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The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) needs your help to erase from the voter register the names of deceased people. INEC said public support was necessary because it could not access, directly, valid data on births and deaths that would enable it to identify and delete the names from the register.
It is not only the existence of names of dead people in the voter register that would pose obstacles to free, fair, and transparent conduct of the 2023 general election. Another persistent impediment is the participation of underage people in the elections. These two problems will invalidate the outcomes of any election conducted in the country. So far, INEC has not found a way to prevent underage people from registering and casting their votes during elections.
The implications of maintaining and using compromised voter register during national elections are severe. A dubious or defective voter register is as good as no register. It will open a floodgate of post-election petitions and agitations.
If INEC is keen to validate the election process and make it transparent, convincing, and reliable, it has a lot of work to do to achieve those objectives. There are so many obstacles that have not allowed free and fair conduct of elections in Nigeria. And those impediments are deliberately engineered by election supervisors, candidates contesting elections, as well as party agents and security officials.
What INEC is doing or attempting to do by seeking public support to update the voter register is equivalent to evading its obligations. INEC must take responsibility for the success or failure of every election.
In the Punch edition of Saturday, January 1, 2022, INEC national commissioner and chairman of its Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, said the organisation could not delete names of deceased people from the voter register erratically and unsystematically. He requested the public to assist INEC in identifying and deleting the names of dead people from the register.
Okoye said: “The commission displays the voter register for claims and objections but few Nigerians pay attention to the process. Nigerians must assist the commission to clean up the voter register by coming forward to point out deceased individuals or those that are not supposed to be in the voter register. Secondly, the country does not have reliable data of births and deaths and the commission cannot engage in arbitrary removal of the names of individuals it suspects are deceased…We as a people and as a country must not condone and or connive in community-aided and politically-motivated underage registration.”
Okoye’s request is bizarre. The job of deleting names of dead people from the voter register has never been the responsibility of the Nigerian public. The National Population Commission (NPC) is the appropriate agency of government to undertake that task.
Nevertheless, asking the NPC for accurate information on births and deaths will yield no valuable data. Records relating to births and deaths in Nigeria that are produced by the NPC are unreliable, statistically unrepresentative, outdated, widely unavailable and, even if they are obtainable, they could easily be contested in courts. When was the last time the NPC conducted a valid, acceptable, and accurate population head count in the country?
The NPC exists in the past. It is allergic to doing business that is well-timed. It has not lived up to public expectations. It has not provided those helpful services for which it was set up. The NPC is yet to justify its existence. It is wrapped in bureaucratic tangle.
It seems that everywhere INEC turns for help, unavoidable hitches exist. The Punch reported that on September 24, 2021, INEC chairperson, Mahmood Yakubu, appealed to the NPC to furnish INEC with information relating to deceased persons. The essence of that is to enable INEC to update the voter register.
The appeal was made when the chairperson of the NPC, Isa Kwarra, visited Yakubu at the INEC headquarters. During that visit, Yakubu was reported to have said: “At present, technology cannot help us to identify and remove dead persons from the voter register. Therefore, I wish to once more appeal to the chairman of the NPC, in your capacity as the registrar of births and deaths in Nigeria, to periodically avail us of the data of deceased Nigerians…This is important so that we can use the official information from your commission to further clean up the voter register. Perhaps, you may wish to start by providing us with the list of prominent Nigerians who have passed on, civil and public servants compiled from the official records of government ministries, departments and agencies and other Nigerians from hospital and funeral records across the country.”
The inconsistency is emblematic of organisational confusion at INEC. The discrepancies are obvious. While Okoye, a senior commissioner at INEC, was requesting public support to clean up the voter register, INEC chairperson Yakubu was soliciting the assistance of the National Population Commission. Unfortunately, ordinary Nigerians do not keep official record of births and deaths in the country. It is the responsibility of the NPC, even though the NPC has no current and reliable record of births and deaths.
No matter what happens, INEC has a track record of inventing excuses for its inability to perform the job assigned to it as a competent election umpire. This is not the first time INEC would try to evade its responsibility. In July 2019, a few months after the general election, INEC chairperson Yakubu shocked the nation when he blamed fake news on social media for undermining the elections. It was a bizarre allegation that was not supported with credible evidence. It was difficult to make sense of Yakubu’s claim.
How could fake news and social media be held accountable for the awful conduct of the 2019 elections? Yakubu could not establish a close and logical link between fake news on social media and the misconducts that occurred at various polling booths and collation centres. How did social media or fake news influence the behaviour of election officials who collaborated with irresponsible and corrupt political party officials, security agents, and candidates contesting elections to undermine the election process?
More than one year after the 2019 general election, Yakubu shifted his position on the factors that undermined the elections. In November 2020, he said technology, rather than social media and fake news, created problems that damaged the credibility of the elections. This claim was made when INEC reviewed its performances during the 2019 elections.
Assessing the use of technology during elections, INEC said: “The growing use of technology in the planning of elections became a feature in our elections with the introduction of MRI in the voter registration process in 2006…Since then, INEC has increasingly deployed technology to address some of the key challenges in the management of electoral processes. However, the deployment of technology in electoral process is not without its challenges.”
One implication of all these contradictions is that Nigeria is likely to use a defective voter register during the 2023 general election. And that would further damage the credibility of the elections. Everyone must prepare for a rough ride before, during, and after next year’s elections
