Assessment of the presidential and National Assembly elections conducted on Saturday, and which spilled over to Sunday, is the staple in public discourse at the moment. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was called out by voters and political parties after the results of the 25 February polls were not transmitted immediately from polling units to the INEC Result Viewing Portal as the law stipulates. The umpire repeatedly assured the public that the integrity of the elections will be like no other, also magisterially declaimed further by President Muhammadu Buhari, who wants to leave this as a legacy.
However, for many, it is déjà vu. INEC has bungled it again! The introduction of the BVAS machine was thought to be the game-changer, underlined by the provisions of the Electoral Act 2022, as amended, which provides for electronic “transmission” of results in Section 64 (4) (a). This was not complied with; triggering outbursts from many parties, including the extreme demand of cancellation of the results yesterday, Monday, 27 February. It is sad that the din about the efficacy of the BVAS by INEC is after all an apocryphal avowal.
If the BVAS did well in authenticating voters but the end product – the results – were not transmitted transparently, thus provoking suspicion of manipulation, it is difficult for INEC to tell Nigerians, nay the world, that it has acquitted itself creditably.
Based on how the three polls were conducted, international election observers from the EU, the IRI, the NDI, ECOWAS and the AU have excoriated INEC over its shoddiness, most especially the failure to transmit results to its portal from polling units, logistical nightmares and electoral banditry typified in the invasion of polling units by armed thugs in order to intimidate voters, snatch and destroy ballot boxes and shoot to disperse voters.
I had watched with incredulity the INEC National Commissioner for Voter Education, Festus Okoye, live on Channels Television on Sunday, being asked why results were not uploaded on the portal, 24 hours after polling, and when it eventually began, those of the presidential polls were completely left out. Okoye feebly explained and, ultimately, was at sea as to why the field officers failed to do what they were expected to do. He then promised to bring up the issue at the Situation Room meeting for the INEC chairman, Mahmood Yakubu’s attention, which came up a few minutes later.
After that conference, the Commission issued a statement, which attributed the results uploading challenge to technical hiccups. “The problem is totally due to technical hitches related to scaling up the IReV from a platform for managing off-season, State elections, to one for managing nationwide general elections. It is indeed not unusual for glitches to occur and to be corrected in such situation.” This is ridiculous. His explanation would have made sense if the remiss were a few isolated cases. But it was a national mess.
What makes the alibi even more deprecatory is the fact that it was not a pre-emptive action, but a patch-work or face-saving volley. It failed woefully to resonate. Okoye, also in that Channels interview, said no reporter raised this question during INEC Situation Room Update, where its chairman would have addressed the concern. But does the INEC leadership need to be reminded of a major clanger such as this before doing its job? Its actions or inactions have triggered a grotesque cloud of doubts on the integrity of the results, which have led even major stakeholders to view the exercise as a farce.
Lagos State is a special case in this interrogation, in spite of the result. There is a surfeit of live television reports and print media accounts of voters’ lamentations of intimidation, the snatching and destruction of already thumb-printed ballots, many of which were emptied into gutters by gunmen. Many voters were wounded, including those from gunshots. Curiously, the thugs were said to have moved freely to perform these heinous acts unhindered, despite movement restrictions. Some Returning Officers have narrated their ordeals while submitting their results at Collation of Result Centres, of being harassed for doing the right thing.
This election was not the first time thugs would invade polling units at Okota and other areas in Lagos to disrupt polling and tear ballots cast when the trajectory of voting misaligned with the projections of those they are working for. Some units at Oshodi, Ikate and Surulere, Ajao Estate, Ojo, Apapa and Etiosa areas, came under similar assaults; and in 141 polling units in Bayela State, which led to fresh polling, in some areas, the following day.
A Federal High Court sitting in Lagos, had a week to the election voided the State INEC’s contract to Lagos State Parks Management Committee, headed by MC Oluomo, a known partisan, to convey electoral materials to polling centres, in an exercise it had interest in. Only the naive and partisan will not see the tendentiousness in the transaction. When this failed, electoral materials arrived late in a number of polling units. This ought not to be so in a state with a small landmass, not encumbered by difficult terrains to effectively deliver logistics on election day. This lateness of materials was also widespread across states.
