BY JUDE OPARA, ABUJA
Certainly the much anticipated 2015 general elections may have come and gone but the issues that played out before the exercise will surely linger for a very long time. There were a lot of predictions and permutations that heralded the polls. There was the much scary talk of the country disintegrating in 2015 and with the elections at hand, the tension was so high that not only the feeble minded decided to relocate to their ancestral homes before the elections.
Jega…INEC boss
Most of the worries originated from the past elections which had always led to one crisis or the other. In Nigeria politicians usually do take elections as a do or die affair (apologies to former President Obasanjo) as they throw everything into it including the absurd.
Frankly speaking the March 28 and April 11 national and state elections also had its fair share of the disturbing issues including the campaign of calumny that was order of the day. Politicians left issues and were busy running down their opponents and even with a number of assassinations recorded across the country.
But be that as it may, one can boldly claim that the Nigerian electoral system has continued to improve from what it was in 1999 when the country returned to civil rule. Before now the electoral fraud used to range from ballot stuffing to ballot box snatching, over voting and outright manipulation of the will of the people by announcing in most cases people who were not voted for by the people.
I recall one rather disturbing incident that took place in River State in the 2003 general elections. There were 77,000 registered voters in Brass local government area and curiously on the Election Day, everybody voted and all of them voted for just one political party. This means that nobody died or travelled during the period, nobody was sick and that the other parties did not have any member even the local government party chairman never existed because if he did he ought to have voted for his own party.
That was the type of electoral manipulations that was common until in 2007 when former Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Maurice Iwu, came on board. Although Iwu was largely criticized after the conduct of the 2007 elections, he also added value to the electoral system by conducting an election that for the very first time saw the transition from one democratically elected government to another.
However that does not mean that there were no serious issues with that election because even the very beneficiary, Late President Umaru Yar’Adua accepted that the electoral process that brought him to power was flawed. He immediately promised to look into the nation’s electoral system with a view to making it operate in line with what is obtainable in other parts of the world.
Despite the fact that President Yar’Adua died on May 5, 2010, his deputy President Goodluck Jonathan in keeping with the promise of that administration to ensure an improvement of the electoral system appointed another University don, Prof. Attahiru Jega as the chairman of INEC.
Jega on assumption of office did not waste time in developing a roadmap for the reengineering of the electoral management body. To start with all the novel inputs of his predecessor like the use of the members of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) as ad-hoc staff during elections, use of the Direct Data Capture (DDC) machines for the registration of voters as well as the establishment of the Electoral Institute to enhance research in electoral matters were adopted and even improved upon.
He began by carrying out the cleaning-up of the Voters Register with the view to removing double registrants and names of some foreigners like Mike Tyson that was recorded as registered voters in some states of the country. That is how he conducted the 2011 general election which was adjudged by both the international and domestic observers as the best ever conducted election in the country before then.
But despite the encomiums poured on his INEC for the transparent manner it conducted the election, Prof. Jega was always quick to tell anybody who cared to listen that in 2015 he intends to conduct a better exercise than even the much celebrated 2011 polls.
He introduced the use of the Permanent Voters Card (PVC) as well as the Smart Card Reader with the view to making the electoral process more transparent. The devise was really aimed at checking the spate of electoral crimes that included multiple registrations and over voting.
With the Card Reader, it was difficult for anybody to vote with another person’s Card Reader because as soon as the PVC and the device were brought close enough, it will trigger up the person’s bio-data which has been imbedded in a chip. If it was genuine, the Card Reader will accept it and also show whether it really belongs to the bearer or not by displaying his picture and finger prints.
However, there were some issues with the Card Reader which made some people to demand for its suspension. In some places especially during the presidential and national assembly elections, the device could not function. In fact it failed severally to read the PVC of President Jonathan and his wife among other high profile failures.
But in spite of the hitches it had, it worked better during the second election which was the gubernatorial and state assembly elections which also prompted the Senate President, David Mark to urge Nigerian politicians to accept the Card Reader as a device of conducting elections because they “have proven to be effective, efficient and worthy for the conduct of elections.”
Again it could be argued that the benefits therein far outweighs the little hitches noticed because with the device, the idea of multiple registration which is the cradle of election rigging has been taken care of. Secondly, it is better for the votes of the few people that exercised their franchise to count as against having millions of people turning out to vote but the process manipulated at some point.
Nevertheless, now that INEC seems to have found a way of stopping electoral fraud, experience from the just concluded general elections have shown that politicians may have started the introduction of some other form of rigging which is hijacking of electoral materials to thumb-print as they wish.
INEC must therefore device a means of stopping them from having their way. The National Assembly must assist to strengthen the commission so as to wield the big stick on anybody that runs foul of the electoral system.
Now that we have succeeded in conducting an election where an incumbent president was defeated in a free and fair contest, all hands must be on deck to ensure that the next general elections in 2019 will be better that 2015.
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