The People’s National Convention (PNC) has emphasized the potential strain that the voter register exhibition exercise will have on its people.
The PNC’s General Secretary, Janet Nabla, in an interview on Eyewitness News on Citi FM, lamented that the exercise would impose a financial burden on the party.
This is due to the fact that the register will be exhibited in every polling centre, necessitating the presence of a party representative at each of these centres.
She disclosed that the party is still struggling to compensate members who represented it during the recently concluded limited voter registration exercise and thus having to deploy agents to all polling stations across the country will exacerbate the party’s existing problems.
“Even with the registration at the district offices, majority of our people who went even wanted us to pay them at the end of the day and payment was becoming a big problem for our people. And now the polling centres have come, and it is even going to compound our problems because it is five days, and you won’t ask somebody to leave their work and go and stay there [at the centres] for nothing. The person is bound to ask you for money, and you will have to pay and that is another headache.”
Madam Nabla also expressed concern about the EC’s failure to convene an Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting before announcing the exhibition.
“The exhibition exercise is fine, but I don’t know if it’s because this one is not political, that’s why the Electoral Commission has not called an Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting to educate us on some of these matters so that we can, in turn, educate our members. I am thinking that this may be because it is non-partisan.”
The Electoral Commission announced on Wednesday during a press conference that it would exhibit the provisional voters’ register from Friday, November 3, 2023, to Tuesday, November 7, 2023, in preparation for the District Level Elections (DLE).
