ADC Demands Probe Of New PVC Figures For Osun, Others

The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has raised the alarm over alleged inflation of the ongoing voter pre-registration for Osun and other states in the Southwest.

A statement on Thursday by the spokesman of the ADC, Bolaji Abdullahi, observed that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) recorded close to 400,000 new registrations in just one week for Osun State alone, a development the party said defied both historical patterns and demographic realities.

The party called on INEC to publish a full forensic audit of its first-week pre-registration data, with a state-by-state breakdown of both physical and online registrations.

The ADC charged INEC to also disclose the server logs, bandwidth distribution, and regional access reports for the registration portal during the period.

The coalition also called on other opposition political parties to set aside rivalry and jointly demand clarity from INEC on what it described as glaring anomalies.

“We urge election monitoring groups, fact-checking organisations, and legal advocacy bodies to independently interrogate these numbers and press for accountability.

“We also invite our partners in the international community—the United Nations, the African Union, ECOWAS, and Nigeria’s democratic allies—to take early interest in these developments, as the credibility of the 2027 elections begins with the integrity of this voter register,” it stated.

Stating that the credibility of the nation’s democracy cannot be left to chance, the ADC warned that silence in the face of the alleged anomalies would amount to complicity.

“The ADC believes Nigerians deserve an explanation, and we will continue to insist that INEC provide one.

“History has shown that when questions about the voter register are left unanswered, the consequences go beyond politics; they touch on national stability itself,” the party noted.

The party said the figures released by INEC for the Southwest states in its first-week report on new Permanent Voter Card (PVC) pre-registrations are “statistically implausible”.

The ADC warned that such suspicious figures, if left unchecked, could undermine confidence in Nigeria’s entire electoral process.

The party called on INEC to explain how one week’s registration in Osun State exceeded the total number of new voters recorded in the state over the last four years combined.

It further noted that the Southwest zone alone accounted for an extraordinary 72 per cent of all pre-registrations nationwide.

The ADC insisted that the first set of data released by INEC on new Permanent Voter Card (PVC) pre-registration was suspicious and quite concerning.

Continuing, the ADC said, “According to INEC’s figures, Osun State alone recorded 393,269 pre-registrations in just one week. To put this in context, Osun added only 275,815 new voters between 2019 and 2023, a period of four years.

“In other words, Osun has now supposedly registered more people in seven days than it managed to do in an entire electoral cycle of four years.

“Even at its highest point of political mobilisation in 2022, Osun has never produced more than 823,124 votes cast in the governorship election.

“Now, by some miracle, nearly 20 per cent of all eligible adults in the state have rushed to register. This is not just unusual; it is statistically implausible.

“The anomalies become even more glaring when viewed in the context of the overall registration report. Across the six geopolitical zones, the South West alone accounts for 848,359 pre-registrations, an astonishing 67 per cent of the national total.

“By contrast, the entire South East recorded just 1,998 pre-registrations. To further illustrate, three states—Osun, Lagos, and Ogun—make up 54.2 per cent of all pre-registrations in Nigeria, while five states combined—Ebonyi, Imo, Enugu, Abia, and Adamawa—barely recorded 4,153, or 0.2 per cent, while the entire North East recorded just 6.1 per cent.

“These fantastic figures suggest either another technical ‘glitch’ in INEC’s digital registration system or a more troubling possibility of deliberate manipulation of data to lay the ground for a more sinister agenda in the coming elections. In either case, INEC has some explanations to give.

“We must be clear: the voter register is the foundation upon which the entire electoral process rests. If the foundation is compromised, it brings the integrity of the elections into question.

“Nigerians still remember the bitter consequences of flawed voter rolls and ‘technical glitches’ in past elections. Our democracy cannot withstand another one. The time to act is now.”

ADC Demands Probe Of New PVC Figures For Osun, Others is first published on The Whistler Newspaper