By Soni Daniel, Regional Editor, North
The postulation by Alexander Herzen,
(1812-1870) became manifest during the last
set of elections in Nigeria.
The Russian reformist had written in one of his
famous essays “that the men who proclaimed
the Republic became the assassins of
freedom”.
Herzen submitted that those who claimed to
be pure revolutionists in Russia had in a way
abandoned the real struggle to secure true
liberty for all, and that though they had
broken the chains they inadvertently left the
prison walls standing, making them assassins
of freedom. The manipulations and high level
intrigues that characterised the just concluded
general elections in Nigeria can be likened to a
coup of some sort by those who claim to be
Nigeria’s most liberal politicians.
They proclaimed to the world that they wanted
a free, peaceful and credible election but they
connived with many forces to rob Nigerians of
the chance to freely elect their leaders and
deliberately arm twisted the electoral umpire,
Prof Attahiru Jega’s Independent National
Electoral Commission, INEC, to short change
Nigerians voters.
No doubt the elections have come and gone,
producing winners and losers but the ripples
generated have left many Nigerians with sour
taste because of the conspiracy of high-
ranking politicians, who worked hard to
subvert the will of Nigerians just to maintain
their electoral status-quo and keep smiling to
the bank.
Nonetheless, while the winners are in high
spirit, working round the clock to fix
themselves on the reins of power, the losers
continue to gnash their teeth, wondering what
might have hit them like a volcano. In a way,
the just-concluded polls, made history, broke
the jinx of incumbency and wrote a new
chapter in the Nigerian polity.
Surprisingly, although the changes introduced
by INEC to add credibility to the elections,
succeeded in certain ways to checkmate mass
figures of electoral victory usually associated
with Nigerian elections, it failed in many ways
to checkmate electoral fraud and violence,
effectively defeating the goals of the
innovations factored into the polls. It appears
that once majority of Nigerians achieved the
change they longed for in the Presidential
elections they overlooked many flaws that
marked the Presidential election and actually
floored the governorship elections in some
states.
Smart Card Readers and Permanent Voter
Cards: The good, the bad
The vision of those who contemplated the use
of the card readers and permanent voter cards
for the 2015 elections shows a clear evidence
of thoughtfulness and readiness to part with
the ugly past of Nigerian elections. In the
recent past, Nigerian leaders with an eye for
rigging, simply engaged in mass thumb-
printing according to the earmarked or
ascribed voter population in their respective
domains because there was no means of
ascertaining who reported for voting or not.
But with the introduction of the SCR the PVC,
it became clear to election riggers that it
would be difficult to continue with the dubious
business as usual.
The SCR simply put a ceiling to what
governors, lawmakers and their parties could
declare in the just-concluded polls. In fact, a
clear pattern simply emerged as the results of
the 2015 elections began to roll in: Out of the
36 states and Abuja, none of them was able to
declare up to 50 percent score of the votes
when juxtaposed with the number of the voter
population claimed by the states and the FCT,
leaving political pundits to wonder what might
have happened to the remaining ‘voters’.
In the recent past, Kano, and Lagos, which
emerged with the highest voter population
figures of about 5 million, would have
accordingly returned something close to that
figure without the use of the card readers,
which automatically pegged the number which
any state could declare at the end of voting.
But because of the application of the
technology, Kano which registered close to five
million voters and was actually issued with
over four million PVCs, could only return two
million votes while Lagos which had about
four million voters with PVCs was only able to
turn in about 1.4 million at the end of the day.
Thus, in a way the SMR worked to some
extent.
INEC’s dilemma and limitation in SMR usage
It is obvious that the success of the card
readers in the last election depended to a
large extent to the cooperation of key political
actors with the electoral umpire. It was
curious that in most PDP states, particularly
in the Southern part of the country, where the
governors had frontally opposed the use of the
technology on the grounds that it would
disenfranchise their citizens, the card readers,
accordingly ‘refused to work’ on election days.
It ‘failed woefully’ during the Presidential and
National Assembly polls in most PDP states
until Jega was compelled to authorise manual
accreditation when no such mass failure rate
was reported in the opposition controlled
states particularly in the northern part of the
country.
Two extreme cases in Daura, Katsina State
where Muhammadu Buhari reported for voting
and Otuoke in Bayelsa State where President
Goodluck Jonathan and Dame Patience
Jonathan were slated to vote, would suffice. In
Daura, the SCR seamlessly accepted GMB’s
and Aisha’s fingerprints within seconds and
they went home while in the latter, the
‘sensitive machines’ stubbornly refused to
accept the fingerprints of the president and
Mama Peace, leaving them standing on the
sun as common citizens for close to half an
hour.
The scenario was simply frustrating, confusing
and provocative to the president’s minders
and those who watched the disappointment on
their faces. But most disappointing was the
INEC official, who appeared as if he was
handling a Rocket Science apparatus that
could easily explode to consume him: he was
helpless. As at today, nobody knows what
happened to the machines in Otuoke and other
PDP states.
Were they jammed by malevolent elements to
embarrass the first family or was it just an
innocent coincidence that nobody had
envisaged? A Correspondent of one of the
