The 2023 election will be conducted under the leadership of Prof Mahmud Yakubu, the first INEC head to be appointed for a second term in the country’s history, with an increasingly professional commission at his disposal even if there are concerns that this could be undermined by the presidential appointees to replace 19 Resident Electoral Commissioners – responsible for overseeing state elections – whose terms expire before the 2023 polls. The 2022 Electoral Act introduces a number of changes that experts believe will continue to improve the credibility of elections. These include the early appropriation and release of election funds; INEC is to get its funding at least one year to the general election. INEC is now required to issue the notice of polls 360 days before a general election. This entails an early release of the timetable and schedule of activities to be undertaken by the commission.
The campaign period of 150 days provides candidates with the chance to engage voters extensively across the country. Debates over the legality of Smart Card Readers, the device previously used for accreditation of voters, is settled by Section 47 of the Act which empowers INEC to use the Smart Card Reader or any other device for accreditation. Political parties must now complete their primaries and submit the names of candidates 180 days to the general election. This gives the commission sufficient time to produce the materials required for the general election, such as ballot papers. The Act empowers INEC to determine the form of transmission or transfer of election results, opening up the possibility of electronic transmission. INEC is now mandated to ensure that persons with disabilities and other vulnerabilities are properly assisted to participate in the process.
New limits have been set for amounts of money that political parties and candidates can spend in elections, as well as the amounts that can be donated to them. However, instead of diminishing the role of money in politics, the Act increased the campaign financing limit from N1 to N5 billion for presidential candidates, with ceilings raised across contested positions. Furthermore, lax compliance with, and enforcement of, campaign finance regulations has not been addressed. Unlike the 2010 Electoral Act which defined over voting in terms of registered voters, the new Act defines it in terms of accredited voters. This will greatly reduce the challenge encountered by the commission whereby elections are easily declared inconclusive because of tying it to registered voters, even where turnout is very low.
The Act empowers the commission to review the result of elections to ensure that declarations are made voluntarily and that results emerge in accordance with the law, regulations, guidelines and manuals for elections. This allows INEC to review results made under duress or financial inducements. In previous years, parties and candidates were able to hold returning officers at gunpoint or gave financial gratification to falsify results.
Read Also: INEC cancels 1m voter registrations
Related to the Electoral Act are the Regulations, Guidelines and Manuals introduced and revised by the commission for election management. Together with the constitution and the Electoral Act, they constitute the legal framework on which the election will be conducted. These strengthen several areas of administering the election, such as the grounds for declaring an election inconclusive, which has been a major contentious issue in past elections, as well as the procedure for electronic transmission of votes. The technological components being proposed by INEC under the law include the use of Bi-modal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), a result viewing platform and the electronic transmission of results which many pundits believe will cure the chaotic, vulnerable to manipulation and unnecessarily opaque result processing and aggregating systems.
At the behest of the public, INEC continues to gradually introduce technology innovations in the electoral process. This has increased the efficiency and integrity in several areas of the electoral process, including registration and identification of voters, accreditation of voters, results management, management of candidates, election observers, media and party agents, security and safety, public information and education, electoral knowledge production, election logistics and election staff recruitment. The introduction of the result viewing platform (IReV), for example, aims to ensure that results can be tabulated, and projections made about winners. But INEC must continue to strengthen its capacity to deploy technology and invest in cybersecurity. While technology is positive, it is not a silver bullet to cure Nigeria’s zero-sum political game with desperate and disparate actors out to win at all costs. Nonetheless, the effective deployment, or otherwise, of technology will be a strong factor in determining the legitimacy and outcome of the elections.
Administration of the 2023 general election is a significant logistical operation. The commission is set to deploy in 176,846 polling units, a 56,872 increase on 2019. This will require the recruitment and training of close to 1.5 million poll and security officials, about four times the size of the Nigerian military. Road vehicles are the predominant mode of transportation and account for 80% of goods traffic in Nigeria, but only 20% of the road network in the country is paved. Improvements have been made regarding internet access, but electricity is still largely absent for the majority of Nigerians. If roads are impassable, electricity epileptic and communication infrastructure rudimentary, this will affect the quality of election administration. For example, INEC uses secondary schools across the country as registration area camps, the last staging posts for election-day deployment. Most of these schools are in a terrible state and INEC will have to provide electricity, toilet facilities and water for its staff to be able to use those schools. These are obstacles that INEC must overcome as it conducts elections across the country.
- Barrister Hassan is Director at the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD).