Commonsense With Danjuma: INEC – Handicapped Or Intentionally Inept

 

Happy New Year all! I wish us all, violence free general elections in 2015.

 

 Enjoying the annual free BRT rides during the festive period, I caught up on my reading and availed myself of the many articles published by politicians and supporters of the PDP and the APC alike. I took stock of the primaries of both parties and the resultant disagreements in some cases. I discovered that though the APC had done transparent primaries, quite a few of the winners that emerged from the process have been replaced by the preferred candidates of certain godfathers/godmothers. I read that nearly all the governorship primaries within the PDP were being contested by members alleging rigging of the elections.

 

All I saw, read and heard, all point to the fact that the forth coming elections will be hotly contested and thus, required premium preparation by the arbiter and stellar performances on all the assigned voting days.

I began to carefully and critically consider the INEC; if its preparation has been premium and the probability that its performances on all assigned voting days will be stellar.

 

Without a doubt, a stellar performance must be preceded by premium preparation. INEC, by the evidence thus far, INEC has shown that its preparation has been anything but ‘premium’. With four years of preparation time, INEC, by its massive failure in the distribution of the permanent voter’s cards to electorates who registered pre-2011 elections, has put a huge question mark on its ability to conduct successful elections next month. 

 

In a particular instance, a voter who went to INEC offices in the Jibowu area of Lagos State, was informed that INEC had lost the data of 24 out of 28 polling units in the area. Consequently, those affected are most likely not going to be able to perform their civic right of voting next month. This development raised a lot of questions with me, especially due to my knowledge of database acquisition and maintenance.

 

The questions that arise are;

 

How did data get lost?

 

In 4 years since the last elections, why did INEC wait for the eve of another election before letting us know that data has been lost?

 

Was the INEC voter’s database hacked or was the lost data erased by a certain person or persons?

 

Did INEC not make a backup of the database, as is the 1st rule of database management?

 

The unsatisfactory answers to some of these questions and the total lack of answers to the others and more, leads me to reach a conclusion that INEC as an organization or certain individuals within the organization have been intentionally inept to ensure that the forth coming elections is unsuccessful and marred with voter apathy. To further compound an already bad situation, INEC’s response to the widespread issue of missing voter’s cards, was lukewarm at the onset and then became largely uncoordinated and therefore confusing, with different versions of solutions procedures being released to the people. As I write this column, this uncoordinated information dissemination proceed still persists, making one come to the sad conclusion that little, if anything at all, will be done to salvage the situation before next month.

 

Logistics and adequate security are the other essential ingredients that will make for successful elections. INEC, with its huge budgets, is responsible for the handling of its logistics; transportation, voting materials, recruitment of personnel, counting and dissemination of result information, all fall within logistics. INEC’s extremely poor performance in recent weeks, on the issue of distribution of permanent voter’s cards does not elicit any amount of confidence in their ability to organize and execute adequately the huge logistics that is necessary for successful general elections.

 

The general belief is that the forth coming elections will be hotly contested with a great probability of violence erupting in places. A clear indication of the likely hood of this happening was evident in the extreme violence that preceded the primaries. The responsibility of providing security to INEC officials during the conduct of the polls and securing the lives and property of Nigerians as they go about exercising their right to choose lies with the Nigerian Police Force. 

 

INEC had previously given figures of 60 million as the number of eligible voters within the country. The Nigerian Police Force has approximately 400,000 officers. If all these officers were to be deployed only towards election duties, we would have a ridiculous situation of 1 officer to 150 voting Nigerians on elections days. However, it has been reported that over 140,000 officers of the Nigerian Police Force are engaged in providing private security for government officials, government contractors or private citizens who pay Divisional Police Officers and/or Area Commanders to assign these officers to them as their private police. This illegal development is evident and fueled with the illegal acquisition of vehicles with sirens in all major cities across the country. Considering this idiocy, we will be presented with a situation with the ratio of 1 police officer to 230 voting Nigerians, if all the remaining 260,000 officers were deployed to election duties. It is clear that when we subtract the number of officers that belong to the higher echelons of the force and also the number of police officers that will be assigned to the normal police duties, the ratio of available police to provide security during the elections, compared to the expected voter turn-out leaves a sad taste of premonition of unchecked violence in one’s mouth. 

 

The two alternatives to the obvious inadequate police presence that will be at the polls will be a deployment of military personnel to complement the efforts o the Police force or the spacing out of the elections, such that all INEC’s resources and all support resources will be focused only on elections in maybe 6 states at any one time. As we have seen with the governorship elections in Ekiti and Osun states recently; the 2nd alternative produces successful elections as all attention and resources are focused towards them. Prior to INEC announcing the election time table, we had suggested this option to them and they, in their wisdom, rejected it for the congested time table they released. I have not heard that either of these options is being considered nor requested to salvage a situation which already looks dire, thus my apprehension at the conduct of the forth coming elections persist. 

 

With barely a month available to INEC to reappraise their preparations and to effect speedy corrections of errors that have been exposed, whilst they run stress checks on other procedures to determine their virility, the fact remains that; ultimately, when the elections have come and gone, Nigerians will be left to decide whether INEC was handicapped by the prevalence of bad institutions or if INEC was intentionally handicapped from within or from without.

 

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