INEC

By Salaudeen Teslim Olamilekan

Over the years, there has been an erroneously hard held belief among some Nigerians, especially the teeming youths of intellectuals, that, ordinarily, electorate votes don’t count in an election. This belief is more evidenced in social media discussions, particularly Facebook. Whether they vote in an election or not, the winner of an election is already known to the powers that be, even before the election day.

In preparation for the 2023 elections, I visited my local government secretariat to register my voter’s card. It was pretty disheartening and mind-boggling for me, realizing that what I observed the very first day I went, there was still the same thing I noticed. About 85% of the people on the queue waiting to be captured are old and mostly unlettered. They are illiterate market women, farmers and some senior civil servants. The numbers of youths in the queue were minuscule.

Many acclaimed young, exposed, and educated individuals who should know better about how a country is built are focused on venting anger and frustration on social media and gatherings against politicians. We fail to do what truly matters for the betterment of our country. It’s safe to say some youths and informed older people don’t even have voters cards, much less planning on voting. A fragment of this proportion doesn’t obtain the card for election purposes. It’s only some one-third among the youthful large social media users who lament and often weep for the country now and then will vote. In the end, the irony is, when an election comes, the old market women and farmers we often view as ill-informed and uneducated are the ones that pull the most votes.

In my conversation with some youths my age in my neighbourhood and the older ones, I discovered seemingly educated people who pride themselves on not having voters cards. They even hold and justify such ignorant views with their full chest. More surprising, a lady once told me that voters are the problem of Nigeria. She believes she’s wiser because she has never voted for any corrupt Nigerian leaders in the past. She has never exercised her right to choose who governs her country and who doesn’t, and she doesn’t seem to care. She sees people that vote as accomplices to the fraud in government. She’s among the many complainants that know every politician that’s not performing by their names but failed to see voting as a reasonable way to push them out of government and establish a new people-oriented government.

To say our votes don’t count in determining who wins or loses the election in Nigeria is a talk borne out of utter ignorance. The fact that the educated ones propagate such opinions makes it more embarrassing. Don’t let us fool ourselves. If our votes don’t count, politicians will not be spending billions of naira on advertisements and campaigns, touring every nooks and cranny of the country begging for votes. I believe anyone who shared in the anger, disappointment and dissatisfaction many of us have towards this current government and doesn’t have a voters card shouldn’t be taken seriously. You can’t complain your way into changing the political order of your country. You take action by voting. Your ignorance towards the poll keeps terrible people in power.

The thing about democracy is that you can’t separate or remove elections from its guiding principles and practices. The moment a country fails to choose its leaders by the polls, directly or indirectly, it cannot be identified as a democratic country. Elections are conducted to elect a leader to represent the people and ensure people’s dreams and aspirations are fulfilled. This mechanism hasn’t proven to be successful in choosing good leaders all the time, but it’s successful in making the majority’s will come to fruition.

It is wise that your hatred towards the ruling government should be why you’re voting, not why you’re apathetic to the poll. If you refuse to vote because you hate the government, your apathy will continue to keep bad people in power, and in so far as bad people are in control, their poor decisions will be ruling every aspect of our lives.

Nigerian politicians understand the power voters have. That’s why they focused more on enticing our poor, uneducated and easily-deceived parents with some handful of rice and N500 so that they could vote for them. Unfortunately, politics is a game of numbers. The more crowd a wrong person pulls based on his war chest, the more that wrong person will have chances of clinging to power.

My fellow Nigerian youths, come 2023, blame yourself if the wrong people win our most important national and regional political offices. Never complain. It’s your fault that you don’t vote. You should now understand that the quality of your life determines the quality of the people in power. How safe and healthy you’re, depends on the outcome of your political decisions. The political aspirations of the government in power affect the country’s political economy, including the highly established businesses and the small and medium scales. It will affect the bread sellers, labourers, and our society’s disadvantaged. We should do away from ego and ignorance and exercise our rights to vote for good and future-focused leaders.

Salaudeen Teslim Olamilekan is an undergraduate of the Federal Polytechnic Offa, Kwara, studying Mass Communication.

By Uzair Adam Imam

Former Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Attahiru Jega, has described Nigerian leaders as greedy who lack the intellectual capacity and vision in terms of how to usher in developmental projects.

