The Coalition of South East Youth Leaders (COSEYL) has made a request to the National Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Mahmood Yakubu, to increase the number of registration centres for permanent voters cards (PVC).
According to Goodluck Ibem, the President-General of the Coalition, who stated that he visited certain centres on Wednesday, it is imperative that each registration centre have at least one hundred computers available for use.
Ibem issued a statement in which it made a request to the electoral body, asking them to broaden the scope of the exercise to include all of the voting units in the South-East.
This would help alleviate some of the challenges that people who were eager to register were encountering.
Since the voters registration exercise commerced for the 2023 general elections, Local Government INEC offices have only been the only registration point for the exercise.
This has made it very difficult and a herculean task for so many Nigerians in the South East to register for their Permanent Voters Card, PVCs.
The statement reads in part as follows: "Since the voters registration exercise commerced for the 2023 general elections, Local Government INEC offices have only been the only registration point for the exercise.
"So many Nigerians coming out to the INEC offices are finding it tough due to the high number of people who come out on a daily basis to register. This is causing a significant amount of congestion in the offices."
Some individuals are required to pay a significant amount of money for transportation fee in order to reach the INEC office for more than a month in order to be unable to register for a PVC.
"At the time that we visited several of the centres, the INEC office had only two computers available for the registration process; however, one computer is only capable of registering sixty people every day, although there are over seven hundred people present at the centres for the registration.
"The INEC chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, needs to come down to South East to see for himself the suffering that people go through in order to register for their PVCs due to the insufficient number of computers and equipments for the registration exercise coupled with the long distance so many people have to trek or transport themselves in order to get to the INEC office where the registration exercise is been done,"