Ahead of next month’s Nigerian elections, the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Mahmood Yakubu has disclosed that the 2023 general election is an election for the young people in Nigeria.
While offering a breakdown of voter registration and collection of Permanent Voter Cards in Nigeria at his address at Chatham House, London, Tuesday afternoon which was monitored by Africa Today News, New York, Yakubu asserted that records on the ground showed that the election would be dominated by the Nigerian youth.
Yakubu, who submitted that he was encouraged by the turn-out of registered voters to collect their PVCs, said over 600,000 eligible voters collected their PVCs in Lagos alone within the last month.
The INEC boss stated that there are currently 93.4 million registered voters in Nigeria out of which 37 million, that is 39 percent, are young people between the ages of 18 and 34.
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He said; ‘And then they’re closely followed by 33.4 million or 35.3 percent middle-age voters between the ages of 35 and 49.
‘Put together, these two categories constitute 75.39 percent of registered voters in Nigeria. So, actually, the 2023 election is the election of the young people, because they have the numbers. Even the majority of the PVCs collected are collected by young people,’ Yakubu added.
‘So, out of the 93.4 million, 70.4 million registered voters are between the ages of 18 and 49,’ Yakubu stated.
He reminded the audience that the collection of the PVCs would end on January 29, adding that ‘we have to end it because before the election we will publish a number of PVCs collected on polling unit by polling unit basis nationwide.’
INEC had last week released the final list of registered voters for the upcoming polls.
In the list made available to political parties on Wednesday, Lagos State has the highest number of registered voters with 7,060,195, followed by Kano State with 5,921,370.
The list showed that INEC registered 93, 469,008 voters for the general polls.