Reports from the South Sudan Referendum Bureau indicate that registrant turn out in North Sudan is very low regardless of the extension of the period to enrol for the vote.
Addressing the press today, the head of the bureau Chan Reec Madut said that less than a quarter of the southerners living in the north have registered until yesterday.Justice Reec said that the number of voters registered in the South doubled from less than a million in the first week to more than two million at the end of the second week.
John Andruga Duku, chief coordinator of the Countdown to Southern Sudan Referendum, told SCR News that Southerners in the north are scared to register due to intimidations from the police and the national security.
Ambassador Andruga added that the north is trying to register as many south Sudanese as it can in order to manipulate the sixty percent threshold needed to validate the independence of South Sudan.
GoSS Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Barnaba Marial Benjamin, told the press this morning that Southerner are not registering in the north because they are returning home by the thousands.