Certainly the much anticipated March 28 presidential and National Assembly elections may have come and gone but the echoes from that exercise is one that will surely linger for a very long time to come.
The election also came with mixed reactions not necessarily about the result or who won or lost but concerning the conduct of the exercise by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the activities of other stakeholders involved in the electoral process including the security agencies.
From all indications, there is this urgent need for the electoral body to take a critical look at its operations especially given the way the much celebrated smart card reader performed on the election day; a development that forced INEC to make a belated adjustment to the electoral guidelines by calling for the accreditation of voters manually.
Making card readers functional
In fact, the card reader was a huge embarrassment to INEC in most places as it failed to read the Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) of many people including that of President Goodluck Jonathan and his wife Patience.
May be because it happened to the number one citizen of the country, would INEC have been patient enough to bring another card reader when the first one failed to read the bio date of the voter if he was just an ordinary citizen?In his polling unit in Otuoke, President Jonathan was visibly embarrassed and livid when after four card readers were brought, none of them could capture his finger prints, which resulted in the issuance of the incident form to him and his wife.
Another lapse that INEC must quickly address before the April 11 governorship and state assembly elections is the issue of logistics. It is worrisome that in most places it took the commission over five to seven hours to send materials and personnel to the polling units even as hundreds of voters were on ground waiting.
Early arrival of electoral officers, materials
In Abuja, for instance, it was a near total failure as materials and the ad-hoc staff arrived very late and this forced elections to extend into the night in most of the polling units. INEC has blamed the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) for the delay but Nigerians will like to see an improvement in the subsequent elections.
Retraining of electoral officers
INEC must also do more in the training and retraining of the staff whether ad-hoc or not. There were some embarrassing reports that in some places the electoral officials did not know how to operate the card reader machines while there was another sorry story of officials forgetting to bring the card reader. It is like a farmer forgetting his hoe and cutlass while heading to the farm. Everybody also saw how the electoral officer who attended to President Jonathan was very uneasy as if he was not given any prior training of how to handle the device.
Security operatives: One other area that needs attention is the proper enlightenment of the security operatives on how to function on Election Day. Though, most of them performed very creditably, but a few others were unnecessarily overzealous.
I encounter this soldier who stopped me on my way to INEC office around 9am, and he said I was wrong to be on the road after 8am. Even as I wore my INEC approved accreditation jacket for the media with an approved car pass, the soldier said he was told not to allow anybody on the road after 8am.
All my explanations that I was a journalist and not an INEC staff did not impress him until after he was begged by other people he stopped including those who were going to where they registered before he allowed us to continue with our journey.
Now haven talked much about the issues we experienced with the card reader, most Nigerians who spoke on the Election Day still believed that despite all the imperfections, the device was better than when it was not introduced. The argument is that it has the tendency to reduce to its barest minimum the incidents of rigging in elections.
INEC who felt embarrassed even after apologizing to the President for his experience at the polling unit has promised to investigate what actually happened.
Possible sabotage
The commission fell short of talking about a possible sabotage but the body language of the national commissioners who briefed the media during the election said it all.
Another puzzle is why the widespread failure of the device which during the demonstration in 12 states only had issues with the capturing of finger prints of some people and not the widespread failure to read the PVCs.
Provision of materials: The issue of River State is also one that INEC must make a categorical statement on because the accusation of a likely deliberate plot to favour some candidates against some others is not a good one. Reports that INEC did not provide the result sheets in many places should be addressed.
In a television interview on Saturday, INEC Chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega, in spite the imperfections said he was hopeful of an election that will be better than the 2011 edition that was said to have been widely free, fair and credible. He argued that the areas that were badly affected by the failure of the card reader which forced the postponement were 305 polling units out of the nearly 120,000.
Apart from addressing these challenges Nigerians want a system that will guarantee their safety and this reflected in the large turnout of voters despite the palpable fear about the outbreak of crisis.
VANGUARD
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