Timipre Sylva, the All Progressives Congress’ candidate for governor in Saturday’s off-cycle Bayelsa State governorship election, bemoaned the lack of voter registration updates from three units in his ward in Okpoama, Brass LGA.
Sylva blamed INEC for the issue, calling it “a careless mistake,” when answering questions from the media shortly after casting his ballot in polling unit 4, ward 4. He listed the impacted units as 3, 5, and 9.
“I’m very confident that things will go well for the APC at the end of the day, definitely,” the man stated. However, there are some problems in the ward; problems were found in Units 3, 5, and 9. These registers, I believe, were not posted. We then brought it to the attention of INEC, who acknowledged that their error was one of carelessness.
Get Instantly Update By: Joining Our Whatapps and Telegram Channel
“Why the units in my ward weren’t uploaded is beyond me. However, I believe the issue has been resolved, and they have pledged to extend the voting period in those specific units since, in the event that the issue remained unresolved, many individuals would have lost their right to vote. However, we were able to elevate it to Abuja.
The APC candidate for governor further claimed that PDP supporters had engaged in violence and ballot theft in several parts of the state, with some army troops allegedly complicit in the crime.
Sylva went on, “But so far, things are going really well in my unit, but we are also following; there is a lot of violence around the state.” The PDP, after all, is making a lot of effort to intimidate our voters by providing security. In fact, our people sometimes think that we are running for office to oppose security rather than the PDP. However, we are managing the situation, and I have no doubt that we will prevail in the end.
“I’ve heard there’s been a lot of violence in Yenagoa.” In fact, I heard of the shooting of one of my APC members when I got up this morning. By afternoon, there were instances when the army had seized control of certain districts, particularly in Bayelsa State. at actuality, I just had a conversation with them at Biseni (Yenagoa LGA). They claimed that the army was out there snatching ballot boxes on behalf of the PDP.
“To be honest, I’m not sure how much is going on, but Bayelsa security needs to be brought under control. Sadly, they truly support the PDP, particularly the army, and that is what we anticipate happening in the end.
However, I was astonished to learn that the reckless error only occurred in my ward and that the targeted units—which were large, densely populated units—were specifically large units. If this issue hadn’t been fixed, almost 4,000 voters would have lost their right to vote. And you start to ask yourself, how could it be that it was limited to my ward? However, INEC is improving significantly overall. We think that more development is still possible.