Almost back to back and in quick succession, the Coalition of United Political Parties(CUPP) has raised two strident alarms over the electoral process. It has clarionly alleged, and for the second time, plots to remove the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission(INEC), Professor Mahmood Yakubu. It has also alleged that a rump of the governing All Progressives Congress(APC) is working assiduously to frustrate the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System(BVAS) in the 2023 General Elections.
Even though the CUPP has not adduced any evidence to support these lurid allegations, they are hair-raising and serious enough to concern stakeholders in the electoral process.
First of all, the CUPP cannot be crying wolf where none exists. Second, Nigeria has an unpleasant pedigree in such matters. Desperate politicians tinkered grotesquely with the electoral process in 1993, bringing the country to the verge of abyss. Third, a former Chairman of INEC, Professor Attahiru Jega, under whose watch the Permanent Voter Card(PVC) and the Smart Card Reader(SCR) were introduced, and which significantly improved our elections, has weighed in, attesting to how scarred politicians can be about technology which fosters and engenders transparency in the electoral process.
Although Professor Jega did not elaborate on his intervention, students of the electoral process will attest to the fact that the introduction of the SCR, particularly, met with one of the stiffest and most vehement oppositions by politicians. Their arguments, as INEC prepared to conduct the 2015 general elections, were two fold: the SCR was strange to our clime, as a result of which our rural folks would be overawed by it. Also, the SCR needed to be fully charged in order to function optimally in a country where electricity was epileptic.
In response to these vociferous arguments, the Commission did a pilot or trial run of the SCR. It deliberately chose rustic backwaters in each of the six geopolitical zones of the country. As it turned out, the bottom was knocked out of the arguments of the opponents of the SCR.
The SCR did not only work remarkably well, it was enthusiastically welcomed by a majority of our rural folks to the chagrin of the naysayers. The immediate upshot was that those opposed to its deployment were shut up by its outstanding performance and its overwhelming acceptance. But if they were quietened by the rousing support the SCR received, they quickly staged an ambush in the courts. They argued that the SCR technology was strange or alien to the law. And they triumphed, even if momentarily.
Learning from the shenanigans of the politicians and the shortcomings of the SCR, the Commission introduced the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System(BVAS) to supplant it. Where the SCR correctly read finger prints but failed to accredit a voter, such a voter was allowed to fill an Incident Form. Soon the politicians took advantage of this loophole by perpetrating identity fraud and making voters, in some cases, to vote more than once. The BVAS has foreclosed this by ensuring that it verifies and accredits the voter using the biometrics embedded in it. Before now the biometrics were captured in a chip embedded in the PVC which are then popped up when it(the PVC) is swiped against the SCR. Reinforcing this transparency measure is the electronic transmission of results. The Form EC 8 in which election results are entered into at the Polling Unit(PU) is scanned and transmitted to a portal, the INEC Elections Result(IreV).
This portal can be accessed by members of the public by simply logging in. The beauty of this portal is that stakeholders can follow and tally results of elections even before they are officially declared by INEC. Also, it makes it impossible to manipulate the outcome of elections between the PU and the Collation Centre. For good measure, the Electoral Act 2022 fortifies these innovations, giving INEC the carte Blanche to deploy technology as appropriate in the conduct of elections. Translation: whatever uplifting technologies now deployed by INEC are governed and provided for by law.
Against the background of these raft of technologies and their sterling performance in the conduct of the recently conducted Ekiti and Osun off season governorship elections and other bye elections, not a few desperate politicians, who are used to the old ways of gaming the process, must be losing sleep or up in arms. Their insomnia must be further compounded by these major considerations: the President’s refrain to bequeath a legacy of credible elections which he inherited and benefitted from. The fact that he has repeated this refrain several times and at August forums such as the United Nations and the fact that he is not contesting must make our political enforcers uncomfortable.
Besides, the eagle-eyed surveillance of the electoral process by stakeholders, especially the media, civil society and members of the international community must have discomfited our political desperadoes. Much worse is the introduction of technologies which have added transparency to the electoral process and which have in turn galvanized and given verve to our teeming youths who were hitherto despondent and apathetic.This increased transparency has invested a renewed confidence in the process and its capacity to change our political course for the better. This reawakening by the youths, who are reported to be rooting for a particular candidate, has frightened the old guard who assumed all along that the presidential election was a two-horse race.
In the light of the above reality, one should not be surprised if there is a sinister cabal somewhere planning to deploy desperate and bizarre measures, in the manner of 1993, to torpedo the electoral process. The best way to make them perish the thought is to replicate the trial run the Commission did in 2014 with the SCR: The BVAS should be tested in the full glare of the public, the media and civil society across the six geopolitical zones and in our rural areas. The unencumbered and superlative performance of the BVAS, in the course of the proposed pilot, should put paid to sensational speculations being bandied that the BVAS cannot work optimally in all jurisdictions. And once it gets wide acceptance by our rural folks,such an acceptance assumes the ultimate validation of the BVAS by the Nigerian people. It also sends a clear and unmistakable message to the naysayers: shut up!
Dazang was a director at INEC