INDUCED CRIMINALITY AND DISENFRANCHISEMENT Delays as a result of dearth of data and effective structures and apparatus for collecting them have become almost a permanent feature of Nigerian public services institution as well as private institutions in the service of the public. Take a typical public service institution like Civil Service Commission whose function is to recruit civil servants, post them to primary locations, train and retrain them, promote, demote, transfer discipline, suspend, terminate, dismiss their appointment retire them. These are enormous logistic work, I admit but they know that it is their job. But a civil servant who retires after keeping his/her record for the entire working life of 35 years or less will be delays for couple of months and years for the commission to trace his/her file, name or some other day and confirm them. Within there periods of delay host workers have been receiving their salaries and allowances but the genuine worker have not confirmed that they ever stepped into the governments department. What a shame! Now INEC is an umpire with sufficient staff and a forthright chairman who had display qualities of indefatigable and committed leadership. But when you juxtapose his qualities with the fact that a couple of days to the election million of eligible Nigerians have been waiting to obtain their PVCs and hopes are deeming by the day that they would ever get them. On the part of INEC their assurances on daily basis is that the PVCs are there for their owners to showing arte obtain them, discount all the time commencing protocol that electorates are made to go through before colleting them. These class of people are those who have  gone through the initial hurdles of getting their bio-data into the INEC voters register. The ones that deserve our collective sympathy are the 4 million eligible voters confirmed by INEC to have registered more than once and therefore became accused persons to be prosecuted according to electoral act 2010 but INEC rather than comply with the Act decided to invoke a waiver. The doctrine of nolle prosequi is entered as a plea by a State or Federal Attorney General in a criminal case before a competent court when the states legal department decided that for some reasons it will be futile to prosecute the case or even if it goes ahead it will be counter productive. One can imagine the amount of time and resources that will be required to investigate, fish out arrest and arraign 4 million persons across Nigeria. They must have taken a piece of advice from their legal team. But that is just one side of the coin. Who are these 4 million person? Most probably they are you and me queuing up, get registered once and obtain temporary voters card, and on subsequent calls to confirm or collect PVC only to find that the computer data will report non-existence of such names, or another scenario where your name will appear in multiple. And these are through no fault of yours. When these 4 million cases are thoroughly dissected you discover that we will be talking about induced criminality. While these cock and bull story are on millions of Nigerian stand a risk of been  disenfranchised through no fault of theirs.  Just recently 14 thousand PVCs were lost to rubber in rivers State and any attempt by their owners to go to voters registered constitute a crime. The computer registration is configured to accept one version of registration. Subsequent once go to the trash and the issue multiple registration would not come up at all. Voters register is not configured to incriminate voters with honest intention to obtain one PVC. I find INEC’s inability to carry out its duties incomprehensive because, it has full description, analysis and scope of its electioneering duties; it has enabling environment like budged, electoral acts and presidential support to ensure transparent, free and fair election at a cost often dictated by INEC. How then did we have such an avalanche of eligible voters that turnout for registration in June 2014 without getting registered and the popular view that the registration will continue at the LGA was not implemented. There is no doubt that INEC was overwhelmed by the large number of voters they have to carter for, but does it not go with the common acknowledgement that Nigerian turn 18 daily in their thousand and accumulating endlessly. That those who have been given temporary voters card by INEC not vote is induced disenfranchisement due to legal incapacitation, which a clause amending the Electoral Act could rescue a few hundred of thousand if not millions of eligible voters holding that  piece of paper. That is a demonstration of not acknowledging the value of electorates civil responsibilities. Iyke Ozemena IKECHULWU O. ODOEMELAM & CO                                                                           Corporate Attorneys/Consultants