Mahmoud Yakubu and the burden of history

There is no doubt that the supervision of the last Saturday’s Presidential and National Assembly election has dented the records of Mahmoud Yakubu, chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission( INEC).

The Nigerian electorate had participated in the Presidential election, following Mahmoud’s assurances that the election will not only be free,.fair and peaceful, but also credible.

But the conduct of the election fell short of expectations, following Yakubu’s inability to deploy the right processes and procedures as enunciated in the Electoral Act, 2022.

The transmission of results at the polling units is crucial, and imposes statutory obligations on INEC to upload polling units results on its portal.

This is because polling units results are the pyramid upon which other results are built, which required that the moment polls come to a close and the results are declared, the results must be uploaded on INEC server or portal.

Yakubu was accused of deliberately ignoring Paragraph 38 of INEC Manual 2022 made pursuant to the provisions of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 as amended and Section 149 of of the Electoral Act 2022 which provides that: “On completion of all the Polling Unit voting and results procedures, the Presiding Officer shall: (i) Electronically transmit or transfer the result of the Polling Unit, direct to the collation system as prescribed by the Commission.
(ii) Use the BVAS to upload a scanned copy of the EC8A to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV), as prescribed by the Commission.
(iii) Take the BVAS and the original copy of each of the forms in tamper evident envelope to the Registration Area/Ward Collation Officer, in the company of Security Agents.”

These breaches gave rise to allegations of compromise and bribery against him which may have also etched his name in vantage place in the book of infamy.

This came after huge amount of money voted for the exercise, the technology on which the confidence of Nigerian voters was boosted failed to deliver free, fair and credible election.

Yakubu has been accused of deceiving Nigerians by promising that no other means of accreditation of voters would be acceptable and that result must be uploaded real time.

He continued to deny that INEC had been compromised ahead of the elections.

For instance, when in September, the Coalition of United Political Parties (CUPP) raised the alarm to an alleged plot to deactivate BVAS from INEC server and the plot to compromise the Commission’s database, Mahmoud Yakubu took the alarm as a vain cry.

In October last year, while dispelling the rumour around the BVAS, the INEC chairman, represented by Lawrence Bayode, director, ICT, answering questions from participants after presenting a paper on ‘INEC and the Challenges of ICT- The way forward,’ insisted that technology would be deployed to actualise a credible, fair and hitch-free general election.

He said: “As with every aspect of our national lives, adopting technologies into the electoral process is always met with challenges.

“One major challenge was the lack of a clear-cut legal framework supporting the deployment of technology by the Commission especially in the accreditation of voters and the voting process.”

He further said: “The deployment of the Smart Card Readers in 2015 and its use was faced with vanous challenges such as resistance to use in some isolated instances, snatching and destruction of devices, attempts to manipulate the use of the devices, and most prominently vanous judicial pronouncements on the legality of its use.”

Yakubu, on other occasions, personally reiterated the commitment of INEC to deploy the technology in the conduct of the elections.

When in October 2020 Buhari reappointed him for another term of five years, some Nigerians had kicked.

His appointment was renewed at a time when the Buhari administration and the APC government were performing poorly in matters of governance.

Some angry Nigerians had said that INEC was not independent since the President makes all the important decisions for the Commission.

Yakubu, a professor of Political Studies and International History, was first appointed on October 21, 2015.

A concerned citizen, who said she was pained at the delivery handed to Nigerians by the INEC, in-between sobs, asked: “Should we celebrate INEC chairman or condemn him?”

Read also: BVAS: INEC to rectify results upload glitches before governorship assembly polls

The man Yakubu

Born in Bauchi in 1962, Mahmoud, took over as Chairman of INEC on 21 October 2015, when he took over from Amina Zakari, who acted as Chairman, after the exit of Attahiru Jega.

After completing his basic and secondary school education at Kobi Primary School and Government Teachers College, Toro, he proceeded to the University of Sokoto, now Usman Danfodio University, where he obtained a first class degree in History.

He later proceeded to the Wolfson College, Cambridge, for his Masters degree, to study International Relations and later, Oxford University, to study Nigerian History for his Doctorate degree, on Bauchi State government scholarship in 1991.

The INEC Chairman, was appointed Executive Secretary ( ES) of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, by late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, in 2007

Yakubu’s tenure saw the establishment of the National Book Development Fund, that supported the development of 102 journals of professional associations.

During the 2014 National Conference, Mahmoud Yakubu was appointed by former President Goodluck Jonathan as the Assistant Secretary of Finance and Administration.

He will go down in history for conducting Nigeria’s worst polls, according to the opinions expressed by opposition parties who have accused him of rigging for the ruling party.

Contrary to expectations, the 2023 Presidential and National Assembly elections were marred by very poor organisation, severe logistical and operational failure, voter suppression, lack of essential electoral transparency, substantial disruption of voting, and several incidents of violence.

Nigerians who were initially assured of the best election ever, were later told by INEC that the election was marred by an alleged “system glitch that prevented uploads of the Presidential election results to the INEC Results Viewing (iReV) Portal.”

These were in contradiction to the 2022 Electoral Act as amended which was signed on February 25, 2022.

The election also suffered from poor communication gaps between INEC and some of its staff, as some said its citizens contact numbers did not work and electoral officials in some parts of the country claimed they had received orders not to transmit results.