Joseph Bakare
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that it is in custody of 7,920,129 Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) that are yet to be collected from its offices across the nation.
The commission disclosed this in a tabular data on consolidated PVCs as at March 22, 2018, released on Tuesday in Abuja.
The data showed that 8,271,401 PVCs were yet to be not collected as at 2016.
A breakdown of the uncollected PVCs as at March 2018 also reveals that Lagos has the highest number of 1,401,390; followed by Oyo, 647,586; and Edo, 449,001 cards, while Kano has 195,941.
INEC data reveals that Bauchi State has the least number of uncollected PVCs at 15,542, followed by Bayelsa and Plateau 28,533 and 25,300 respectively.
The commission, however, disclosed that 351,272 PVCs had so far been collected across the 36 states and the FCT between 2015 to March 2018.
INEC further showed that 230,175 out of the 351,272 PVCs were collected in 2017 while the remaining 121,097 cards were collected in 2018.
The state with the highest number of PVCs collected, between 2017 and 2018, is Anambra with 102,264 collected cards; with the breakdown of 95,385 and 6,879 cards collected in 2017 and 2018, according to the commission.
Kogi and Lagos followed with 41,174 and 20,002 cards collected, it said.
The data also shows that 15,318 and 25,856 PVCs were collected in Kogi in 2017 and 2018; 14,907 and 5,095 collected in Lagos in the same order.
The states with the least total number of collected PVCs within 2017 and 2018 are: Zamfara with 40; followed by Taraba, 158; and Bauch 558 collected card, according to INEC.