Nigerian elections: How much progress have we made?
During the recent Adamawa state governorship election, voting by children according to election monitors, did not elicit any adverse reaction from many adults and eligible voters thereby giving the phenomenon a stamp of acceptability. The monitors in fact concluded that the practice has been legitimized in many communities. Why has INEC not reversed it as […]
During the recent Adamawa state governorship election, voting by children according to election monitors, did not elicit any adverse reaction from many adults and eligible voters thereby giving the phenomenon a stamp of acceptability. The monitors in fact concluded that the practice has been legitimized in many communities. Why has INEC not reversed it as it had also been widely observed in many polling units in Bauchi, Gombe, Kaduna, Kano, Plateau, Nasarawa and Taraba states in 2011? All political parties are reportedly behind the malpractice meaning that the trend is one that we have come to live with. If as in the time of our grand fathers, we cannot stop children from voting, can we really claim to have made progress in the conduct of our elections?
Again, polling units are located too close to people’s houses despite the availability of public places near such houses. As noted by observers during the Adamawa election, it was hard for election personnel to set up properly and guarantee the secrecy of the vote because many of the units were in awkward places and were also too close to each other. In the election in Bayelsa State there were reports that polling units were located in people’s houses, mechanics workshops, and street corners as has always been done with petrol stations along Limca road in Onitsha as though INEC cannot provide polling booths to guarantee the sanctity of a voter’s choice. Here it is instructive that the Supreme Court had as far back as 1994 highlighted the fundamental importance of polling booths when it said through Chief Justice Mohammed Bello that “Polling booths are the base of the pyramid and the roots which nourish the electoral process”.
No less worrisome is Nigeria’s incredible voter turn-out figures. During the Bayelsa election the media were unanimous that the event was characterized by voters’ apathy. In Ogbia local government, President Jonathan himself lamented the trend and reportedly attributed it to confusion caused by court cases on the election. Yet, official results showed that many places recorded as high as 90% turn-out. It was not surprising therefore that an election observation coalition comprising representatives of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Transition Monitoring Group (TMG), Federation of Muslim Women Association of Nigeria (FOMWAN) and the Justice Development and Peace/Caritas (JPDC) expressed serious reservations over the authenticity of the INEC figure. The group felt that the high voter turnout rate would no doubt pose concerns when juxtaposed with 37.5 per cent for Adamawa and 35.1 per cent for Kogi elections. Thus if in 2012, independent observers cast aspersions on figures released by the umpire, it means we have made no progress from the situation in 1999, when the former American President, Jimmy Carter at the head of an international observer group, said that there were several cases of “disparity between the number of voters observed at the polling stations and the final result”
It is strange that in Nigerian elections, some candidates are still able to attain landslide victories as their forbearers did over half a century ago during the regional elections held in the Eastern and Northern regions in 1961. The ‘famous’ National Party of Nigeria (NPN) performed the same feat even in the strongholds of the opposition during the 1983 elections. Nigerians ought to despair over the story in 2012, that 200 ballot boxes were distributed by INEC in Thukudou/Sukufu/Zar wards of Adamawa state comprising 14 polling units instead of 1, 000 ballot boxes earmarked for the polling units and at the end of the day there were results from the 1, 000 ballot boxes. Also painful to hear is the allegation that a former member of the House of Representatives from Ganye/Fufore Constituency was caught with 6 ballot boxes inside his house. How did he get the boxes? More than two years earlier, a Senator had allegedly engaged 36 thugs on voting day in Oye Ekiti, during the Ekiti governorship re-run election to massively thumb- ballot papers, in his house. It was the Police that reportedly saved the delinquents from being lynched. But how did the Senator get the papers?
The conduct of elections in a developing society like Nigeria would no doubt face several challenges some of which could surpass the capacity of the electoral body. But we know that electoral malpractices are usually aided from within. Electoral Commissioner Onukagu said that much from his Anambra base where voters’ registration was hijacked to the forest and where a returning officer spent valuable time looking for where to hide from perceived assassins instead of announcing what he collated as result for the Anambra Central Senatorial district election. We are thus not persuaded that INEC operatives are committed to free and fair elections as their leadership is. We also do not subscribe to the naïve but popular opinion that a ‘peaceful’ election is necessarily a successful one. If indeed, peace were to be the major factor of success, the most successful place on earth would probably have been the cemetery. Elections during the transition from military to civilian rule in Nigeria were applauded by some people on the grounds that the military was able to coerce everyone to accept its arrangements but one outstanding scholar, Professor Richard Joseph got it right when he compared the so called peaceful elections of the military to “a planet which appears smooth from a distance but when looked closely, the seemingly even surface is pock-marked by craters”. Peaceful elections are good only if they are free and fair. To achieve that, INEC has to embrace best practices by using improved technology to sanitize our election process.