Bothered about the possibility of registering 70 million Nigerians for the 2011 polls, the Conference of Nigeria Political Parties (CNPP), yesterday asked the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to extend the voters registration exercise to March or April next year.

The group also appealed to President Goodluck Jonathan and the National Assembly to join in calling on the electoral body to adjust the timetable. But the electoral body, in reaction, said it would stick with the timetable and urged political parties to mobilize Nigerians to ensure its success. According to the timetable released recently by INEC, the voters registration will hold between November 1 and 14 this year.

The CNPP Spokesman, Osita Okechukwu, who described the timetable as “a race against time”, said in a statement in Abuja that if the time allotted for the exercise is not changed, the forthcoming polls could suffer legitimacy crisis.

“We call on Attahiru Jega to come to terms with the unrealistic nature of his timeline, the race against time, undue haste the timetable represents and formally request President Goodluck Jonathanand the National Assembly for extension of time to March – April 2011, otherwise time will be too short for 70million people to register and the 2011 elections will suffer legitimacy crisis,” the statement said.

The opposition group argued that it is inconceivable for INEC to procure the Direct Data Capture {DDC} machine, train officials and conclude registration of 70million people within 14 days. It recalled that Mr Jega once expressed concern about time for the activities lined up ahead of the polls, insisting that the issue should treated seriously.

It also said that its investigations on the matter revealed that as of today no deal has been sealed, as none of the companies issued Request for Quotation (RFQ) to procure the DDC machines and their components has been offered award letter.

“In a semi-literate computer society, when and how will the INEC ad -hoc officials be trained to efficiently man the DDC machines in 120,000 centers nationwide in so short a time?,” the CNPP asked. “Are the companies capable to manufacture the fast hybrid minutiae and pattern algorithm which is the main ingredient of speed search of fingerprint database at over 1.5million fingerprints per second on a standard Quad Core?”

On the time of the amendment of the 1999 Constitution and the Electoral Act 2006, which INEC predicated the timetable, the CNPP said there is nothing sacrosanct in the exercise carried out by the National Assembly, stressing that “free, fair and transparent 2011 poll is more important than the amendment without Uwais Report.”

Play your part

Kayode Idowu, a media aide to the INEC chairman, said in a telephone interview that the exercise would go on as planned and asked the political parties to play their role

“Considering that INECjavascript:void(0); plans to deploy DDCs at the 120,000 polling stations each with a median population of 500 voters, it is sensibly projected that 70 million people can be registered over a period of 14 days at nine hours of the exercise each day, If there are up to that number of registrable voters out there,” Mr Idowu said.

“That is the basis of the projection and INEC is fully resolved to play its part if the others play theirs like political parties mobilizing their supporters to turn out within the stipulated time.”