We gloat here over how Nigerians in the United Kingdom (UK), the US and Canada get involved in politics there and win seats in parliaments. In the House of Commons, for instance, Kemi Badenoch is an MP presently serving as secretary of state for business in the Rishi Sunak government. She was also a cabinet member when Boris Johnson held sway. Mr Chuka Umunna was a Labour Party MP, who once aspired to lead the party before he finally resigned his membership. These and other Nigerians make bold statements about our common humanity or that the world has really become a global village.
But here, this canon of globalism does not hold water. Nigerians from a certain ethnic group are not allowed to freely vote in Lagos. They must align with the ruling party, or risk being harmed. This antediluvian and undemocratic nuance must be exorcised in our evolution as a nation if progress is to be made. This drivel should stop.
Now, what constitutes political structure may be viewed differently by those who dissipated their energy discussing it as it affected Peter Obi, the candidate of the Labour Party, who was cajoled as being present only in the social media, with activists in that space. His victory in Lagos State with 582,454 votes, as against Bola Tinubu of the APC who polled 572,606, negates that cynicism. Obi, without structure, won Enugu State with 428,640 votes, while Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party trailed a distant second with 15,749 votes; he had a landslide Abia State with 327,095 votes, out of 381,683 of the total votes cast. Plateau and Nasarawa States are in his kitty, as declared by INEC.
As thugs went berserk in disrupting the electoral process in Lagos, so did they in Rivers State, fuelled by unit results that didn’t follow certain political tendency. An outgoing governor of Enugu State, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, lost his senatorial election to an LP candidate. Obi, dismissed by cynics as a cipher in this election has had his run so far speak for him – his relevance now in the agora, no matter how this election ends.
I pity the so-called Ndi-Igbo political elite who subverted Obi’s ambition for their parochial political interests. It is an issue that will echo for long in my homeland. No governor from the South-East supported him, not even his own state governor, Chukwuma Soludo of Anambra, whose needless anti-Obi disquisition made headlines in the pre-election period. In one public outing, his anecdote that he was still trying to figure out if he is a politician, as different from the itinerant scholar he is, is a self-appraisal worth doing. The Igbo elite who promised to deliver Igbo land to their preferred parties/candidates, rather than support the Igbo communal interest, which Obi represents, and his triumph in the states results from the South-East so far declared by INEC, should compel them to read the lips of Ralph Emerson: Every hero becomes a bore at last.
This election has revealed one thing: the integrity of the electoral process is as much as the politicians want it to be. It is a kamikaze mission for the country to surrender this to them. The human element or interference with the overhaul of elections is a conundrum that must be defanged. It was smart Card Reader abuses in previous polls that gave birth to the BVAS technology in this poll. As a country, we have been having electoral heists since 1999, with that of 2007 being the peak, where the ballots had no serial numbers, contrary to the provisions of Electoral Act. Yet, the outcome was upheld by a court verdict, ironically inveighed by the late Umaru Yar’Adua, the ultimate beneficiary.
Mangling elections in Nigeria will continue and may get worse, until electoral malfeasance – including the use of thugs, alongside the politicians that arm them, and INEC and security personnel who get compromised by politicians – are punished in tandem with extant laws. America’s NDI, one of the foreign observers with presence in Nigeria, has called for the creation of an agency of government with the sole duty of prosecuting electoral offenders in this election, a reminder of an extant national report inspired by electoral absurdities of 2007.
In other jurisdictions, the arrest of Chinyere Igwe, a federal lawmaker, with $498,100 on him in Rivers State, whilst armed with a list of beneficiaries on the eve of the election; and the man arrested with N30 million new naira notes for vote buying, would have had prosecutorial traction by now. Why this has not happened explains why the country is in the swamp in terms of civilisation. The bank and its manager where the cash came from, above the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) withdrawal limits, and while Nigerians get a miserly N20,000 after being in the queue for a whole day, should not be spared.
Nigerians are tired of electoral debacles. The incubus in our electoral system should be faced squarely without timidity or restraint. Otherwise every election will continue to be a perverse harvest, a mere routine outside the global grid of democracy.
