The Chairman, Oyo State Independent Electoral Commission, (OYSIEC), Aare Isiaka Abiola Olagunju (SAN), has charged the residents and prospective voters in the state who are yet to collect their Permanent Voter’s Cards to ensure that they collect their PVC before the local government election in the state.
Olagunju said that without PVC, no one can vote in the forthcoming local government election in the state.
Urging the citizens to troop out en masse to exercise their civic rights on the election day, Olagunju warned the electorate not to conspire with anybody or organisation to violate the electoral laws on the election day.
The OYSIEC boss, who stated this while speaking on a radio program in Ibadan, re- affirmed the commission’s readiness to conduct transparent election through the introduction of situation room, where results of elections would be relayed directly from polling units.
According to him “Election results would be uploaded to OYSIEC portal immediately and all political parties will have representatives in our situation room alongside staffers of the commission. With this, it will be difficult for anyone to manipulate election results. We have a lot of unclaimed Permanent Voter’s Cards in Oyo state and that is why we are calling on concerned people to collect theirs on time and keep till election day and beyond for us to have an all-inclusive polls by May 15, 2021”.
Speaking on the possibilities of elections not holding as scheduled, Olagunju hinted that there were no signals pointing to such at the moment.
He added that responses from the political parties following the release of elections time table and guidelines were commendable so far.
“Responses from political parties were encouraging as election date is sacrosanct. Some parties even demanded for extension for conduct of party primaries and we have attended to their request. We are just appealing to our people to participate in the election, vote peacefully for candidates of their choice and avoid vote buying”, he said.
