The PDP Delta State Chapter said its attention has been drawn to an article titled: “2023: DELTA APC CAMPAIGN ORG ACCUSES STATE GOVT OF COLLECTING PVC TO RIG ELECTION”, signed by Ima Niboro, Director, Communications and Media Strategy, Delta APC Gubernatorial Campaign Organisation, in which the Delta APC alleged the State Government is planning to compromise the 2023 elections in the State by illegally obtaining Permanent Voters Cards (PVC), from youths for a rural skills acquisition programme.
According to a press release on Saturday, 3rd September 2022 signed by the Delta State PDP State Publicity Secretary, Dr Ifeanyi M. Osuoza, he said that the party is constrained to deploy some very strong words to respond to this post and apologize to Deltans that in this day and age when technology has become the mainstay of our election, gothic and primordial creatures like Ima Niboro, who have completely lost touch with modern realities, will still display the idiocy and ignorance of raking up old fashioned excuses to justify the pecuniary subsidy of his verbose office.
The statement reads, “Let us, for the benefit of educating and informing him and his hapless co-travellers in the APC, that since the last time they interacted with the civilized Community, the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC, in the quest to improve the integrity of elections in Nigeria, has introduced what it called the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS).
“Ima Niboro says in his childish write-up that: “There is no correlation between an applicant seeking skill acquisition and his PVC, as this only suggests that the PDP government is hellbent on rigging the forthcoming elections in the State”, and though he fails typically to explain how this will eventually translate into rigging the 2023 election, it is important however to school him properly on the new technology for the conduct of elections, which even his boss, the Deputy Senate President, was at the forefront of its adoption.
“Upton Beal Sinclair, the American writer, and political activist note succinctly, that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” and the great Albert Einstein would further add that: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”. This is exactly the case with Ima Niboro.
“Let us educate Ima Niboro further, with particular emphasis on his bone of contention which is the Permanent Voters Card, PVC, and how it is configured.
“Discerning Nigerians who have followed the conduct of elections, especially since 2015, will confirm that in line with improvements in election conduct in the country, innovations in the Anti-Electoral Fraud Procedures (AEFP), compelled the need to embrace modern voting procedures and some of the technologies the INEC introduced in the past included Permanent Voter Card (PVC), which contains voters’ biometric information in an embedded microchip. It replaced the Temporary Voter Card that was used in the 2011 general election. It is also on record that the Commission deployed electronic card readers with fingerprint scanners for the first time in the 2015 elections.
“The card reader displayed the picture of the voter so that poll workers can visually establish the identity of the voter against the card, and allows for scanning of fingerprints to check voters’ fingerprints against the biometric information contained in the PVC.
“Then came the Z-Pad, which the INEC used to conduct a few offseason elections and as of today, INEC has raised the bar higher by introducing what is referred to as the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS).
“So, what is BVAS? How does it work? How is BVAS remarkably different from Smart Card readers?
“Quoting INEC, the BVAS captures three stages of the voting process: it acts as the INEC Voter Enrolment Device (IVED) during voter registration, it performs the voter accreditation on an election day, and also serves as INEC Results Viewing Device (IReV Device) to be used for election results upload on an election day. Incorporated into the INEC Voter Enrollment Device, the BVAS is said to combine fingerprint and facial authentication to ensure the true identity of a prospective voter.
“Therefore, BVAS performs the functions of both the Smart Card Reader and Z-Pad, as it is designed to ensure fingerprint authentication during the accreditation of voters and eliminate any need for the filing of incident forms.
“In other words, the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) will ensure efficient human recognition through a biometric verification mechanism, using fingerprint and facial recognition of voters, which are all embedded in the microchip built into the PVC.
“We have gone to great lengths to break down the way and manner the new technology that will be deployed for the 2023 election will operate. Against this backdrop, therefore, how possible will it be for anybody including the APC, to even contemplate, not talking of rigging the election, as Ima Niboro has wildly alleged?
“It rankles the sensibilities of intelligent, logical Deltans that Ima Niboro, with all his exposure and experience, as former Presidential spokesperson and dismissed Director General of the News Agency of Nigeria, will descend so low as to allege such a crude, illiterate and loquacious accusation and we challenge him to please do us Deltans and Nigerians alike, a big favour, by educating us on exactly how the collection of PVC will aid and facilitate the rigging of the 2023 election. We wait to hear and we are quite sure that even he will be ashamed, of his foolish explanations, if he attempts it.
“As for his allusion that: “Justification that the move is meant to collect the details of applicants falls flat on its face as there are other documents like National Identity card, Drivers Licence, International Passport that could equally serve the same purpose,” we are at a loss to fathom how a man who addresses himself as Director, Communications and Media Strategy, Delta APC Gubernatorial Campaign Organisation, is totally and completely ignorant of the collective national importance, which has been given to the PVC, especially among the youth population, in recent times.
“It is not surprising that the likes of Ima Niboro, who are completely out of touch with the realities of the day, have not considered the fact that quite a sizable number of youths, particularly in the rural areas, may not need a driver’s licence or an international passport, for obvious reasons.
“He is also quite ignorant of the reality that the tedious and cumbersome nature involved in procuring the National Identity card or the International passport has even discouraged the majority of urban inhabitants from those establishments, so one can only imagine how rural dwellers will feel, like fish out of water surely, in the quest to seek these documents of identification.
“But the most worrisome and embarrassing oversight which Ima Niboro has exhibited is his ignorance that INEC took the registration of voters to exercise to the rural areas and set up offices and structures in every electoral Ward in the country, where rural youths and those of voting age went to register and fill in all their details, in the Continuous Voters Registration (CVR) exercise.
“And so, what other form of proper Identification would be better for a youth skills acquisition programme than the one in which every youth had the access and opportunity to be captured?
“Beyond the very important fact that the PVC as a means of identification, will ensure that more rural youths will have the advantage and opportunity to participate in the skills acquisition programme, it also added further impetus, relevance, and urgency to the effort to ensure that those youths, who were hitherto reluctant or lukewarm towards the registration exercise, will now be greatly encouraged by the prospects of benefiting from what ownership of a PVC can bring and indeed by extension, be strongly motivated, to fully participate in the electoral process by voting for the party that will continue to deliver more dividends of democracy to them.
“It is a crying shame that at this time when our leaders across all political divides in the country are consciously and passionately exploring avenues and initiatives to provide more operational platforms for youth engagement and empowerment and are also mobilizing youths for greater involvement and participation in the electoral process, the Media Director of a so-called major political party, is raising puerile and kindergarten accusations over a programme that will be of immense benefit to our rural youths.
“We are however very much aware that the APC has nothing to offer to the youths of Delta State and have been witnesses to the hugely successful results of the youth entrepreneurial and empowerment schemes like the STEP, YAGEP, and the PPSP amongst others, of the Governor Ifeanyi Okowa administration, as well as the avalanche of published testimonies of those who have graduated from the programmes, they know that the only way to be relevant is to dredge up an obsolete media consultant, who also has nothing new to add to the old and tired allegations and negative propaganda, of a failed political party.
“The incontrovertible truth remains that PDP is the only party that understands and is frontally and conscientiously addressing and proferring modern and tested solutions, to the present challenge of youth unemployment.
“Of course,e we must add, for Ima Niboro’s information and chagrin, that Governor Ifeanyi Okowa is taking this excellent model of youth engagement and empowerment, all the way to the Presidency as the next Vice President of Nigeria, where these initiatives will be replicated at the national level for the huge benefit of even more Delta and indeed Nigerian youths.
