WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER
info@medaner.com, justme4justice@yahoo.com
Well, the 2023 general elections ended last weekend with the statewide elections; expectedly, winners and losers alike have emerged. There were jubilations and lamentations, varying moods and responses across the states. And there are questions that beg for answers; realities that must be brought to the fore for the service of understanding what the 2023 elections have brought to the table for Nigeria and Nigerians in terms of factors that matters to the sanctity of the national processes; factors that talk to the unity and peace of the country and the legitimacy of its government.
There were so many expectations from the 2023 elections. The drives from many quarters to have the electoral acts passed and signed by the president began the manifestation of the many expectations. The discussions surrounding the emergence of the BVAS device and electronic transmission of results via IReV portal were a part of the front burners.
The process began with many dramas; from the party primaries, the tensed and even mix of healthy and unhealthy campaigns from many parties’ camps and the eventual abuse of demographic factors within the country; and now, it has ended with outcomes that many have chosen to reject for whatever reasons they have and are giving.
So many gains and yet so many setbacks; so many submissions and so many lessons. We must move away from these elections with a readiness to learn from the positives and the misdeeds alike in preparation for all future election outings in the country.
Again and again, the question has been asked, if the 2023 elections were free, fair and credible enough to receive a pat from Nigerians. The answer would remain relative in a partitioned community as ours with partitioned and differing emotional support and deep biases for pre-selected outcomes. It would be a near impossible task to get certain losers to see realities and appreciate the many positives thrown up by the just concluded elections; and there are many positives.
Top of the list of misunderstanding and grievances of a section of the country about the just concluded elections arise from the issue of election result uploading by BVAS and transmission to the IREV. There have been differing interpretations of the Electoral Act to the effect of the possibility of INEC erring or otherwise on the subject matter. Unfortunately, we have also learned men across the country taking opposing sides on the topic and fueling the already volatile discussion. Nigerians need proper education on the exact interpretation of the Electoral Act; and perhaps, maybe a sizeable number of the uninformed and the disillusioned citizens would regain confidence in the system if they could realise they have been misled by emotions and rushed propagandas.
The Electoral Act is bold in its provisions that the electoral umpire, INEC would coordinate the elections including, handling results transmission or transfer as the case maybe in full accordance to its regulation; so, the question to ask at this point would be what have been provided for with regard to in INEC election regulation and which INEC repeatedly promised Nigerians to strictly abide by the provisions. The INEC regulation regarding the handling of election results is in three parts; one and the first states that after counting of ballot, the results must be recorded in form EC08A and duly signed by a polling unit (PU) chief election officer and the various agents of the partaking political parties. Secondly, the signed form EC08A must be scanned with the BVAS devices and uploaded on the IReV portal, that is, INEC Result Viewing Portal. The third states that the duly signed form EC08, and the BVAS devices in deployment must be packaged and transported to the ward collation center where they are submitted to the ward collation officer.
So, the question is, did INEC comply with its regulations? Let’s pick it one after the other; one, the EC08A forms were duly filled and signatures appended in PUs as prescribed. So, regulation one was fulfilled. Secondly, signed EC08A forms were scanned with the BVAS devices at all PUs but were not uploaded real time to the IReV as expected by many citizens. This is where many parted with the system in ignorance; the regulation says PU results would be transmitted to the IReV portal, but did not expressly state in real time; in practice, what is sacrosanct is that all scanned results on BVAS must be uploaded to IReV. Nigerians did have so much expectation and were fixated on electronically transmitted results but INEC till now and by law has not disregarded any of its regulation. The third; all the form EC08A and packaged BVAS were submitted to the designated officers at the ward collation center and onward collation up to the State and national Collation center in the case of Presidential Election respectively .
Another question then pops up; is it possible that non-transmitting of the results real time upset the genuineness of the election projected results? Definitely not. The law also prescribes that form EC08A must be relied on at the collation centers in collating results manually up to the State and national collation center respectively. The most important document in the log is the form EC08 duly signed as prescribed. In a situation where this form is not found or becomes contentious, the agency would resort to accessing copies of the results from the political parties or the police who are given copies of the polling units’ results. By this, the uploaded results on the IReV portal are merely for the public view, comparison and evaluation if they are able to do so, and of no importance in the collation duties of INEC as assumed by many.
I would also state clearly that all political parties, particularly the most active ones, are in possession of copies of the election results from all the polling units state and nationwide or as it may affect them. At whatever time the results are uploaded on the IReV portal, comparison can always be made and allowable actions taken to redress errors if any had been committed.
