By Vincent Akanmode
Anyone with the faintest idea of the place of Nigeria in international politics as the most populous black nation in the world would not be surprised at the huge interest the just concluded general election in the country generated from election observers locally and internationally. No fewer than 146,913 observers were accredited by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the presidential and National Assembly elections held on February 25 and the governorship and state house of assembly elections that took place on March 18.
Their brief as was highlighted by INEC Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, was to submit reports to the commission, highlighting the strength and weaknesses of the electoral process. The progressive improvement in the nation’s electoral culture since 1999, he noted, derived in part from the reports filed in by observers which, this time, included the 40 deployed by US-based political think-tanks, International Republican Institute (IRI) and National Democratic Institute (NDI). The delegation included political leaders, civil society election experts and regional specialists from 20 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America.
There were also others like the Commonwealth Observer Group led by its chairperson and former President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki; the 90-man African Union delegation led by former Kenyan President, Uhuru Kenyatta, the European Union Election Observation Mission (EU EOM), YIAGA Africa and the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), to mention a few.
A major feature of the election was the divergence of opinions among the various observer groups that monitored its conduct. While some observers rated it as the best ever in the nation’s electoral history, others were quick to dismiss it as a rape on democracy.
To the first category of observers, the deployment of BVAS in the conduct of the elections was the master stroke that placed it over and above other elections that had been conducted since the nation returned to democratic rule in 1999. They could not but applaud this piece of technology that made it impossible for voters to break the sacred electoral rule of one man one vote.
The second category of observers, however, were miffed at what the failure of INEC to upload the results of the elections from the polling units to the IREV in real time as the electoral umpire had promised as well as the pockets of violence that attended the exercise in few places around the country, particularly during the governorship and state house of assembly elections.
Unfortunately, the incidents of violence were magnified on the social and traditional media by vested interests determined to discredit the election the same way they had sought to discredit the candidacy of the eventual winner of the presidential election, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). Many observers, particularly the foreign ones who depended on reports from the biased sections of the social and traditional media, could not put the election in context and therefore fell victim of the propaganda machine rolled out against the ruling party and its candidates.
The first point of disagreement occurred during the presidential election when it was observed that voting started late at many polling units around the country. Some observers who blamed INEC for the delay did not put into account the prevailing social and economic conditions like fuel scarcity and the cash crunch occasioned by the failed naira redesigning policy of the Godwin Emefiele-led Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), both of which contributed to the late arrival of voting materials at many polling units.
Some of the observers who criticised the election also pointed to alleged failure of the electoral umpire to fulfill its pledge before the elections that the results from the polling units would be uploaded on its central server in real time. Hon. Dino Melaye, the querulous spokesperson of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), had latched on to it to reject the result of the election that was won by the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and call for its cancellation.
His protest would later catch on as a few other aggrieved political parties, including the Labour Party (LP), whose candidate Peter Obi came third in the election, joined in the ensuing protest designed primarily to give the world the impression that the election was compromised by INEC. It would later be revealed that INEC decided against its earlier plan to upload the results when it discovered that numerous attempts had been made to hack into its server.
In its preliminary statement on the presidential and National Assembly elections, the IRI and NDI Joint Election Observation Mission said the elections “fell well short of Nigerian citizens’ reasonable expectations” while the electoral umpire lacked transparency. The Mission’s leader and former President of Malawi, Dr. Joyce Banda, opined that logistical challenges and multiple incidents of violence overshadowed the electoral process and impeded a substantial number of voters from participating.
The delegation observed that the late opening of polling locations and logistical failures created tension while the secrecy of the ballot was compromised in some polling units because of overcrowding. Banda also said that after the polls, challenges with the electronic transfer of results and their upload to a public portal in a timely manner undermined citizens’ confidence at a crucial moment of the process.
The assessment of the election made by the IRI and NDI Joint Election Observation Mission was, however, at variance with the one made by the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), whose President, Yakubu Maikyau, gave INEC an 80 per cent rating after reports from about 1,000 members of the association deployed to monitor the elections nationwide.
Speaking in an interview on Channels Television after the election, the NBA President said: “I will say that the election went well. Those who came out were happy to express their franchise.
“There were challenges, definitely. There were some infractions, some of them actually constituted electoral offences. But on the whole, I will score INEC as having performed maybe about 78, 80 per cent in the delivery of these elections.
“That will be an A for every exam, notwithstanding all the things that happened, which we are not ignoring.”