From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
This weekend, precisely on Saturday, the re-run and bye-elections, holding across many parts of the country, will finally bring to a conclusion the series of electoral activities for the 2023 general elections which started February 25, last year with the presidential and National Assembly elections.
The forthcoming elections are majorly offshoot of the inconclusive polls or voided elections due to court action and or deaths of the legislators involved in the conducted 2023 poll.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), in succinctly capturing the nature of the elections holding this weekend disclosed that they will be in two categories.
The first category, according to the commission, would be the bye-elections arising from the death or resignation of members of the National and State legislative Houses of Assemblies. These, it announced, affected two senatorial districts, four federal and three state Assembly constituencies while the second is the re-run elections by order of Election Petition Appeal Tribunals.
Before now, the elections affected 35 national and state constituencies. But after the commission was served with four additional orders of the Court of Appeal recently in respect of Yabo/Shagari federal constituency of Sokoto state, Madara/Chinade state constituency of Bauchi state as well as Kudan and Kauru/Chawai state constituencies of Kaduna state, it brings the total number of affected constituencies to 39.
It translated to 2.6 per cent of the 1,491 constituencies for which elections were conducted nationwide in the 2023 general election. Nine bye-elections, according to the statistics from the commission, are fresh ones covering the entire constituencies. However, except for three constituencies (Plateau North senatorial district and Jos North/Bassa federal constituency in Plateau state and Kachia/Kagarko federal constituency in Kaduna state), the re-run elections are to be held in a few polling units.
The implication is that the conduct of the re-run and bye-elections should be very seamless since only one polling unit is affected in an entire federal or state constituency in some cases. And as expected, INEC has, as usual, assured and reassured of its readiness to conduct the elections.
To match words with action, apart from perfecting the logistics, deploying election materials and accrediting the media and election observers, security agencies have also confirmed conducting all the necessary threat analyses and willingness to deploy personnel to the affected areas to combat the threats during the polls.
Conscious of the fact that the commission may have betrayed the confidence and trust of many Nigerians during the conduct of the 2023 general election, INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, in his remarks at the commission’s extraordinary emergency meeting with Inter-Agency Consultative Committee on Election Security (ICCES), expressed fears of insecurity still posing serious menace to the process of conducting elections in the country.
In what appeared as raising doubts and reservations ahead of the elections, Yakubu said: “As you are all aware, election is a multi-stakeholder responsibility. INEC has a role to play. So too are other stakeholders. As security agencies, it is your responsibility to secure the environment to enable us to deploy personnel and materials, the protection of observers, the media as well as the polling and collation agents representing the political parties and candidates.
“Without a secure and peaceful environment, the conduct of credible elections is imperilled. From experience, the conduct of isolated elections such as bye-elections and re-run elections can be very challenging. We must pay attention to the potential for disruptive behaviour by some candidates and their supporters.
“A re-run election conducted in one PU or a handful of PUs can be severely disrupted by acts of thuggery knowing full well that these few locations will determine the outcome of the election.
“Arising from the reports we received from the states, concerns have been raised about the impact of the prevailing insecurity in some states on the conduct of the elections, made worse by incendiary statements by some political actors. We will present such concerns and reports for appropriate security response.”
Yakubu, while admitting pressure conducting elections in the country, said: “What many people do not realise is that there is no election season in Nigeria any longer. Elections are held throughout the year between one general election and another. This adds to the enormous pressure on both INEC and the security agencies.
“For instance, in addition to the bye-elections and re-run elections holding this weekend, the commission has also released the timetable and schedule of activities for the two off-cycle governorship elections in Edo State scheduled for September 21, 2024, and Ondo State holding November 16, 2024.
“Your task as members of ICCES is to ensure security for the elections. For this reason, the commission has already provided to the Nigeria Police Force, as the lead agency in election security, the full information of the locations where the elections will be held, broken down by states, Local Government Areas, Registration Areas/Wards and PUs. We have similarly provided the number of registered voters and Permanent Voters’ Cards (PVCs) collected in each PU.”
Bringing a message of assurances and readiness during the extraordinary meeting, both the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Kayode Egbetukun, and the National Security Adviser (NSA), Nuhu Ribadu, confirmed the threat analysis but promised their readiness to deploy accordingly to ensure a peaceful, transparent poll.
The IGP, in his comments, promised: “We want to assure Nigerians that we are on top of the situation. We have conducted threat analysis in all 26 states where the elections are going to take place. We are going to deploy according to the threat assessment.
“We are also going to deploy adequately and massively for these elections just like we did in the last off-season governorship elections in the three states of Imo, Bayelsa and Kogi,” the IGP assured.
In his remarks, the NSA, represented by a Director in the agency, Hassan Abdullahi, said that; “the office of the NSA and security agencies under the platform of ICCES will sustain collaboration with INEC to ensure elections are conducted in a secure and peaceful environment.
“In this regard, the coordination of security operations, deployment of personnel and adoption of proactive security measures would be paramount,” he reassured.
