Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Mahmood Yakubu, has spoken on the double voter registration saga involving Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi.
Yakubu hinted that the Governor Bello may be prosecuted whenever he leaves office.
He disclosed that an investigation was in progress and that the commission was waiting for the outcome.
His words “We have already issued a statement on the incident and there is nothing more to add at the moment. Our Kogi office is investigating the role of our staff in the matter. The commission is awaiting the outcome of the investigation for further action.
“This is not something one can comment on because it is dependent on whenever his tenure ends. For now, this is the action we have taken. Our constraint is that we cannot prosecute a serving governor. Let me reiterate that it is illegal to register more than once”, he told Daily Trust.
Asked if there are other cases of multiple registrations, he replied: “No, but at the end of the exercise we are going to have what we call d-duplication, where we would compare the data coming from the field with what we already have.
“It is only when we do this that we can authoritatively say some people have registered more than once. This one was detected because he is a high profile personality and it was on the internet”.
On how INEC is handling the issue of internally displaced persons, Yakubu said: “We have advised our staff in places where you have displaced persons not to register them again.
“First, they should go with the register and tick those whose names are already on the register but have lost their PVCs. All we need to do is to reprint their PVCs because they are already in our database. They are doing that in a number of places, particularly Borno, Yobe and parts of Adamawa”.
