A former Director at the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Oluwole Osaze-Uzzi, has said Nigeria’s voter register is full of irregularities and cannot produce free and fair elections unless it is cleaned up.
Naija News reports that Osaze-Uzzi said this on Friday during an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today while speaking on the state of Nigeria’s electoral system ahead of the 2027 general elections.
According to Osaze-Uzzi, a compromised voter register cannot guarantee credible elections in Nigeria.
He warned that if INEC fails to audit and sanitise the register, the 2027 elections would be marred by the same controversies that trailed the 2023 polls.
The former INEC Director called on the electoral umpire to conduct a thorough cleanup of the register, remove dead persons, underage voters and multiple registrations.
He also urged INEC to make the register public for Nigerians to scrutinise before the elections.
He said, “A compromised voter register cannot guarantee credible elections. What we have now cannot give us credible elections in 2027 if we don’t fix it.”
Meanwhile, INEC Chairman, Professor Joash Amupitan, has assured that the commission has no favoured candidate or political party in the 2027 general elections.
Amupitan gave the assurance on Friday in Abuja when he received a pre-election fact-finding mission from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), led by a former Vice-President of Sierra Leone, Victor Foh.
Amupitan said the commission was currently on a readiness assessment tour of the geopolitical zones in preparation for the polls.
The INEC boss disclosed that elections would hold in 8,809 registration areas across the country’s 774 local government areas.
He said the number of registered voters had exceeded 103 million, adding that the commission had completed nine of the 14 major statutory activities in its revised election timetable.
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