitan SAN, has directed that the Commission’s Continuous Voter Registration CVR records in the zone be reviewed and every obstacle to the distribution of PVCs removed ahead of the 2027 General Election.

The Commission in its Daily Bulletin said Amupitan gave the directive on Tuesday in Enugu at the South-East Zonal Interactive Meeting with Staff and Readiness Assessment for the 2027 General Election.

Prof. Amupitan said the Commission’s “primary operational focus in the South-East is to review our local CVR records and dismantle every bottleneck affecting Permanent Voters Card PVC distribution.

“Our objective is uncompromising: no eligible citizen who registered should be disenfranchised by administrative or logistical friction,” he declared.

The INEC Chairman noted that the National Register of Voters now stands at over 103 million registered citizens.

He recalled that, in line with Section 10 of the Electoral Act 2026, the Commission conducted three structured phases of the CVR. Phase I, which ran from August 25, 2025 to December 10, 2025, registered 2,611,266 voters. Phase II, held between January 5, 2026 and April 17, 2026, registered 4,121,835 voters, while Phase III, conducted from May 11, 2026 to July 26, 2026, registered 3,867,997 voters.

According to him, the figures bring the total number of new registrants to 10,772,421 citizens, subject to final Automated Biometric Identification System ABIS deduplication verification at the National Headquarters.

Prof. Amupitan disclosed that in the third phase, the Commission introduced, for the first time in Nigeria, the Online Registration Portal, a technology designed “to eliminate barriers of distance and time.”

He added that the Commission had activated Printable PVC technology in line with Section 18(1) of the Electoral Act 2026, an innovation he said ensures that “waiting for months to pick up a voter’s card becomes a relic of the past.”

The Enugu engagement is the third in the Commission’s nationwide readiness assessment tour, following the South-West edition in Lagos on September 7, 2026 and the North-West edition in Kaduna on September 28, 2026.

The INEC Chairman said the visit was significant because no INEC Chairman had visited the Enugu office since 1999. He said that for over two decades, zonal preparations of such magnitude were coordinated through delegated structures or handled at the level of National Commissioners and headquarters directorates.

“Today, as we bring our nationwide tour to the South-East, we continue to break that tradition of remote governance,” he said.

Prof. Amupitan explained that he was in Enugu in person because “the true success of any election is not decided solely in the meeting rooms of our headquarters in Abuja. It is decided in the field.”

He said the outcome of elections is determined across the 95 Local Government Areas of the South-East, in the Registration Area Centres RACs and at the polling units.

He reminded the officials that the 2027 General Election would be “a simultaneous, national assignment across 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, involving over 103 million registered voters and 176,846 polling units. The statutory timeline is fixed, and the clock is ticking,” the INEC Chairman said.

Amupitan said to the voter in a rural ward or an urban centre, “INEC is not the Chairman in Abuja; INEC is you.”

He expressed confidence that the Commission was equipped to deliver a credible election. “The road to 2027 passes through our hands, and we shall not falter,” he said. (Vanguard)