Tackling Voter Suppression in Nigeria

By Moshood Isah

A lot of issues have been attributed to the increasing decline in voter turnout which has continued to diminish the quality of Nigeria’s elections. The 2019 Presidential election witnessed lower turnout with only 32percent of registered voters coming out to vote and the situation was even worse for other state and off-cycle elections. This poses a lot of questions around the legitimacy of mandate where returns are made for polling units where elections were not held thereby undermining the principles of inclusion, free and credible elections.

In this vein, citizens’ rights to determine who lead them are directly or indirectly suppressed by either the tedious nature of the process or dubious nature of the actors. In recent times, voter suppression has become a strategy used to influence the outcome of an election by discouraging or preventing specific groups of people from voting. The November 2019 Bayelsa and Kogi States gubernatorial elections, climaxed the issues of voters’ suppression suffered in the 2019 general elections.

This is in no way a negligible figure since election is strictly a game of number and every digit is important to measure emergence of political candidates to position of authority. Unfortunately, those percentage simply meant that thousands of eligible voters were suppressed and prevented from making decisions that affect them. Cancellation of elections is just one out of numerous ways which citizens’ right to elect their leaders have been suppressed either deliberately or otherwise.

It is indeed profound to know that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Security agents and Political parties are major culprits when it comes to voter suppression in Nigeria’s election which means all key stakeholders need to chart a pathway to tackling voters suppression in Nigeria’s election. During a recent conversation hosted by Yiaga Africa on tackling voter suppression in Nigeria’s election, National Commissioner of INEC on Registration and Election Review Committee, Professor Antonia Simbine admitted the challenges of voter suppression saying all stakeholders need to be involved in the fight against voter suppression.

No gainsaying that election stakeholders have called on the National Assembly to fast track the electoral act which will further legalise certain provisions to ease the process thereby mitigating voter suppression. Electoral reform provides an opportunity to strengthen election legal framework to which lack definition of what voter suppression is all about and the implications, which should be captured in the new amendment of the electoral act.

Political parties have been severely accused for always finding ways to manipulate the process for their own selfish interest. As a matter of fact, politicians have become a threat to Nigeria’s democracy by way of circumventing measures to prevent electoral malfeasance and this goes a long way in causing voter suppression. It is time to put national interest first and play by the rules to ensure the citizens alone decide who governs them.

• Moshood Isah is the Media Officer of Yiaga Africa