30 hours’ gain in 40 years

At 1.30am on Wednesday last week, INEC chairman Professor Mahmood Yakubu adjourned collation of presidential election results after receiving the last state to come in. He said collation would resume at 3am and that he was aiming to make a return earlier than 4am, the time the result was declared four years ago. In the event, he made the return at 4.38am Wednesday morning, i.e. 38 minutes later than in the 2015.

I was just wondering. In 1979, FEDECO [INEC’s predecessor] compiled presidential election results on a giant scoreboard at its headquarters in Lagos. NTA was beaming live from the collation centre into its Verdict ’79 studio on Victoria Island, which ace broadcaster Adamu Augie was anchoring. He had two guests who provided a running commentary as the results filtered in. The whole nation watched, because NTA had no competitor at the time. In those days there were no text messages and there was no social media to announce fake results. Results from the then 19 states started coming in on Monday and by Wednesday evening, all the states had sent in their results except Gongola State.

This was not surprising. INEC is holding only two elections this year but in 1979, FEDECO held five elections for Senate, House of Representatives, Houses of Assembly, Governorships and President, in that order. In the first four, Gongola State was always the last to file its results due to the almost impregnable terrain of southern Gongola, what is now Taraba State. During that year’s senatorial election, FRCN Kaduna first announced results from Niger State at mid-day on Sunday, which NPN won. Remember that in 1979 each state had five senators, not three as we have today. The very last senatorial result announced by FRCN Kaduna, four days later, was the seat for Wukari District, which NPN candidate Iliya Audu won.

It was at noon on Thursday, five days after the presidential election, that FEDECO received the result from Gongola State. As we learnt at the time, NPN’s National Executive Committee was meeting at its national secretariat in Lagos when they saw on NTA the Returning Officer Presidential Election, Frederick Louis Oki Menkiti, returning its candidate Alhaji Shehu Shagari as elected. The NPN bosses broke into wild jubilation but Alhaji Yusuf Maitama Sule told everybody to sit down and pray first. Because last week’s return occurred at 4.30am, APC leaders were not meeting and we instead saw video pictures of President Buhari watching the return in his living room.

In 1979 the NPN men were a bit surprised by the return because the assumption in Nigeria at the time, fostered by the media, was that two thirds of 19 states was 13. In the first four elections, NPN consistently got the highest votes, secured one quarter of the votes in 12 states namely Sokoto, Kaduna, Niger, Borno, Bauchi, Benue, Gongola, Plateau, Kwara, Rivers, Cross River and Bendel. In addition, it got around 20% of the votes in Kano. Two days earlier, NPN’s national legal adviser Richard Akinjide sensationally appeared on NTA Network News and said two thirds of 19 was 12 states and two thirds of one quarter of the votes in a 13th state. Shagari got the highest votes [5.6 million], one quarter each in the same twelve states and 19% in Kano. As we learnt later, FEDECO chiefs run to the Attorney General of the Federation, Augustine Nnamani, and he advised them to take Akinjide’s interpretation, which the Election Tribunal and the Supreme Court subsequently upheld.

The point here is that 40 years ago, presidential election result was declared at noon on Thursday. This year, it was declared at 4.30 on Wednesday morning, a saving of only 30 hours in 40 years! This, despite the coming into being since that time of digital telephone landline, electric typewriter, fax machine, personal computer, floppy and flash disks, Bluetooth, computer printer which replaced cyclostyling machine, Wi-Fi, computer servers, mobile phones, smart phones, internet, email, websites, social media, private airlines, parcel delivery services, a lot more radio stations, several more television networks, wider roads, more airports, more rail-lines and a revived Baro inland port.

Even though the conduct of elections in Nigeria has improved in many ways over the decades, improvement has been very slow indeed with respect to the tallying of votes and declaration of results, especially in the all-important presidential election. Such delays are occasioned by the need to satisfy the processes prescribed by the Electoral Act. However, these delays are dangerous because they give rise to rumours that results are being tampered with. Delay also gives hoodlums time to mobilise and unleash mayhem.

Today’s collation process is more cumbersome than it was 40 years ago. Maybe the process was tightened over the years in order to plug loopholes that allowed for tampering with the results. Two things in particular cause a lot of delay. One is that the collation officer in every state must come physically to the national collation center, wait for his turn and read his result in front of the Returning Officer. I don’t think it was like that in 1979. That year, as we saw on NTA, results were transmitted to Lagos by phone and immediately posted on FEDECO’s giant scoreboard. The phones of those days were rotary analogues, not the 4G smart phones you have today. I know that trust is an issue, but why wont INEC receive results through WhatsApp, whose messages are encrypted, and verify them through others sent by security agencies, party agents and election observers? That will save a lot of time.

The manual tabulation process also makes for much delay. I see no reason why tabulation should not be done with computers, which are faster than human brains. If it is because of fear that computer figures can be manipulated, so also can manual tabulation. What it requires, I think, is to have several layers of people to check the tabulation. With the onset of the infotech age, I think it is time to amend the system where state collation officers must physically travel to Abuja to prevent their results. At the lower levels of the process too, the speed of collation would be greatly improved if we use our elaborate infotech facilities, including our 140million active telephone lines, to transmit results.

The problem clearly is one of trust. In 2011 for instance, CPC candidate General Buhari bitterly complained about a mistake said to have been made by Excel worksheet on Kano election results. We should find a technological solution to the trust issues. That way, we could have a return on Sunday afternoon or even earlier.

Another change we made over the years was to make the INEC Chairman the returning officer. This was not the case in 1979; Menkiti was a civil servant on ad hoc election duty. In 1991 we had RECs serving as returning officers in gubernatorial election but in 1999, then INEC Chairman Justice Ephraim Akpata changed that. For the first time, he made Vice Chancellors the returning officers. Though this system was abandoned in 2003 and 2007, it was revived in 2011 and has been deepened since then. This year we saw professors declaring results at every level. Professors are not saints, as we saw from some sex-for-marks scandals, but academics, university students and youth corpers are the last bastions of idealism in Nigerian society. Their involvement in this process has raised its technical and ethical quality, I think.

In order to move to the Next Level, Nigerian newspapers, television stations and research organisations should develop the capacity for exit polling. If voters would tell researchers who they voted for as soon as they exit polling stations, TV stations would be able to “call” the election almost as soon as voting ends. That way, INEC would be marginalized and the loser will make a phone call to congratulate the winner even before the official collation process begins. How about that?