Every vote must count in Nigeria –Yakubu, INEC chair

By Willy Eya

National chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof Mahmood Yakubu has expressed determination to ensure that every vote in Nigeria counts despite the challenges the electoral body has faced under his leadership. In an interactive session with a select group of journalists in Lagos recently, he assured that elections in the country would continue to improve. Excerpts:
With the challenges facing INEC under your leadership, what are you doing to make elections better?
We are looking at the possibility of making the Card Reader facilitate e-collation and e-transmission of results from the polling units. We have recognized that this is one of the weakest links now in our electoral process; what happens to the results after the ballots has been cast and counted and the result travels from the polling unit to the INEC Ward Collation, to the local government, and to eventually the collation centre. It is so that what actually transpires at the polling unit is what is eventually used for the declaration of results.
Secondly, we want to make the process easy, faster and accurate. You know elsewhere they conduct elections and you see it on television and by sunset or by midnight, you will see much of the results in; we are not there yet but there is some hope one day we will get there. We are inching closer to that. Every ballot in this country must count. This is the commitment of this INEC. Every ballot in Nigeria must count and every polling unit must be accountable. The most important unit on the Election Day is the polling unit; that is the place where voters go and cast their votes. So, what they do at the polling units must be recognized, respected and must determine the final outcome of elections.
We have had other challenges and one of the major ones now is inconclusive elections. And I have heard some of the generalizations on the print and the electronic media that all elections conducted by this INEC ended up inconclusively. Then I asked how many elections have we conducted that you are saying all are inconclusive. It may interest you to know that so far, as at today, this INEC has conducted 137 elections and this is the highest number of elections conducted by any electoral commission before now outside the context of general elections. We had no honeymoon shortly after we were sworn in. The first election came in barely two weeks after we were sworn in and it came with its own peculiar challenges. It challenged our electoral jurisprudence; there was no guidance under the constitution, no guidance under the Electoral Act, no guidance under any guideline. Where a candidate dies before the announcement or the declaration of results, what the Electoral Act envisages is a candidate dying before the commencement of poll. In this case, INEC has the powers under the law to count among the elections; allow the party of the deceased candidate to substitute and then conduct the elections within two weeks. It was the most proximate sections of the Electoral Act that we could rely upon to get out of the Kogi conondrum. And the rest they say is history.
We had rerun elections arising from court nullification of elections after the 2015 general elections for which were 80 of such. Then we have natural end of tenure elections – Kogi, Bayelsa, the FCT Area Council elections.
When is INEC going to commence continuous voters’ registration?
Very soon, we will roll out the national continuous voters’ registration exercise. You may have also noticed that in state wide elections; Kogi, Bayelsa and most recently Edo and Ondo; Edo on September 10 and Ondo November 26, we rolled out and conducted the continuous voter’s registration in these states and the FCT as well as when we conducted the FCT Area Council elections. But the one involving the general country will roll out soon because it is supposed to be continuous.
What about the issue of uncollected PVCs?
There is also an issue arising from the 2015 general elections. The uncollected PVCs for which we have over a million uncollected nationwide. We had a meeting with the Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) and we said they should find means of distributing the uncollected cards and they have been doing so at the local government level as we speak nationwide. And we also requested all RECs nationwide to be submitting monthly reports to the commission and the reports of the collection are not very encouraging at all. For instance Ondo State, which is a state facing governorship election in November, and for the period, only 162 cards were collected. In fact, in some local governments, none at all collected. But we have directed the Director ICT to look at the details captured at the point of registration; you know each PVC has the PIN number and the voter identification number and at the point of registration, the registrars indicated their telephone numbers. So we said they should use the telephone numbers provided and send bulk SMS and tell people where they can collect so that at least, we can put the last exercise behind us when we face the exercise ahead of us.