Jega stated this on Monday, 15th November 2021, at the Maitama Sule Leadership Lecture Series, organised by the Students Wing of Coalition of Northern Groups (SW-CNG), in Katsina.

He also added that the insecurity and economic challenges that have been bedeviling the country for a long time are as a result of the country’s bad leadership.

Jega said: “The major indices of these crises manifested themselves from the Northern part of this country, whether it is poverty, youth unemployment, security challenges, maternal mortality, out-of-school children, lack of girl-child education and early marriage as well as the challenge of reproduction of our females.

“Anything you can think of, the terrible statistics come from the Northern part of this country. And why is it so? That is the key question. Today, we remember the Maitama Sule, the Amadu Bellos, Isa Katais and many others.

“These were people who led and protected the North and ensured that the North developed in accordance with its ability and their own abilities as leaders. While we cherish the memories of what had happened in the past, what kind of leadership have we got from the Northern part of this country?

“We have so-called leaders who are selfish, who are not selfless, greedy, who have a narrow vision in terms of how this country can develop not to talk about the region where they come from. They really lack intellectual capacity to be classified as leaders,” he said.

By Muhammad Sabiu

By Lawan Adamu Usman

The glimmers of hopes that the country will have a free and fair election in the 2023 general election have been dashed by our senators. Section 52(3) of amendment bill 2021 which will provide room for the electronic transmission of election results from the polling unit, received a kiss of death by the APC senators after a rowdy session in the senate. In 2015, when president Jonathan introduced the card reader machine, which was part of the technology drive to checkmate multiple voting and detect elections fraud and ensure a free and fair election, the APC, which was desperate to clinch to power, commended the bold initiative. There is no gainsaying the fact, APC was the beneficiary of the card reader machine in the 2015 general election. The election victories recorded by the party across the country could be credited to such technological innovation.  

Little wonder, many Nigerians expected President Muhammadu Buhari to maintain the momentum in 2019 by passing section52(3) of the electorate act into laws, which will pave the way for electronic transmission of results. However, President Buhari failed to convince Nigerians why he could not approve the bill, cited short of time as the reason ahead of the 2019 general election. Also, our lawmakers’ lack of political will to unanimously agree and take a common position for the quick passing of the bill is unfortunate. While other African countries have since embraced technology and reformed their electorate process in tandem with the best global practice, some unpatriotic senators are dragging us to the medieval period.

By its name, the Independent National Electorate Commission (INEC) should act independently according to the laws that established it. For the Senate to insist that INEC should collaborate with the Nigeria Communication Commission (NCC) on the possibility of adequate network coverage in the country and seek its approval before it adopts electronic transmission of results raises serious suspicion on its part. 

The million naira questions begging for answers are: why the majority of APC senators voted against the electronic transmission of results? Are they acting on the script of their party to frustrate any genuine efforts to have a credible and acceptable poll in 2023? It is either the ruling party plans to rig the 2023 elections as suspected, or it is jittery that the electronic transmission of results will expose it to serious defeat.

Civil societies organisations and Nigerians should wake up and reject this glaring rape of our democracy. Democracy the world over thrives and flourishes based on free and fair elections. This can only be achieved if INEC is allowed to conduct credible elections and transmitted the results electronically as obtained in other democratic climes.

Lawan Adamu Usman (aka Mr LA) writes from Kaduna State. He can be reached via imustapha650@gmail.com.

I wonder why the APC senators mostly stood against the clause that sought to operationalize the electronic transmission of election results.

I thought APC as a party was supposed to embody the ideals of political progressivism and was not created and sold to the people as a mere alternative political party with almost the same modus operandi as the others. I thought it was supposed to be a positive paradigm shifter and a status quo disrupter. But they have proven us wrong. 

Debates over this issue took a very heated dimension on the floors of both chambers of the National Assembly, and I wonder why. I understand there are certain concerns around issues like the devices to be used in the transmission of the results; how the results would be authenticated digitally before transmission; how the relevant stakeholders(e.g. party agents, observers) would be able to access the original results as transmitted; how accountability and transparency will be entrenched especially regarding public access to results and of course the issue of internet connectivity and inadequate digital infrastructure.

But if we are really determined, are there no answers and solutions to all these questions and concerns? Where is the APC’s commitment to innovation and “change”? 

