With Uche Nnadozie
By Saturday, this year’s electoral cycle would have come to the end. The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC had slated the elections over a year ago. Even without them doing so, according to the electoral act, our general election will always hold around this period. This year, the election was moved a few hours to the process beginning. What was scheduled initially for February 16, 2019 was moved by a week. As a result, state governorship and state assembly polls were consequently moved by a week too. This week’s election was earlier scheduled for March 2, 2019. What is more, today we see the issues that bedeviled the presidential and national assembly election, thus it is only natural to look at them to see if they will not be repeated on Saturday.
One of the biggest challenge confronting us as a country is project management. Most of the time, project management tasks us to no avail. As a result, we blame financing or lack of it or we blame the timing of the release of funding. Whereas, the major issue revolves around the infinite detail of actual booths on ground, moving things from point A to B. because of the years and years of impunity in our social interactions, we care very little about issues that others care very much about. We play with time. We call it African time, to justify why we start late or stroll in while the event is almost over. We like to wait till the last minute, but there is a limit by which we can win such challenge. Where you have to move different shades of materials from Abuja to 36 states, then to 744 local governments and 120,000 polling units, you will surely realize that time is everything.
Recall that as you move these materials, you equally move men and women. You move with cars, buses, bicycles, motor bikes, canoes, air planes, among others. This undertaking is prone to sabotage, accident, ill health, bad luck, bad weather, rain, bad roads, ebb and tide and in fact insecurity. Like it happened this time, INEC offices were burnt in at least three states. Heavy duty vehicles carrying materials were torched. Materials that can get burnt include papers, electronic devices, sensitive and non sensitive materials. To be fair to INEC, this is a huge operation; it is a huge project no matter where this may be taking place. This year’s operation became even more critical following the number of political parties and the litigations that followed party primaries.
Party primary is another huge distraction. You have a country with 92 political parties. These parties did not field candidates in all the available constituencies. Where they did not, it simply means their logos were not included on the ballot. You can imagine the enormous attention the designers have to put in to ensure there is a difference and that the integrity of the ballot is maintained across states and across constituencies. This has to happen because excluding any party’s logo can render the exercise invalid. As if that was not enough, parties (especially the big two) had acrimonious primary election. The various disputed primaries ended up in courts. In fact, some are still in court till date both for national assembly election already held and the forthcoming state level elections. Some parties have had their candidates changed by the courts in different states more than four times. Yet INEC is obliged to include whatever is the party logo on the ballot. The litigations are in many folds, some argue against parties fielding candidates, while others argue about specific candidates not featuring. It is a mess, it is confusing.
In spite of security features on the ballot and the centralization of distribution channels, politicians still found a way to infiltrate the process. In some states, politicians found a way to hijack election materials by bribing their way through security, abducting INEC officials and forcing them to thumb print for their preferred candidates. Others found a way to suppress voting in areas of strength of their opponents either by causing a crisis thereby leading to vote cancellation or instigating scare mongering so that people do not come out to exercise their franchise. Of course, a lot of people complained about voter intimidation and illegal cover by notorious security personnel where bad behavior occurred.
These highlighted shortcomings have forced a lot of commentators to promote electronic voting. To them, that will help in resolving majority of the issues that characterized the poll. These issues I bet will still come up on Saturday. There is also the talk about voter apathy especially in the southern parts of Nigeria. People have suggested that it may have to do with bad governance, but I disagree.
Just the same way commentators think electronic voting will pull people up from the backsides during voting. We naturally don’t see these things as pretty important. We tale them joke just the same way we take other things even our lives. We want things to be served us in bed, yet we come outside to mouth inanities against government. So if we have electronic voting suddenly folks who rather played football on Election Day will now go and vote? I doubt.
I think that politicians have not done enough to get voters out. They still rely on some fabricated means to get votes where they really need it. The people do not yet see the correlation between their franchise and governance. That is why we do not hold our legislators accountable. Rather we look out for who will throw money at us, otherwise, the politician is bad. Then I think, our voter register is still padded with multiple registration and completely fake voters.
The numbers we see do not necessarily represent the facts on ground. These issues will continue to get my attention this election season.