Judging by their declarations, marginal improvements will, expectedly, be recorded during the poll. It will be noticeable in the areas of deployment of the required election materials, their early arrival at the voting centres, configuration and improvement in the efficiency of the deployed technologies, provision of power and internet facilities, and perhaps the usual guarantees by the security agencies to protect the process.
In retrospect, assurances of readiness by the commission have never been in short supply. On the flip side, it is usually the implementation of the arrangements it has put in place during the day of the elections that has always constituted the major challenges.
Yes, the commission has previously promised top-notch preparations for elections in addition to the expression of readiness to deliver, but the execution of the lofty arrangements has always been the point of departure and concern to many political watchers.
Experiences of the elections the commission conducted in the recent past, beginning with the 2023 general elections to the ignoble off-cycle governorship poll in the three states of Imo, Bayelsa and Kogi, have confirmed that the commission may have been everything but impressive in delivering that responsibility.
Under the commission’s supervision, the celebrated anti-rigging latest election technologies, like the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal, it usually deploys, have been compromised by desperate politicians in connivance with its field officials, especially clearly visible during the off-cycle governorship elections.
Under the commission’s watch, its officials had allegedly stormed the polling units confidently with pre-filled election result sheets and even a high volume of cash which could be evidently regarded as proceeds of bribery.
In many instances, the supply of certain statutory sensitive election materials was denied the electorate in many voting areas, while in others some INEC officials allegedly connive with desperate political actors to aid and abate, in not only the snatching of sensitive materials but also in authenticating the tampered materials.
In fact, there have been recurring allegations of the commission tampering with the polling units’ collated results at the backend of its IReV portal to ensure that the data correlate with the doctored and altered results submitted through the conspiratorial efforts of the desperate political actors and greedily influenced commission’s officials.
And in what looked like an acceptance of guilt, the commission is yet to update Nigerians over the outcome of the investigations from the panel it constituted to unravel the circumstances behind the allegation of pre-filled election result sheets or the efforts it has made to bring to book the culprits few months after the conclusion of the elections.
To add salt to the already painful injury, the situation became even worse when the commission surprisingly went the extra mile to defend certain perceived fraudulent electoral malfeasance at various law courts which action has gone a long way to authenticate the actions of the desperate politicians at the polling units.
Analysts argue that lack of firmness of the commission to extricate and immunise its officials from involvement in many of these electoral malfeasances, and show of lukewarm response deceptively seem to have emboldened the desperate Nigerian politicians to deploy all manners of antics and negative strategy that can ensure that they are declared the winner at the poll.
The desperation with which many stakeholders approached and executed the last off-cycle governorship election may have obviously given the wrong signal to the political actors that the future of elections in Nigeria could easily be compromised.
The development is not unconnected with the commission’s failure to live up to the expectations of many Nigerians and the international community by reneging on its constitutionally assigned responsibility of conducting ordinary verification of the status of the political parties under its regulatory control for nearly five years.
Only this month, the commission brazenly admitted, at the headquarters of the All Progressives Congress (APC), that a multiplicity of factors had contributed to its failure to verify the status of the political parties in the country in the past four years.
Hawa Habibu, Director Election and Party Monitoring, confessed while speaking during the verification exercise, disclosed that the commission conducted the last verification exercise in 2019.
“We are on an annual verification of political parties. It is a constitutional mandate of the commission. Basically, we are supposed to find out and issue notices where political parties are not in compliance with the constitutional provisions as to the number, and structure of the party in terms of the office in Abuja, auditing of their finances and other issues.
“A team will go round to verify the offices with our forms to give us the structure of the party as to whether the Electoral Act provision of a minimum of 24 members of different states of the federation and the FCT has been compiled with. We will also find out whether APC has given us its audited account over the years.
“The last time we had this verification was in 2019, there was COVID-19 in 2020, we had so many activities in 2021 and 2022 and it has become pertinent that we have to do so now to verify political parties to ensure that compliance status is in order. These are basically our assignments,” she said.
But, whether it failed in the discharge of those statutory responsibilities or not, the commission has a strong apostle in the National Chairman of the APC, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, who described it as a never do wrong, absolving it of any complicity and blaming any failure on electoral violence experienced during the conduct of elections.
While admitting that politicians are the biggest culprits, Ganduje said: “I know that one of the biggest problems of INEC in conducting elections is insecurity. Everyone will blame INEC, but it is the politicians. So, to understand the rules and regulations of elections, to understand what is required to be civilised politicians, our institutions will be educating our people from time to time so that they can abide by the rules and regulations and it will be going digital. And without the cooperation of our politicians that can be bastardized.”
But differing from Ganduje’s efforts to extricate INEC of any blame for the violence and deteriorating conduct of elections in the country, many opposition political parties and a presidential candidate in the 2015 election, Martins Onovo, argued that INEC, not the politicians should be blamed.
In his trending response to Ganduje’s claims, Onovo said that; “the experience we have is not that politicians did anything, the experience we have is that INEC is fundamentally dysfunctional. INEC cannot be independent in doing what is wrong. It is the independence to do what is right, not what is wrong.