UNDERAGE voters have been part of our electoral system for quite some time. Even the 2015 general elections, which were perceived as “free, fair, and credible,” featured thousands, if not millions, of ineligible kids who freely registered and cast their votes.

Child voters are minors who are not up to the voting age of 18 years and above. Children and foreigners register and vote freely in our elections in the North East and North, in particular. Attempts to question the presence of voter’s card-wielding children at the polling stations are met with belligerent stares and threats of violence by adult members of the communities.

Even the law enforcement agents posted to maintain the law, fail to remove them from the lines for fear of their own safety. 

The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, officials never bother to question the children on their false claims of being of age. They don’t demand proof. They just register them and allow them to vote, in blatant contravention of the Constitution and the Electoral Act.

After the Kano State local government elections in 2018, photos and videos of child voters as young as eight went viral on social media. 

The INEC’s spokesman, Oluwole Uzzi, then distanced the commission from it, claiming that the election was conducted by the Kano State Independent National Electoral Commission, KANSIEC. 

The Kano State Commissioner for Information, Mohammed Garba, also denied that they came from the local poll, alleging that they were taken from the 2015 general elections.

INEC formed a panel to look into the matter. Nothing came of that effort. Yet, the same underage children surfaced again, even after the Professor Mahmood Yakubu-led INEC claimed to have “cleaned” the voter’s register with their homemade technology known as the Automatic Biometric Identification System, ABIS. They were neither able to remove the kids’ registrants nor knock off their double or multiple registrations.

Instead, the INEC delegated responsibility for removing ineligible prospective child voters to the public, asking them to identify the perpetrators “with concrete proof.” Shouldn’t INEC summon their officials who enrolled these children to justify their actions? They could easily ask the children to bring proofs of their eligibility or have their names struck out, and appropriate sanctions applied to prevent re-occurrence.

After all these rigmaroles, it is most likely that those children will still vote in 2023, thus rendering all efforts by the Commission to conduct a credible election with technology a mere pretence. 

They will be complicit in pre-rigging the election with child voters, along with the unexplained invalidation of millions of voter registrants in the Southern zones.