OVER

The manual voter registration exercise comes to a close Sunday at 5PM local time.

Over 12 million voters had registered by the weekend having surpassed the 10 million voters' target set by the Interim Independent Electoral Commission- IIEC last week.

The commission extended the exercise by four days on Wednesday to allow more people register so as to participate in the forthcoming referendum vote.

Long queues are evident in many registration centres as people move to beat Sunday's deadline.

IIEC is expected to start a civic Education exercise on Tuesday after the closer of the manual voter registration exercise.

The electronic registration that is being carried out in 18 constituencies will end on the 21st of this month.

Elsewhere, Turkana Regional Commissioner Christopher Musumbu has hit out at some church leaders for using the voter registration exercise to block the disarmament process in the region. Musumbu castigated the clergy who were calling on the government to call off the exercise, saying that the same leaders were blaming it for lack of adequate security in the region.

He said the voter registration exercise should not be used as a scapegoat to derail disarmament in the area.

Some church leaders recently called on the government to call off the disarmament on grounds that it had scared off armed pastoralists who were yet to register as voters.

Musumbu said military operations will soon take place in the area to disarm all armed groups. He assured all those who had surrendered their arms of adequate security during the exercise.

Close to 300 illegally held arsenals have been voluntarily surrendered in Turkana region even as the amnesty period expired to pave way for the military operations.