So many people in Edo, Ondo, Bayelsa, Kogi and the FCT actually registered more than once. There were some who registered before and they went and registered again believing that the INEC PVC is the cheapest and fastest means of national identification today. Of course, the national I.D card you don’t pay but it takes a lot of time before you get it. So we will roll out the continuous voter’s registration exercise and we will also ensure that we distribute as much as possible the outstanding PVCs. The state that recorded the least distribution nationwide is Ogun State and the reason then that the Commission gave was probably that some of those who did not claim their cards were students of tertiary institutions and you know Ogun State has the largest number of tertiary institutions in the country and so, some people may have graduated and that is the experience why some of the cards delivered before the last general election to Ogun State could not be collected.
One of the greatest challenges facing the INEC today, is that of inconclusive elections; what is really the cause of all these?
What is an inconclusive election? It is an election in which a winner has not emerged from the first ballot simple. Therefore, what do you do? You conduct supplementary elections to conclude the elections. Is it strange? It is not strange. Is it happening for the first time? No, it is not happening for the first time. In fact, take a head count, perhaps maybe few people can tell you when Nigeria recorded its first inconclusive election in recent democracy. Some of you would recall that the first inconclusive election was in 1979, the election that brought Shagari. Have you forgotten the mathematics of 19? What is two-third of 19? Is it twelve and two-third or thirteen? Eventually that election was decided not by FEDECO, the interim commission; it was determined by the courts, the court eventually determined the mathematics of two-third of 19. In 2011, two governorship elections were inconclusive – my own state Bauchi because of post-election violence in 2011. The governorship election was inconclusive and they concluded elections after two weeks. Have we forgotten Imo 2011? The governorship election was inconclusive; it was concluded after two weeks. In 2015, have we forgotten Imo again? The election was inconclusive and the election was concluded after two weeks. Taraba governorship was inconclusive in 2015 and concluded thereafter. In 2013 Anambra, was it conclusive? I recall also 2011, Chris Ngige and the late Dora Akunyili in the Senatorial election; it was inconclusive, it was concluded later. So there have been inconclusive elections. But at the time they occurred, they occurred in the context of general elections, so we hardly noticed that the elections were inconclusive. Recall also the difficulties encountered in previous elections when we were standing alone. So, they are actually difficult elections for us to conduct. I also wish to say that something happened in 2015 but were not taken into cognizance. Number one, we have strong political parties that have evolved but were not decreed by the government of the day. These are political parties that Nigerians are praying for at a time when we will have strong political parties rather than one big party and smaller parties. Now, we have two strong political parties. While you have two strong political parties fielding strong candidates, you are unlikely to have landslide in an election. Check the results of the last presidential election, the person declared winner won by the closest margin since 1999 – 2.5 million votes. So, we have strong parties fielding strong candidates.
In Kogi, it was a contest between an incumbent governor and a former governor. Bayelsa, it was a contest between an incumbent governor and a former governor. Elsewhere too, you will see that the contest was between an incumbent governor and a former governor. Secondly, the elections are getting better. Are we where we all hope for? Not yet, but we are inching closer.  Are the votes counting because this has also been the kind of prayers by Nigerians that may God take us or bring us to the place where the votes we actually cast at the polling unit will determine who wins or who loses in an election.
The votes are increasingly counting. I will give you an example. In one of the states which had its governorship election long time ago, four years earlier, the margin of victory between the candidate declared winner and the runner up was over four hundred thousand votes. When we conducted the supplementary election to conclude the governorship election in January this year, that margin shrank with a little about forty thousand. So, it is 10 per cent of the previous margin. So, the votes are really counting.
But in all the inconclusive elections, the major cause of inconclusive election is violence. And the level of violence determines the speed with which we were able to mobilize to go back and conclude the elections. In places like Ife Central where some people targeted two highly populated polling units, stole the ballot boxes, broke the plastic boxes and as they were running away with the boxes, unknown to us, they had bottles of ink in their pocket. So, they poured ink into the containers, shook the ballot boxes and dropped the boxes. We recovered the boxes later but couldn’t use the ballot papers but we were able to remobilize and went back the following day to conclude the elections.