Duped Again!

“The performance of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), whose chairman and directors were all appointed by the President, has been so inept that some experts think it was set up to fail.”

Considering everything we have witnessed or heard so far about the voter registration process, about the verification exercise, about the sale and destruction of voters’ cards, this statement would seem fair and apt. However, it was made four years ago on April 19 2007 in an article in The Economist titled ‘How to steal yet another election’.

Nigeria is the kind of place where you are constantly being surprised. Even when you think you have heard it all…even when you think you have become blasé about the level people will stoop to or the absolutely stupefying mind racking disregard the government has for its people…something comes along which drains all understanding from your head, with the same finality as a sledgehammer coming down hard on an ant.

Last week one of the stories making the rounds was that INEC might resort to using a manual voter register for the April elections. After spending almost a trillion naira for a problematic and painful registration process then we hear manual registers are going to be used? As Governor Ngige put it a lot more eloquently than I could, INEC reverting to a manual register would amount to ‘a rape of the sensibilities of the people’. But what is new? What makes this rape any different than all the others? Excess Crude Account has been depleted from $20B to $3M in a little over a year? Entire country held hostage by terminally ill PDP president refusing to hand over to PDP vice president? Over and over again our sensibilities are abused, shredded into pieces, stomped on and then flattened with a steamroller for good measure and still we go on.

I was not worried by INEC’s silence when the stories of multiple registration broke out, because I assumed the expensive system procured to guarantee free and fair elections would ‘deal’ with the issue. Then came the stories about people buying and selling voter registration cards from as little as N100 to as much as N10,000, I was still not perturbed by INEC’s stoic stance because I assumed the system around which the registration process was built would also keep our elections relatively clean. But when I heard that the voters’ registration cards were being burnt…then I was troubled. This meant that people would not be able to vote and this would leave room for ‘fake votes’ to ‘fill up the gap’ left by those who had let hunger, apathy, or greed disenfranchise them. So I placed my ear to the hot melting tar on the ground to hear if INEC would address this urgent problem. Maybe INEC would speak to the public through full page adverts in the papers or through the radio and television – urging people not to succumb to temptation or threatening those caught with all sorts of dire consequences if they are found out…but still nothing. As I tried to wade through the meaning of this silence, the stories of manual registers began to break out. Okay. It is all beginning to make sense. INEC, who is always complicit in electoral fraud in Nigeria was merely going through the motions in order to provide good reasons for their decision to return to the manual registers and the old ways of ballot stuffing.

Now suddenly INEC says the Electoral Act does not require e-voting (only e- voter registration). So what was the point about the 10 fingerprints? Was it not to ensure that it would be impossible for a person to vote more than once? Was I alone in assuming that all the data captured from all the polling stations across Nigeria were going to be fed into one central virtual location so that people who turn up more than once on the list will be identified and eliminated by virtue of their unique fingerprints turning up more than once on the data base?

Now the story from IT experts is that collating all the data would take too long? Science can send people into space and in Nigeria we cannot borrow or buy the technology to collate the data of 60 million people in 6 weeks? How long could it possibly take and if indeed time is the issue, why didn’t we start the process earlier?

In July last year INEC Chairman Prof. Jega was emphatic that the entire foundation for credible elections in Nigeria rested on a clean voters register. As he pounded the circuit trying to convince us all, Vanguard of July 23 2010 quoted him as saying “We closely looked through the existing voters register sampling over 100 polling units from randomly selected 19 states. What we found were massive inadequacies including under age registrants, hundreds of blank or blurred photographs and multiple registrations by same persons”. Pray tell – once you substitute ‘hundreds of blank or blurred photographs’ with ‘thousands of voters with partially captured fingerprints’ would we not have the same identical register we had in 2007?

The now four year old article in The Economist concluded with saying that ‘Nigeria is going backwards’ because everyone (excluding PDP and INEC of course) was in agreement that the 2007 elections were ‘far worse than those of 1999 and 2003’. Everything is on track to ensure we do not deviate from our backward slide: we are all set to break the 2007 record for fraud and violence in the 2011 elections with INEC aiding and abetting all the way.