Barely five weeks to the general elections in Nigeria, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says that about eight million eligible voters are yet to pick up their Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs).

An INEC National Commissioner, Dr. Mohammed Lecky who disclosed this while speaking with journalists on Saturday said the electoral body remained committed to preventing electoral fraud.

Lecky also confirmed that the Commission had no intention of re-introducing the controversial incidence forms during the 2019 elections.

His words: “In fact, the use of the incidence form has been completely abrogated. It is no longer part of INEC’s regulations and guidelines. So, that is the position. There is no re-introduction of the incidence form, contrary to what the media had reported recently.

“First and foremost, INEC is a very responsive agency and once people raised the objection and following the review of the 2015 general election, a number of observers, like the CSOs, NGOs and international organizations had made recommendations on how to improve and we have to respond to them.

“One of the things they recommended is that we have to do away with the incidence form because it could be susceptible to all manner of abuses and we don’t want to give chance to those abuses to either occur or give a perception to their occurrence.”

The INEC commissioner stated further that in the absence of the incidence form, the electoral body had put measures in place to ensure rigorous authentication of the would-be voter in case the card reader failed to work.

On the number of uncollected PVCs, Lecky added:  “There is no state in the country where we have achieved 100 per cent distribution of PVC. The distribution of PVC is the biggest headache for us.

“We need the media to help us encourage the people to come and collect their PVCs. People are not coming forward to pick their PVCs. We have about eight million PVCs yet to be collected by Nigerians.”