Prof. Mahmood Yakubu superintends one of Nigeria’s most talked about institutions, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). As INEC Chairman, he faces an impossible task: to fuse a tumultuous and corrupted electoral culture with the puritan formality of a neutral, ethical oversight. Yakubu was meant to sanitise the country’s corrupt system and the February 25 presidential polls was his litmus test.
But while the exercise has been hailed in several quarters as a dependable foundation for more remarkable poll administration, a motley of aggrieved parties comprising defeated aspirants and their supporters and some foreign media, accuse the Yakubu-led INEC for holding a flawed election.
Amid the barrage of commendation, criticisms, and threats, Yakubu’s calling asserts two big changes in Nigerian politics. The first is a paradigm shift from knee-jerk electoral superintending to a proactive, punctilious, cultured ethic – politics after all, is a social science.
The other big change manifests in the conduct of a technologically-compliant INEC amid unforeseen contingencies; E.g. the procedural shortcomings and resort to manual upload of results to forestall a record 1.2 million attempts by mercenary hackers to hack INEC’s portal and compromise the results of the presidential and legislative elections.
“On the election day alone, we were able to block more than 200 attacks, and the next day, the attacks geometrically increased to about 1.2 million,” said the Managing Director (MD) of Galaxy Backbone (GBB), Muhammad Abubakar. The GBB is the federal government’s information technology and shared services provider.
Thus it may be said that under Yakubu’s leadership, INEC successfully neutered criminal cyber attacks on the commission’s portal.
It’s debatable whether these changes have been good for Nigeria. There’s little doubt, however, that Yakubu has midwifed a remarkable electoral process, albeit suitable and improvable, for keeping Nigeria afloat through the most competitive transitions ever.
Nonetheless, he suffers virulent criticism of his oversight functions as INEC boss. Critics and supporters of the PDP and LP accuse him of rigging the election for All Progressives Congress (APC)’s Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who emerged victorious polling a total of 8,794,726 votes to defeat his closest rival, Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), who scored 6,984,520 to emerge second. Labour Party’s Peter Obi scored 6,101,533 votes to come third and Rabiu Kwankwaso of New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) scored 1,496,687 to emerge fourth.
Against the backdrop of the criticisms, however, it must be said that there are no perfect elections even in the Western world. The United States, for instance, suffers major challenges in its electoral processes including deepening party polarization over electoral procedures, the vulnerability of electronic records to hacking, and the impact of deregulating campaign spending, compounding the lack of professional standards of electoral management.
There is no gainsaying the 2016 US presidential elections deepened the cracks and hinted at a pervasive problem in the conduct of American elections. Hillary Clinton (Democratic Party) and ex-president Donald Trump (Republican Party) battled through exceptionally bitter primary and general election campaigns polarizing the electorate and generating serious claims of vote rigging, voter suppression, fraud and hacking. The flaws in America’s electoral process have become more apparent over the decades. The contemporary tipping point in public awareness occurred during the 2000 Bush-versus-Gore election count. Several major structural weaknesses, thereafter, exacerbated doubts in the 2016 campaign, thereby worsening party divisions and corroding public trust in America’s electoral process.
Such anomaly has been experienced by some other major democracies of the world. Hence it is mischievous of a few foreign media to cast aspersions on Nigeria’s electoral process while deliberately ignoring the electoral challenges of their homeland.
Since 2019, INEC facilities across the country have been attacked over 50 times while its officials and security personnel have been injured and killed, in some cases, especially in Nigeria’s southeast.
Speaking at the Chatham House, recently, Yakubu stated that “The 2022 attacks constitute the deepest concerns for the Commission…This is so not only because they are increasingly happening closer to the general election, but also because some of them seem to be coordinated.”
But while violence constituted a major challenge to credible elections in this year’s elections, another hindrance manifested in the scarcity of funding generated by the ill-fated currency redesign and naira swap policy initiated by CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, with the backing of the incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari. This impoverished the masses and aggravated widespread insecurity as voter divides resorted to extreme violence to register their resentment.
Notwithstanding, Yakubu assured that INEC has put in place measures to ensure safe, free and credible elections. The commission’s deployment of technology to protect its portal and the polling exercise via the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) was widely hailed as a visionary step well suited to Nigeria’s clamour for a free and fair election.
But meeting with Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) from all over the country in Abuja, following the February 25 presidential polls, Yakubu noyed that, “The issues of logistics, election technology, behaviour of some election personnel at different levels, attitude of some party agents and supporters added to the extremely challenging environment in which elections are usually held in Nigeria.”
Citing that “a lot of lessons have been learnt,” Yakubu stated that INEC will correct its shortcomings en route to the polls for the 28 State governorship seats and the 993 State Houses of Assembly seats.
He said, “On Election Day technology, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) will once again be deployed for voter accreditation and result management. The deployment of BVAS has gone a long way to sanitise voter accreditation as can be seen from the result of recent elections. Since last week, the Commission has intensified the review of the technology to ensure that glitches experienced, particularly with the upload of results are rectified. We are confident that going forward the system will run optimally.”
Such a pledge by the INEC boss should be enough reassurance to stakeholders in the election. As Yakubu leads the charge of administration and supervision of the March 18 gubernatorial and state legislature elections, the onus is on him, no doubt, to guarantee an efficient exercise.