The Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) of Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Osun, Mr Olusegun Agbaje on Tuesday in Osogbo said the commission would not allow food vendors near polling booths and centres on the election days in the state.
He contended that this development followed the discovery that their shops were mostly used by vote buyers during the last governorship election in the state.
Agbaje made this disclosure during an interactive session with journalists at the Correspondents’ Chapel of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Osun State council, Osogbo.
He reiterated the resolve of INEC to tackle votes buying, just as he tasked the media on collaboration against the electoral vices by alerting the security agencies on any suspicious move to buy peoples’ votes.
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Agbaje stated “we discovered that vote buyers used the advantage of food vendors to share money during the last governorship election. We would not allow them to open during voting hours in the coming elections.”
He further hinted that the commission had distributed 1,266,587 Permanent Voters’ Cards, PVCs, which is 75.38 percent, out of 1,680,498 registered voters in Osun state, remaining 413,606 uncollected PVCs.
Agbaje averred that the state received 1,680,193 PVCs from the headquarters, saying. that uncollected ones would be taken to the central bank.
According to him, “the media should help us educate and warn politicians not to distribute money to the electorates. If politicians keep to the rules of the games, INEC is ready to keep to the rules of the games.”
On the card reader, Agbaje said the commission had trained its staffs that will handle the card reader and technical experts have been deployed to each local government in case of any malfunction.
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