The Permanent Voter’s Card and its derelict functionality

By Hussein Adegoke

You cannot be a patriotic NIGERIAN and be excited about the state of affairs here.

There are people who are desperately willing to strangulate the rest of us and hellbent on driving our collective wealth to nothingness. I hold the viewpoint that the derelict state of our economy is an artificial creation of some few. And what is it about PVC collection and its sale for a paltry sum? Are you suggesting those who gave them out never anticipated this? Is the INEC Chairman that myopic and incredulous? In a place of hunger…and rife illiteracy, how dare you make such item a cheap commodity available to all Jick and Harry without adequate structures in place to curb its unmerited use?

That piece of card, if sincerely done, should have done no one any good save the one electorate it was intended for.

So, the “PERMANENT VOTERS CARD”—as you declare with brazen stupidity—could just have been picked, snatched, sold, bought, and the new custodians would benefit from it? Such valuable item put into use just once in every four years…? What a country? What a shame?!

I mean, is this too far from common logic? To “personalize” the card would never have been an idea from the scratch. This is the system forever in place at the ATM stands or in our banking systems. Does anyone pick up a debit card and gain access to your funds that cheaply? Why do we mature in size but never in sense in this part of the world, for crying out loud? You keep spending on systems that give you no value for what you give to it? Yearly, suffrages (or people of voting ages) keep absconding from polling booths because of their waned beliefs in electoral practices. You keep administering the same migraine reliefs to a Malaria that has survived since the 1960s.

We’re no teachers or apologists when it comes to voter’s apathy. But it seems to me that no elite with tangible duties and sensibilities go out to “speak” with no voice—on the election day. Or how would that card that was not equitably distributed, capturing only a fraction of the voting populace and excluding well-meaning citizens of the country living in the diaspora fairly represent your “credible choice”? The biggest project in the land is an election—coming up but just in every four years, yet we can barely stake it appropriately. What happens to having a VOTING STAND (much like an ATM) at every voting booth across the nation where every eligible person could “clock” or time in by facial recognition? And this, too, could be replicated in the diaspora. What big deal lies in that?

But going back to the first critical point made, there are ugly men within this space hellbent on not making it work! Every Mahmood Yakubu who submits his credentials for such lofty positions should also fear the day of reckoning (but well, it does them good to know and believe there is one)! No NIGERIAN races to political offices in the land without having a separate “booth” of accountability on the judgement day!

Hussein Adegoke is a Public Affairs Analyst.