A very disturbing pattern that was obvious in the just concluded elections is the awful regional and tribal colourations of the outcomes. As much as we preach unity and togetherness, and we hope we would get to the point where our regions, tribal affiliations and even religions would play minimal role in our practice of democracy, it has again turnout, that these divisive demographics are the major influencers of the responses and outcomes of our polls. We witnessed on a very large and disturbing level, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, who apparently explored and exploited regional affiliation of the Nigeria population and went too deep into capitalising on our religious differences to carve out a virulent and equally violent support base for his presidential candidacy. Nigeria witnessed this disturbing situation where he and his covert backers prevailed on the Christian associations and clergies, who turned their pulpits to campaign podiums and sites for the propagation of religious hate messages. We got low to the point that the candidate told the Christian to take back their country. It was a low for the country; a return to the errors we thought we could finally eliminate from our system as we approached a new dispensation of national healing and togetherness.
The victory of the Labour Party candidate in Lagos, as sweet as it may be to the nation’s political evolution, is actually a negative because it emanated from a systemic error in the balancing of the country, particularly with regard to regional advancements. The historical victory was carved out of a combination of religious and tribal display of bigotry. The victory came from some segments of the population that planned a silent coup to upset the seat of Yoruba democracy. The Yoruba see this as a clever and painstaking tribal attack on the Yoruba nation; but much more a signal to the bottled regional superiority war among the Nigeria regions and tribal men.
The ensuing Lagos state governorship elections became a reflection of the extent and intents of the players and participants in the game. It appeared at a time, it wasn’t democracy again but a war of tribal, religious and regional control. The Obedients, having the full backing of their self-styled lord Obi, became hell bent on displacing the Yoruba leadership in Lagos, and leveraging on the presidential win in the state grew wings to the extent of publicly declaring that Lagos state is a ‘no man’s land.’ That the Yorubas considered it an absurd; as a believer in One Nigeria, I find it impossible to understand the basis for the Obedients to feel so confident to encroach into the basic life of a people in such a way that angers all, particularly the sensibility of the dominant Yorubas in the South West. It is a fact that no state or region in the country would accept such without corresponding effect ; and definitely the South-East, where even an Ebonyi man would not be allowed to contest in Enugu state. It was an affront, but it has become yet a fundamental challenge to the entire country. We will have to deal with the aftermath of this ugly development, both oral outbursts and actions from all the tension points.
This is as the Labour Party or its leadership allowed it to be hijacked by political opportunists who leveraged on the ruling party’s same religion ticket to evoke and organise ethno-religious sentiments among the people of Southwest. At the end, the support for the messiah figure in Peter Obi was not about capacity or antecedents but divisive religious and regional affiliation sentiments that became virulent before, during and after the elections.
The 2023 elections would be very difficult to analyse; we just saw an election that appears to present a large level of citizens’ awareness and desire to effect changes via the power of the ballot. The elections have ended and we have continued to see the same outburst that characterised the pre-election time, but the figure of election participation has a different story to tell. In reality, the 2023 elections recorded the highest level of voters’ apathy in the country since the 1999 elections. INEC announced that over 90 million Nigerians registered as voters; we had expected a massive voting population but ended up recording 77.78 voters’ apathy in the presidential election. Where were the populations who wanted to take back the country? Was it just a social media gyration that has no bearing with reality? Has Nigeria been swindled of a chance to have a real reawakening? These and many questions seriously beg for answers.
Another development worthy of discussion as far as the 2023 elections is concerned is the rise and impact of the Obedient movement in the entire permutation of events before, during and now, after the elections. It is not panning out what the movement was really about; results and outcomes of polls were a complete deviation from what such a movement could have achieved if it is for real. After a series of unbelievable wins at unexpected sections of the country during the presidential election and for the first time, having a third party having such a strong, formidable appearance in an election at that level in the country, the party and the movement went out of fire and couldn’t achieve anything at the state level where wins could have strategically become the structure the party has always been accused of lacking. Where were the same people that gave the Labour Party above 90 percent of the presidential ballots in the entire South-east states, and overwhelming victories in the South-South states? It appears the Obedient movement is just as it was summarised, “a fluke and spaghetti movement.”
There is so much to be studied about the 2023 elections across the country; the result itself, the discussions around voters’ intimidations, the glaring variation in the presidential and governorship election outlooks. There would be the need to ask and answer the question, as to what extent the 2023 elections is peaceful, free, fair and credible based on recorded realities and facts and without spaces for emotional biases. We must learn every lesson embedded in the election term and we must evolve a better Nigeria from it.
GOD BLESS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA!
