Voter registration planned for September

Nigeria’s electoral body said on Thursday that the long-delayed registration of voters ahead of forthcoming general elections would be held between 12 and 21 September. "The registration of voters will commence on Thursday 12 September 2002 at all 120,000 registration centres nationwide," Abel Guobadia, chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), told a news conference. "Some mobile stations will be deployed to cater for the needs of new settlements and of widely scattered and thinly populated rural settlements," he added. The exercise was to have been completed in time for local elections that were due at the end of April but that did not take place after INEC said it had not received the funds needed to update the voters' register from the government. The polls were rescheduled to 10 August and later deferred indefinitely. These delays, along with wrangling between INEC and new parties which were denied registration for the elections, cast doubts over the general elections, which would have been the first since President Olusegun Obasanjo’s election in 1999 ended more than 15 years of military rule. Guobadia said the electoral body will be providing Nigerians with a computerised voters’ register for the first time in the country’s history. This would be tamper-proof and guarantee free and fair elections, he added.