Disruption

The doomsayers are shamed, the doubters are silenced, thoughts that the late Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi’s 2010 suggestions about splitting up Nigeria to solve its nationality problem may come to pass with the last general election are buried. Nigeria’s readiness for the consolidation of democracy – what Samuel P. Huntington calls “two turnover,” where “the party or group that takes power in the initial election at the time of transition loses a subsequent election and turns over power to those election winners, and if those election winners then peacefully turn over power to the winners of a later election” – is no longer in doubt.

Nigeria has proved that it can bear the trauma of opposition takeover in a Third World environment without breaking or bursting, as the experience of some has been.

All are now set for the inauguration of the first opposition candidate to defeat a sitting president in a democratic election in Nigeria. It would be the fourth civilian-to-civilian transition since the inception of the Fourth Republic in 1999, the third transition from one civilian president to another, and the first democratic transition from a ruling party to an opposition party.

The issue now is how to maintain the momentum of political change.

Card Reader

The Permanent Voter Card and Smart Card Reader played a significant role in the current political feat in Nigeria. The electronic accreditation system, which verified the biometrics of voters as contained in the PVCs, helped to limit the capacity of poll riggers during the general election.

INEC said its decision to deploy the card readers for the election was based on four main objectives. First, the commission aimed to verify the PVCs presented by voters at polling units and ensure that they were the genuine ones issued by it, not cloned cards. Second, the commission wanted to biometrically authenticate those who presented PVCs at polling units and ensure that they were the legitimate holders of the cards.

But INEC said it had, in agreement with the registered political parties, provided in the approved guidelines for the conduct of the 2015 elections that where biometric authentication of a legitimate holder of a genuine PVC became difficult, there could be physical authentication of the voter and completion of an Incident Form, to allow the person to vote.

Third, in deploying the card readers, INEC also aimed to, through the instrumentality of the device, provide a disaggregated data of accredited voters in male/female and elderly/youth categories for local and national research and planning purposes.

Finally, INEC said it had deployed the card readers for the purpose of sending the data of all accredited voters to the its central server, thus, equipping the commission to be able to audit figures subsequently filed from the polling units by electoral officials and determine if fraudulent alterations had been made.

The commission conducted a public demonstration of the card readers in 12 states, two from each of the six geopolitical zones, on March 7. The states were Rivers and Delta (South-south), Kano and Kebbi (North-west), Anambra and Ebonyi (South-east), Ekiti and Lagos (Southwest), Bauchi and Taraba (North-east), and Niger and Nasarawa (North-central).

INEC said the public demonstration of the card readers fully achieved the four main objectives for their deployment, except in the area of fingerprint authentication, where in general, 59 per cent of voters who turned out for the demonstration had their fingerprints successfully authenticated.

There is no doubt that the card readers helped to reduce rigging in the last elections. Though, certain electoral malpractices were still able to slip through some large holes in the net of the electronic ac- creditation system. The failure of the card readers, in some cases, to authenticate the biometrics of voters and the resort to manual accreditation provided enormous leeway for rigging by the politicians.

The first stage of the general election on March 28 witnessed widespread malfunctioning of the card readers. To mitigate the effect of the failures, chairman of INEC’s Information, Voter Education and Publicity Committee, Dr. Chris O. Iyimoga, issued a statement midway into voting that Saturday, acknowledging the challenges and saying, “Even though the guidelines for the conduct of the 2015 general elections provide that where card readers fail to work and cannot be replaced, elections in such polling units will be postponed to the following day, the scale of the challenge we have observed today has necessitated a reconsideration of this provision of the guidelines.

“The commission has, therefore, decided as part of the guidelines for the conduct of the 2015 general elections that in polling units where card readers have so failed to work, the presiding officer shall manually accredit voters by marking the register of voters, upon being satisfied that the person presenting a Permanent Voter’s Card (PVC) is the legitimate holder of the card.”

But as it turned out, the difficulties encountered with the card readers were not so much a problem of the device as a result of poor knowledge of the electoral officers and deliberate sabotage in some cases.

INEC said it had trained about 700, 000 ad hoc staff to conduct the elections and operate the card readers at the about 120, 000 polling units across the country. But a good number of the commission’s staff at the polling units could not properly