This is how I visualize the entire process in the simplest terms:

 
Firstly, on registration of party agents (and independent observers, both local and international) for each polling unit by INEC. The commission would take all necessary details, including biometrics and create a profile for each of them on the INEC system. As such, all agents and observers would have access to their profiles on an app developed specifically for the elections. Of course, rigorous training of agents would be done to this effect. All political parties would also have accounts on the platform(perhaps to be operated by the Chairmen of the Parties). 

Secondly, after the elections, the transmission of results can only be done after validation and authentication by all party agents registered(and official observers) in the polling units. This can be done in many ways. One way is by barcode scanning. This way, the agents’(and observers’) mobile application would allow the scanning of the barcodes of the digital results as compiled so that immediately the barcode is scanned, the agents would be sent the result sheet on their mobile app as tabulated for verification(just as we use our XENDER app). On verification, the agents would accept or decline(in cases that warrant such). If accepted, the agents would still, after accepting their devices, go further to verify their acceptance with a biometric scan(thumbprint) on the device of INEC. Only then will the result be transmitted. 

Thirdly, immediately after transmission, INEC will send originally certified and legally admissible copies of the verified and authenticated result to the accounts(profiles) of the party agents and the central party account(profile). The result will also be immediately published on the elections website and projected at the polling unit for public consumption. 

On connectivity, INEC might choose to use the networks of the local service providers operating in Nigeria or partner with reputable international service providers. I prefer the latter because of the argument that almost 50% of the polling units we have do not have internet coverage. The government might partner with companies like SpaceX that provide satellite internet services with the capacity of delivering 150mbps internet speed to any place on the planet via satellite. All that is needed is a small kit at every polling station. There are also many other companies the country can partner with to optimize the device with satellite internet functionality that will guarantee internet connectivity almost anywhere in the world with appreciable speed, for example, companies like Thuraya, Iridium, Inmarsat etc. Of course, under the supervision and protection of the nation’s digital firewall. In this case, all polling units would have the digital infrastructure necessary for this purpose. 

Are these things possible, or they are just too fictional and unrealistic? 

If they are possible, then what is all this noise around e-transmission of election results? Or are we just not yet ready for such a revolutionary change towards more transparency and accountability in our election processes? 

Why is APC hell-bent on amplifying a limitation that they have done nothing to improve as justification for their scepticism towards e-transmission of the election result? Why are they not talking solutions and alternative routes towards achieving e-transmission just as they did vehemently when the PDP postponed elections in 2015 because of the insecurity in the North East? I wonder how they would have reacted if they were still in the opposition, but given their reaction to the issue of card readers while they were, I strongly believe they would have supported e-transmission. 

Some of them argue that even the United States, by virtue of the Protecting American Votes and Elections Act of 2019, use conventional ballot papers for voting. And I ask, is electronic voting the same thing as the electronic transmission of results? Have they ever wondered how they get live election result updates on channels like CBN, ABC, FOX etc.? Don’t they know of the National Election Pool in the US and Edison Research which provide real-time election results? 

Some are sceptical because such a network is susceptible to cyber intrusion. And I ask why the pessimism? Can we not trust the same cybersecurity infrastructure that protects our national security data(in DIA, NIA, DSS etc.) to offer befitting protection to a network that will be used just for electronic transmission of election results? 

So many questions for the APC! 

And here is the subtlety, the initial clause in section 52(3), as presented, already had the practicability condition; “The Commission may transmit results of elections by electronic means where and when practicable.” So this was the original clause. 

Then it was amended to this by both chambers of NASS; “The commission may consider electronic transmission provided the national network coverage is adjudged to be adequate and secure by the Nigerian Communications Commission and approved by the National Assembly.” 

In the amendment, the National Assembly subtly gave itself the exclusive power for approval subject to the NCC assessment and network coverage report. This is in absolute contravention with section 78 and Third Schedule Part 1, F, S.15 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as amended. Per these extant provisions, the constitution has given exclusive rights and powers to INEC in the matters of the conduct, supervision, undertaking and organization of elections in Nigeria. Hence, the unconstitutionality of subjecting INEC’s powers to the approval of the NCC and the NASS. 

We are ashamed by the actions of the APC towards this issue because we believed that any initiative that holds the potential of improving transparency in election proceedings in this country ought to be unconditionally supported, especially by the APC. But, sadly, that is not the case. 

Abdulhaleem Ishaq Ringim is a political and public affairs analyst. He writes from Zaria and can be reached through haleemabdul1999@gmail.com.