leading Tv stations in Nigeria, attached to the
Presidential Villa almost gave an inkling of
what was to happen during the accreditation
during a live transmission of the event, when
he warned his anchor man, not to disconnect
from the location but to ‘just stay on and
watch and see what is going to happen”. It
was a warning loaded with meanings, which
most people did not take seriously until the
‘failure’ occurred, to the chagrin of all.
Where is the SCR magic?
For all the benefits and promises which INEC
said the SCR would contribute to making
rigging impossible in the last election, the
cards simply could not significantly stall mass
rigging in most states where the governors
had already connived with compromised
security agents, INEC officials and thugs to
deliver a premeditated results to prove that
they were in charge or were working for ’our
son’.
Those governors simply made a ship wreck of
the card readers and still rolled out impossible
figures for INEC to announce at the end of the
day. They slapped Jega on the face with their
actions. After failing to browbeat Jega to
abandon the smart card, the governors gladly
sought and obtained the support of security
agents to back their well-trained thugs and
party agents to make a mockery of the cards.
In most states, the government-backed thugs
merely waited for INEC officials to conclude
accreditation using the cards for them to
snatch both the result sheets, number of
accredited voters and the card readers and
move to their fortified locations to compute
the ‘result’ before handing over to the INEC
officials to announce with fanfare. In these
states, those masterminding the rigging were
fully aware that they could not win in a free
and fair contest, given the fact that some of
them insisted on certain candidates not
minding the feelings of the electorate.
One of the media coordinators for one
Southern governor said in a chat with this
reporter that they had to resort to hijacking of
sensitive election materials and writing the
results by themselves so as to avoid being
defeated in a free contest with the opposition,
which was very strong.
“We knew that without using our boys backed
by the security that we would lose to the
opposition governorship candidate,” the
source explained, adding “we have put the
opposition in a tight corner with our electoral
‘massive victory’; it is their duty to prove
whether we rigged or not but that is none of
our business.”
Eclipse of the security agencies or electoral
fraud accomplices?
For all the promises to help ensure free, fair
and credible polls in Nigeria, can the Nigerian
security agencies say boldly that they helped
in a significant way to advance credible
election or acted as a spoke in the wheel of
progress? The answer is yes and no. Although
the police high command and other security
agencies gave the world the impression that
their officers and men would provide a level
playing field for a credible and peaceful
election, the reverse was the case when the
interest of the two leading parties-APC and
PDP was factored in.
Most of the security men wanted to ‘deliver
victory’ at all cost for those who paid them
and by extension protect their jobs while a
handful insisted on doing the job
dispassionately and in the overall interest of
Nigeria. But the ‘big bosses’ would not allow
that to happen, hence the resort to ‘obey the
last order’ and comply with the ‘order from
above’, a situation which manifested in most
security agents aiding and abetting electoral
fraud and violence just to maintain the status
quo in many cases.
The elections cost Suleiman Abba his job as
Inspector General of Police. Some suspect that
Abba was being difficult to the ruling party. He
was accused of ‘not being sensitive enough’
by posting a police officer suspected to have
sympathy for APC in Rivers State. The PDP
insisted on having a Hosea Karma to conduct
the election since he understands the riverine
state more than any other police officer in
Nigeria.
The attempt by Abba to ‘foist’ Ogunshakin on
the state to conduct the election alongside
three other AIGs and 2800 police men merely
infuriated the powers that be and quickened
his ouster from the force. While Ogunhakin
was forced to flee Port Harcourt for Calabar in
the early hours of the election day, the other
police officers and men, never dared to set
their feet on the Garden City throughout the
duration of the election.
At least, it will teach those who contested for
power that ‘what a man is afraid to do, a
courageous woman can accomplish that with
audacity and damn the consequences. Security
men were used to rig these elections.
What worked and what didn’t work
Perhaps, the electoral umpire will be ready to
return to the drawing board to work out more
strategies to advance the Nigerian electoral
system. It should be able to demonstrate to us
that the card readers have the capacity to
transmit how many people were accredited in
all the polling units and indicate clearly where
cards readers were not used at or deliberately
manipulated for electoral fraud. Without that,
it may not make any sense using it in future
elections.
But the best way out is to launch Nigeria into
a full scale electronic voting to eliminate
intimidation, killings and snatching of
electoral materials. The earlier this is done,
the more likely the hope that the votes of
Nigerians will begin to count. Again, that is
the only way that those who spearheaded our
democracy will not turn round to oppose
reforms that will bring about sanity in the
system and become ‘’assassins of freedom”
like Herzen said .
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still reading

So true.

hmmmmm

Northern conspiracy! GEJ my HERO! FAYOSE my ROLE MODEL!!

it's well

Well, between now and the next four years, perhaps, INEC can be able to work out a better means of voting that won't be so biased for everyone to see.
They can use the principle of the ATM over secured networks to allow for live results as they are being cast. A few billions on the line is definitely not too much to sacrifice to keep this loose country together.