The ongoing nationwide Continuous Voter Registration has raised concerns about some grey areas in the exercise. EMEKA NZE examines some of the concerns as well as the challenges of INEC in its efforts to improve on the last exercise
There were genuine concerns raised by members of the public at the flag-off of the National Continuous Voters Registration (NCVR) exercise by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) which held last Thursday.
These concerns, if concretely and dispassionately addressed, will result in the improvement of Nigeria’s electoral system, but where lip service is paid to them, or treated in a window dressing manner, these challenges will linger and continue to impinge on the country’s democracy.
Of note is that the exercise has been, for now, as planned by INEC, slated to take place at the local government headquarters across the country and the recurring question is: “how can the teeming population of Nigerians who live far away from the headquarters of these LGs access the programme, especially, in this current economic hardship being compounded by a recession?
At the Thursday’s flag off, this was a major concern of Chairman of Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC), Abdullahi Candido, and his FCT Inter Party Advisory Council (IPAC), counterpart, Joseph Indiwa.
Both of them harped on the need to take the CVR to the people at the remote villages. To Candido, AMAC did not just start and end in Zuba or A.Y.A, but there are villages that are over 50 km away from the city centre, hence, the need for the exercise to be taken to the grassroots.
Indiwa, also emphasized the need to make the exercise violence-free, saying that in conjunction with AMAC, it was already planning a stakeholders meeting to ensure a hitch-free exercise. The concerns of these politicians can never be overstressed as they remain germane to the success of the exercise if addressed.
Rather than provide a practicable answer to the problem which has in the past disenfranchised many Nigerians, essentially in the rural areas, the INEC chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu, only hightened fears saying that overcoming this challenge is one hampered by scanty manpower. As a corollary, INEC is also constrained by lean financial resources.
Yakubu said: “We are aware of the concern to devolve the registration to ward and Polling Units levels. We want to assure all Nigerians that the current exercise is just the beginning. We are considering devolving the registration to all the 8, 809 wards and our 120, 000 polling units. We are working on the logistics.
“The current exercise, confined to our 774 local government areas, we mobilised over 4, 000 of our own staff. If we are going to devolve this exercise to ward level, and we have 8, 809 wards, on the basis of five staff per ward, we are going to recruit over 44, 000 ad hoc for the exercise. If we are going to devolve it to our 120, 000 polling units, we are going to recruit over 600,000 ad hoc staff for the exercise.”
Even though he assured that as the exercise proceeds, it would be taken beyond the local governments down to the wards and polling units, but the statistics later reeled out by the INEC boss raise doubts and are indicative of a commission incapacitated by manpower and funding.
The promise to later take it to wards and polling units is seemingly an afterthought, portraying a seemingly lackadaisical attitude to carry along the people at the grassroots in an important national programme such as the CVR which ought to have run simultaneously to capture the people at the hinterland.
Making a case for the people at grassroots is truly justifiable. It is on record that during elections, the so called elite who inhabit the city centres where this programme has been flagged off, going by the INEC arrangement, are the ones who hardly come out to perform civic duties such as registration and voting during elections. More often than not, these elite consider it infra-dig to come out to vote or register, except where they, their relations, friends and acquaintances are directly involved.
The preponderance of opinions, therefore, is that INEC has placed the cart before the horse. If the commission is committed to making a difference in Nigeria’s political system which hitherto had witnessed the massive disenfranchisement of the ruralites due to lack of access to materials, it ought to have first flagged off the programme from the polling units, villages, the wards where it cannot fund the programme concurrently with the city centres or local governments headquarters.
However, if INEC has sealed its plans as presently constituted as sacrosanct, Nigerians will only hope that it should not renege in its promise to take the programme the villages or show weakness when it is the turn of the wards and polling units “since it is not going to be for a week or two, it is going to be all year round, we need to consider the logistics”, as stated by Prof Yakubu.
Another issue of prominent concern is the interference of foreigners in the process, some of who the INEC chairman disclosed were already apprehended by men of the Nigerian Immigration Service for being in possession of the Permanent Voters Registers (PVCs), even though some are fake.
On this, the INEC boss said: “Going forward, we are going to working with security agencies, including the Nigeria Immigration Service by keeping an eye on the process. If there is any person that doesn’t look like Nigerian try to register, please draw the attention of the security agencies and we will move in swiftly, particularly when we devolve to the ward and Polling Unit levels because that is where the problem will arise. At local government level, the security will be tighter. So the security agencies will continue to do their work and it is our responsibility to assist the process.”
The relevant question here is what punishment has been meted to the culprits to serve as a deterrent to others. Was this arrest kept from the public? As enjoined by the INEC chairman, how will Nigerians identify foreigners – Cameroonians, Chadians, citizens of Niger Republic, amongst others who have similar looks with Nigerians. In many instances, some of them are versatile and speak fluently Nigerian local languages even more than some natives.
As difficult as this may seem, INEC and the security agencies may need to do more in this regard to fish out more foreigners who even may have lived for so long in Nigeria to ensure that certain desperate politicians do not deploy them to their own advantage in subsequent elections, a situation capable of subverting the process.
Though not much has been heard of the effort of INEC to cleanse the voters’ register of dead Nigerians, there is need for the commission to update Nigerians with the figures already in the register before the commencement of this latest exercise. This would have been made possible by deleting the names of those who have died so that desperate politicians will not cash in on this to maneuver the system during election. However, with the use of Card Reader Technology, which authenticates the identity of the voter before voting, it seems that era of ghost voters is over.
Expectedly, politicians, as enunciated by the AMAC chairman on the flag of date, are the direct beneficiaries of CVR. There is the need to monitor them closely to ensure that they do not infiltrate the process to their advantage. This they often achieved by ensuring that their weak areas do not participate fully in the process while the strongholds are usually well mobilized to take part in the exercise.
During the Thursday flag-off, special citizens- the aged, the physically challenged and those living with albinism raised concerns which INEC said were well noted. It can only be noted if concerted effort is geared towards mitigating them so that no segment of the society can claim to have been marginalized in the ongoing registration.
While the CVR is a necessary ingredient to the electoral process, the exercise cannot be complete without developing an effective means of distributing the PVCs. Many Nigerians are of the opinion that INEC has no genuine excuse for not distributing the huge number of cards lying fallow in its offices across the country. Some people suggest that INEC in conjunction with State Independent Electoral Commission (SIEC) can liaise to distribute the cards even by posting them to the addresses provided by the citizens during registration.
