Making The Bold Leap Towards Free And Fair Elections (II)

Someone else might also want to remind me that the June 12, 1993, election results were not doctored at the collation centres or state and national secretariat of NECON. True! But this was not because it could not have happened with the same ease with which it happens today. I do not recall any special mode of election results transmittal from the polling units to the collation centres and to the state and national secretariats of the NECON that is different from and more secure than the method used by the INEC today.

The explanation for the integrity of the NECON-announced results of the June 12, 1993, election was given by the same man who annulled the election, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, in his memorandum to the ERC on July 22, 2008: “You are likely to agree with us that the elections conducted under my watch between 1989 and 1992 were generally free, fair, acceptable and credible. One of the many success factors of those elections is the environment… It is therefore easy to understand why elections conducted by the military when they are exiting from power have been much freer and more credible than elections conducted by Nigerians when the rulers are members of one political party.

“We hear these days about the need to return to what, under our watch, we called ‘Modified Open Ballot System’ in elections. But this can succeed only if the environment of elections is properly sanitised. This observation and suggestion applies to what we called ‘Option A4’, particularly for party primaries. We believe ‘Option A4’ is good again only if the environment is sanitised. Today in large sections of the country, the use of dangerous weapons including sophisticated arms and ammunition have become commonplace spectacles. In other words, the partisanship of the umpires and the toxicity of the electoral environment are much different today from what they were in 1993. The desperation of our politicians has gone through the roof. For them, every election is now a do-or-die affair. They would do anything to ‘win’, including maiming and murdering the people they want to rule. The INEC on its part, for the most part, has been operating as a subsidiary of the ruling party. What I am saying is that the times have changed and the methods of 1993 will not work in 2011 and beyond.”

The necessity of moving with time was eloquently proclaimed by Charles Iroegbu, Esq., who in his article ‘Christian Burial: The Two Cries In One’ wrote, “Good dancers change their dance steps with changing beats. In our world today, the beats have drastically changed and we must change our dance steps or else we’d be done” (Kwenu, November 1, 2010)!

To begin with, if we are serious, in the months following the 2011 elections we should intensify effort to create a credible and secure national identity database so that every Nigerian that has attained the age of maturity would have his unique biodata and biometric information saved in a central database and linked to a unique national identity number. The national identity card to be issued should be such as carry a magnetic strip so that by swiping it through an appropriate magnetic strip reader, the owner’s identity can be verified non-duplicably. Thus, either with the identity card or with the national identity number and a valid photo identification an individual’s identity can be authenticated.

This is no rocket science. We already do similar things with our ATM cards. Identity cards with magnetic strips are very commonplace around the world. All I have said is that we should employ and expand this system, which we already now use in some fashion, to encompass all Nigerians that have attained the age of maturity. Under the authority of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), all personal identity data collected should be deposited in a secure, central database, equipped with a query mechanism for snappy validation of personal identity information (over the internet or in a local NIMC network).

This is not something to be rushed like the 2011 voters’ registration. Even if it takes two or three years to create this database, it is okay. It is more important that the system is credible, comprehensive, secure, and readily responsive. If we succeed in this, creating and updating a credible voters’ register and issuance of other civil identification (for example, driver’s licenses and international passport) would be easy. Voter’s registration would never again be a huge, national event requiring tens of billions of naira; or the closure of schools; or declaration of avoidable, ad hoc holidays; or that voters line up in unending registration queues in dilapidated school buildings, with no security arrangement either for voters or for registration officers. Obtaining a voter’s card would be very much similar to obtaining a driver’s license.

Over the years it has become apparent that our present method of policing voting centres has not succeeded in stamping out voter intimidation. Political thugs have succeeded over and over again in too many places in preventing legitimate voters from voting, in snatching and stuffing of ballot boxes, in preventing opposition party representatives from observing the voting process, and in causing bodily harm to voters and electoral officers. The result will be the same if we continue to do the same thing.

At the risk of being repetitive, let me reiterate that Donald Duke (former Governor of Cross River State) was right on this: “technology is the answer. I recommend we move on to e-voting (electronic voting). It is long overdue. India has adopted it. Brazil has adopted it. The same is true of Venezuela, the United States, the United Kingdom, Estonia, Switzerland, France, Belgium, and  Canada. There are others. We do not have to reinvent the wheel. All we should do is study the available systems of e-voting and choose the one that would best address our peculiar electoral challenges.”

If we decide to add remote e-voting to our choice so that voters are able to cast their votes over the internet, we would have succeeded in almost completely decentralising the polling unit so that there is no crowded polling unit for thugs to attack and rout. Even if we do not use remote e-voting, we would, by adopting e-voting, have created the greatest disincentive ever for politicians to recruit thugs that would help them commandeer polling units or snatch and stuff ballot boxes. There would be no ballot boxes to stuff. And even if political thugs hijack a voting centre, they cannot joggle any figures for only legitimate voters with an appropriate voting access code can cast a vote.

Further, it can be done in such a way that a voter can vote from any of the electronic voting machines, merely needing to navigate on the machine to where he is duly registered. Voter intimidation, in the forms we have known it to be, would have been permanently laid to rest.

How about the joggling of election figures at the collation centres and at the state and national secretariats of the INEC? That too would be history. There would be no need for collation centres. Counting would be automated and far speedier, yet verifiable by all stakeholders.

And please do not give me the argument that our ogbanje power status would make e-voting impossible. The power situation has not prevented us from doing e-banking. All the oil companies in Nigeria have almost constant power supply. All we need to invest in are generators and batteries that would not be as expensive as Jega’s so-called DDC machines. There are small barber’s and hairdresser’s shops all across the country that run on those generators. Until we fix our power problem, the generator is there for us to use.

To those who worry about the nefarious activities of “Yahoo” boys to compromise the system, I say relax. Believe me, we do not have more Yahoo boys than they do in the US, the UK, Canada, Brazil, and India. Yes, we have earned a bad name as the headquarters of Yahoo e-mails circulators, but it does not mean that we have the ‘baddest’ or smartest IT ‘uber-techies’.

The US is the home of the internet; the UK uses the internet for business more than anywhere else in the world; Brazil was the first to utilize 100% e-voting. All of these countries and the rest listed above have been doing e-voting successfully and securely. The Yahoo boys have been effectively kept in check by good e-voting protocols and security standards. I do not see why we cannot do the same thing. We do e-banking and e-commerce securely and efficiently without fearing Yahoo boys. Why not e-voting?

We have started electronic voters’ registration; we just need to complete the process by reforming our electronic voters’ registration and transitions to e-voting. E-voting has its own challenges, but it is, by far, the safest and most efficient way of voting in the 21st century. It is very cost-effective, requiring less logistics and less human capital. Voting records can also be kept securely for centuries and shared, where necessary, in minutes. —Concluded

—Choice Ekpekurede

  Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2011 P.M.News