Stakeholders in Ikorodu Division, Lagos State, have begun mobilisation of residents for the collection of their Permanent Voter Cards to enable them to participate in the forthcoming general election in the state.
The stakeholders, including royal fathers, political leaders, chieftains of the Community Development Committees/Community Development Associations, market leaders, traditional chiefs, and students, among others, engaged in the mobilisation owing to the large number of unclaimed PVCs in the division.
Speaking during the event organised by the Ikorodu Divisional Council of Obas and Chiefs, a former state Commissioner for Agriculture, Koali Olusanya, said politics started from people’s households and should not be left to only the politicians.
He said, “It will be unfair that on election day we only record 40,000 out of 300,000 in Ikorodu. For us to even vote, the first step we ought to take is to collect our PVCs and it’s such a pity that the cards we have collected in Ikorodu division so far are not up to 150,000.
“If you get to the INEC office, you will see a lot of cards that are yet to be collected and if we fail to collect those PVCs, we won’t be able to show the power of the Ikorodu population. The benefit of collecting the card and using it to vote is that it will make the government pay more attention to us in Ikorodu.”
Also speaking, the senator representing the Lagos East Senatorial District, Tokunbo Abiru, said in 2015 and 2019, less than 200, 000 votes were recorded out of over a million registered voters, adding that in Ikorodu division, less than 50,000 votes were recorded by the APC out of about 340,000 registered voters.
