Do we really need this PVC? A question of trust, not apathy

By AbdulHakeem Salami

Before every election people keep singing the same chorus. Civil society groups, journalists, social media influencers, they are all singing get your PVC, your vote is your power, decide your fate. The message is well-meaning and often sincere. But a question that we keep avoiding is, Do we actually trust this process enough for the PVC to mean what they say it means?

Let us be precise about what this question is and what it is not. This is not a call for political apathy. It is not about the laziness to queue at an INEC registration centre to get the Permanent Voters Card PVC. It is something far more uncomfortable than apathy, it is a question of trust. And trust has to be earned. It cannot be bought through campaign canvassing.

The first layer of the problem is the one we are most familiar with, even if we rarely say it this plainly. Whether the flag bearer wears APC, PDP, ADC, Labour, or Accord across their chest, we have increasingly come to recognise the face underneath.

Nigerian politicians have turned party decamping into a habit, not because of ideological conviction, but out of strategic survival. A governor who presided over years of infrastructural decay and salary arrears does not transform into a different administrator because he has decamped to a new party.

This is why the argument that “this election is different, this party is different” wears thin faster every cycle. The parties are not different. They are vessels. What matters is the individual inside the vessel, and more specifically, what that individual did the last time Nigerians trusted them with power. Some have records of genuine delivery. Many do not.

But the civic conversation rarely goes there with enough precision, because it is easier to sell party identity than to do the unglamorous work of candidate-by-candidate scrutiny.

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So the honest citizen sitting at home asks a reasonable question: if the faces are the same, if the networks are the same, if the patronage systems that reward loyalty over competence remain intact, what exactly is my PVC unlocking?

The second layer is structural, and in some ways more troubling, because it is written into law rather than merely into political culture.

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the body charged with conducting free, fair, and credible elections, has its chairman appointed by the President of the Federal Republic, subject to Senate confirmation. This can be confirmed in Section 154(1) of the 1999 Constitution as amended.

The same president whose party is contesting an election participates in determining who oversees that election. The same Senate, populated largely by members of established parties, confirms that appointment.

Now, reasonable people can debate how much this structural arrangement actually influences electoral conduct in practice. There are INEC chairmen who have presided over elections widely regarded as relatively credible, and others whose tenures have been marked by controversy.

But the question of trust does not require proof of deliberate manipulation in every instance. It only requires citizens to look at the architecture and ask: whose interests does this structure protect by design?

The question is not whether votes have ever mattered anywhere in principle. The question is whether, in this specific context, with these specific candidates carrying these specific records, overseen by this specific institutional arrangement does our PVC deliver what it promises. That is a different and considerably harder question.