•The journey to 2027 must start now

When Professor Attahiru Jega discusses elections, many Nigerians listen. He has been speaking recently about the 2023 general elections, especially the February presidential poll disparaged by many.

Before last week’s media round by the former national chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), he had told federal lawmakers in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, that it was time to improve on the electoral system. Professor Jega said that 24 years after return to civil rule, Nigeria ought to have become a model for other African countries.

While speaking on the 2022 Electoral Act last week, he contended that despite the loud criticism of this year’s election, the legal framework was the best ever. He accepted that the technological innovations embedded in it were designed to ensure that all went well. The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), that provided for optional finger or facial approval, is an upgrade of the card reader machine introduced by the Jega administration, alongside the Permanent Voter Card (PVC). Both measures brought some integrity to the electoral system. By the scheme, politicians who hired voters to cast multiple ballots were checkmated.

Under the Yakubu Mahmud administration, BVAS was brought in to check the rate at which voters failed to get accredited owing to the state of their thumbs. Besides, the new machine is enabled to transmit the result to the iREV where the general public could monitor development from the polling units.

By the development, it was expected that confidence in the electoral system would be built up.

However, even by design, the lawmakers fell short of fully digitalising the process. The BVAS machine or iREV could not collate the result. The paper trail system by which Forms EC8A from the polling units are taken to the ward, the local government and then state levels still prevailed in the 2023 elections.

There is no doubt that the process has to be tweaked ahead of the 2027 election. But, it must be acknowledged that the problem is more with operations, processes, planning and commitment of officials. Machines have to be operated by officials, and their judgment have to be trusted if Nigeria is to ride the storm. The election management body must therefore come up with an acceptable mode of recruitment, training, retraining, discipline and reward system. This is as important as improvement on technology.

As Professor Jega, a teacher of political science and former Vice Chancellor of the Bayero University, Kano, has pointed out, it is wrong to suggest that the 2023 general election is the worst in the country’s history. The 1964 federal election nearly set Nigeria ablaze, with political parties pitched against one another, regions at war and worse still, the then President, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, publicly on the warpath with the Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa.

The Eyo Esua-led election commission could not even agree on the integrity of the polls as members from the North insisted that the result declared must be upheld while those from the South kicked against it. That was the origin of the conflagration that consumed the First Republic.

The 1983 election was another election that could compete against the worst conducted in the world. The Justice Victor Ovie-Whiskey Commission literally rolled out the political tank for the ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN), paving the way for the party to make inroads into the West and East that were strongholds of the opposition political parties. It was no surprise that the Second Republic quickly went the way of the first.

President Olusegun Obasanjo recruited Professor Maurice Iwu who practically deferred to the head of government as a soldier would to his Commander-in-Chief. As it was in 1983, so it was in 2007.

So, anyone with knowledge of conduct of elections in the country would agree with Professor Jega that the denigrated 2023 polls would actually rank among the best in the country. An analysis by the professor shortly after the February presidential election had laid out the basis for the conclusion as three political parties, the All Progressives Congress (APC), People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and Labour Party (LP) shared the states almost equally, with New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), taking control of Kano State.

We have to go beyond the usual blame-the-commission game. It is good that both houses of the National Assembly, international development partners and civil society organisations are waking up to the need for early review of the law and processes. However, it must be noted that the main culprits are politicians who would go to any extent to win. They will compromise the commission’s officials at polling units and collation centres, vote huge sums to induce voters, get security officials to turn the blind eye to malfeasance, and do all things to subdue or denigrate the judiciary. Unless something is done to checkmate such practices, the quest for credible polls will remain a mirage. The starting point is to ensure that all those found to have manipulated the last general elections are duly tried in the courts of law.

Focusing on amending the Electoral Act alone cannot perform the magic. Nigerians must rise to wake up the sleeping ‘giant’ well ahead of 2027.

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