In defence of INEC

For a number of reasons, the result of the gubernatorial election in Osun State was a foregone conclusion—it went and ended as expected; and despite masterful attempts to inject religion into the fray, voters in Osun understood and appreciated a competence that talked. In Ekiti, politics defeated performance, and the All Progressives Congress (APC), the […]

For a number of reasons, the result of the gubernatorial election in Osun State was a foregone conclusion—it went and ended as expected; and despite masterful attempts to inject religion into the fray, voters in Osun understood and appreciated a competence that talked. In Ekiti, politics defeated performance, and the All Progressives Congress (APC), the party hitherto thought to be in control, was disgraced in virtually every local government of that state. But Governor Kayode Fayemi was able to turn defeat into victory by conceding defeat and undercutting the ground from under the feet of APC hawks who would have mounted a seemingly plausible case of having being rigged out.
The factors that made these successes possible included the congregation of all the most senior staff in one place supervising the same election; the restraining presence of the security, even if intimidating, helped; the intensity of the probe of the eyes of the people; and the ‘rig and roast’ threat, bad as it was, was perhaps a most effective factor. And whatever people thought of INEC, the credit goes to it.
And just as people were beginning to applaud this and the decision to introduce e-card readers and put election security personnel under the control of INEC, suddenly that familiar cry of North-South dichotomy was raised; and the issue of the distribution of polling units was turned into a divisive affair by idle elite. In this republic, any issue can be the stuff for divisive difference that leads permanently-smouldering, low-level disunity in diversity. There is North, there is South; there is Islam, there is Christianity; there is tribe and there is tongue—and all these six, along with many others, can be, are and have been, repeatedly exploited; and in the blindness engendered by heightened primeval fears, support is created for inappropriate cause and undeserving persons.
Of course, throughout history, the policy of divide and rule has been the prerogative of the visionless while the practice of divide and misrule has been that of the clueless; but to divide and ruin a nation and a people requires more than ordinary average incompetence. But this democracy, if what s happening in Nigeria can be called that, is threatened more by the desperation of a multi-dared and painfully unpopular incumbency than by the sordid details or the defectiveness in drawing up a revised voters’ register.
Usually, it is during the electioneering period, and especially at election time just before the polls that the government would get compliant agencies to release controversial information on sensitive issues sometimes doctored to produce a desired effect. It had happened many times before. When they wanted to create a North-South divide, they tried it with the population issue. That failed and it only ended up consuming, the chairman of the National Population Commission.
And when they wanted to raise religious tension that would, according to their calculation, result in electoral support for the president, they would release figures of admission into the Nigerian Defence Academy, for instance—and soon Muslims and Christians will be at daggers drawn and each other’s throat. And the more thoughtless and indiscreet of the preachers would rush to condemn the government—and fall right into its trap, because Christians would then rise in its defence; and in the end religious tension is unnecessarily raised over an issue that had nothing to do with religion at all.
Even though in devising its strategy for distributing the polling units, INEC has kowtowed and shown unwarranted oversensitivity on some issues that may have appeared to it to have potential for divisiveness, it has been criticised on two grounds: one, that the creation of new polling units is suspicious; and, two, that the distribution of the units to states favours the North. But it is difficult to see what can be suspicious about the equivalent of the revision of the voters’ register; because that is what the creation of new polling units is—it is the revision of the polling units, for the very same reasons for which a voters’ register is revised.         
Since the creation of polling units by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, in 1996, and the subsequent verification of 119,973 in the run up to the 2011 elections, there has been no attempt to verify, reconfigure, delimit or otherwise bring the number of polling units up to date. Based on Nigeria’s estimated population of 175 million and a voters’ register of 70 million and an average of 500 voters per polling unit, INEC calculated that 140,000 polling units will be required.
But in the 18 years since the creation of that list, even those born on the day it was compiled had now come of voting age; and Nigeria’s population, then estimated at 140 million and growing at 3.2% annually, had added 5.6 million newly-born voters, plus several millions of those who had, in the course of each of those 18 years, attained to democratic maturity and become enfranchised.
There is also need to capture and provide units for those who, for various reasons, had been left out in the writing up of the original list. And in the course of the last four elections—in 1999, 2003, 2007 and 2011, it had come to light that several polling units are overpopulated—some with as many as 4,400 names of voters instead of 500—and new units needed to be created to cater for the excess; and some units, especially those in the rural areas were under populated, and new units needed to be created to cater for those who, on account of distance or some other impediments, were not being served.
To cater for all these, the required number of polling units was rounded up to 150,000. With 119,973 verified polling units, almost all of which had even been geo-referenced, and the extra 30,027 units that would need to be created, the task before INEC is to distribute these among states and the Federal Capital Territory on the basis of registered voters. Instead of doing that INEC tried to bend over backwards to reward those accusing it now.
But the attack on INEC is an indirect swipe at the population of the North; and on this, Southern elite don’t seem to realise that they will need more plausible empirical logic than that provided by chief Bola Ige’s goats. Of course, begging the question is always easier than addressing it. But some nonsense is for busting, because in the absence of response, this deviousness has the tendency to graduate into a permanent, unjustified animus and reason for blackmail against the North.
It is not true as they have kept hammering that has conferred on the south a halo of population supremacy. First, in Africa, except as a postcolonial reality, when the British and the French established their colonial headquarters on the cost, the forests to West Africa’s south, which had been depopulated by pre-colonial slave trade, had never acted as a major magnet for attracting massive settlement or migration. Here, it is not the coast; it is the river that is the hub for population growth.
Egypt with exactly the same length of coastline as Mozambique has almost four times Mozambique’s population, because it has the Nile, along the bank of which Egyptians in their millions settle. Namibia, which is a little less than Nigeria and with a coastline twice Nigeria’s, has a much smaller population: in fact Nigeria’s population is exactly 85 times Namibia’s. Nigeria has the Niger and Benue rivers. And the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has one of the shortest coastlines on the continent, has a population that is three and a half times that of Madagascar, which has the longest coastline of any country on the African continent. The DRC has the Congo River.
Second, with its larger population in 1963 and with a lower age of marriage for Northern girls, with greater and more widespread practice of polygamy, with the higher practical fecundity of the average Northern woman, and with its well-known aversion to the use of contraception and other intrusive family planning techniques, the North ought to have doubled the South in population by now. And it probably has but this reality has not been captured by our superficial censuses.
And then in addition, there is the question of size. The North is almost three times the size of the South; many states in the South are smaller than some local governments in the North. Either Toro local government in Bauchi State or Kachia local government in Kaduna is bigger than Bayelsa State. Katagum Division in Bauchi State is almost the size of all the states of the South East put together. Even in the past, it was the North that attracted people to itself—a reality that has remained unchanged, as can be seen today in the fact, for instance, that there are today more Igbos in Bauchi State alone than there are people of Northern origin in the entire southern—South East, South-South and South Western—parts of the country. What is attracting them to leave the coastal areas is exactly what attracted the empire-builders of old to settle and found the states that preceded Nigeria.
At any event, INEC shouldn’t be deterred; and after this spate of criticism, it ought to have been clear to it that it was futile trying to reward states like Anambra and Bayelsa with the illegal excess polling units they already hold and another 15% in equality with those states that have been acting fair and square within the law. And without in any way meaning to join the sectionalist bandwagon, we may quote the disappeared, irrepressible Ibrahim Abdu, a.k.a. Gibi, who used to say in ultra-literate, but nonetheless confident, English: “’Keep quiet, keep quiet’ is not fear; it is running of talk.” Shiru-shiru ba tsoro bane; gudun magana ne.