• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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BusinessDay

Some thoughts on improving Nigeria’s election

APC alerts security over PDP plans to unleash violence ahead of Bayelsa, Kogi guber polls

This past election strengthened the argument for electoral reform. As we prepare for a new National Assembly to take charge, we must begin early to call for improvements in our electoral process.There were many issues that came up from the elections that demand urgent attention, but this piece covers just a few that address transparency.

For one thing, we have to standardize the use of the card readers. The new amendment passed by the NASS to Section 49 of the Electoral Act seeks to enshrine use of card readers in upcoming elections, but I believe that more work needs to be done before we do that. In the last election, the card readers were used in some places and not in others. Card readers are a great tool to check election malpractice because they help ensure that only accredited voters can cast votes, reducing the opportunity for any discrepancies in the vote count. However, when we leave it to the discretion of INEC officials on whether to use it or not, we remove the element of fairness and replace it with suspicion and a sense of disenfranchisement, which is the opposite of what our elections should engender. Card readers are a tool, and we have to use them properly for them to serve us all. We should either use them uniformly or not at all.

While we are on the subject of card readers, we also need to ensure that we create the structures that help us use the technology before we write it into our laws.The amendment that the President declined in August 2018 has a new section 25A that allows for electronic archiving of election results. There is also a new provision to keep a national registry of voters at the headquarters of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and an amendment to Section 18 on loss of a voter’s card states that a card can be replaced up to 30 days before an election, an improvement on the current 60 days. These are all good ideas, but they call to question what our current data management system looks like, specifically what Nigeria is doing to protect voter information from getting in the wrong hands. There is currently no law, for example, governing what any government agency does with Nigerians’ personal data. Government is also not officially mandated to share what happens with our information if any of their vast databases are corrupted or if there has been any breach. This is also true for Bank Verification Numbers (BVN) and data collected from Nigerians by telecommunications companies during registration.For this reason, any entity can sell user data to anyone who wants to buy it, be it for a bulk SMS marketing campaign or otherwise.

The dangers posed by shoddy data management are real. In October 2018, Arik’s database was hacked and over 600,000 customers’ email addresses, last and first four digits of ATM cards, business names, country of origin of purchase was leaked. A big part of how people come in contact with scammers is because our information is leaked in ways we often do not know. Improving visibility on these issues will be key to improve Nigerian government service delivery where the elections are concerned. As we think of how we can deploy card readers better, we must ensure that Nigerians’ data is protected.

Any amendment of the Electoral Act must also seek to address the sharp increase in cancelled votes and work towards reducing that number. In 2019, we recorded 1,084,358 cancelled votes across 1175 polling units in 18 States, compared to 844,519 votes rejected out of the 29,432,083 votes cast in 2015.The cancelations were sometimes the result of sharp practices that saw the number of votes cast higher than the number of accredited voters, but it was often the result of violence meted out against ordinary Nigerians that claimed many lives across the country. A lot of the people directly in harm’s way are youth service corps members, many of whom were not adequately taken care of during the unplanned-for period where the elections were postponed. The welfare and safety of ordinary Nigerians must be ensured during the electoral process, and there is a need to develop and document policies on this that take into account all scenarios so that INEC can act proactively.

The current Act allows parties to hold direct or indirect primaries, and the proposed Amendment tries to add some transparency while attempting to control the arbitrary cost of nomination fees and place caps on campaign financing. However, Nigeria has long since had regulations on campaign finance that have never been followed. Moreover, there is simply no political will to do this in a way that will not be politically motivated. Realistically speaking, INEC should direct its energies to helping ensure that political parties actually hold primaries and should be willing to nullify a candidacy if direct primaries are not held. It is arguably easier to control whether primaries are held or not, than whether or not a political party bigwig spent an obscene amount to get elected. INEC can and should do more to use its powers and enforce these measures to help improve transparency in our political parties, because parties will not do it themselves and prospective candidates can only really put up with whatever their party throws their way.

The preparation for 2023 national elections must begin now, with all public sector and civil society stakeholders holding INEC, the National Assembly and the Presidency to account. This past election was not an improvement on the previous ones, but the best time to prepare for the next elections is years, not months, before you have one.

 

Saratu Abiola

Saratu Abiola is a writer based in Abuja. Her interests include governance, media, literature and socio-political issues.