Of bad workmen and tools
With all that has happened over the course of the weekend, Nigerians would hopefully still be clear-eyed to understand the real issues underlying the current agitation over the Electoral Act
With all that has happened over the course of the weekend, Nigerians would hopefully still be clear-eyed to understand the real issues underlying the current agitation over the Electoral Act 2022 amendment. For the many among the hordes of partisans, it suffices that the upper legislative chamber, the senate, an institution, which in their eyes could never be seen or trusted to do anything right, has taken a decision that is contrary to their expectations: the rejection of mandatory real-time electronic transmission of results in the recently passed Electoral Act 2026. The decision they claim, has dashed Nigerians’ hopes for free, fair and transparent elections in 2027!
Now, their fine arguments on why anything short of that ‘real-time electronic transmission’, the substance of those well-crafted talking points on radio and television by their ‘missioners’, would appear insufficient; many in the opposition are already threatening fire and brimstone should the senate fail to accede to their ‘real-time transmission’ fantasy. Their allies in the so-called civil society organisations – the usual echo chambers – have since picked up the gauntlet. From all appearances, the heat is already on!
Part of that was yesterday’s rally at the National Assembly ostensibly designed to intimidate the upper legislative house. No surprise: the former Labour Party presidential candidate currently taking shelter in Atiku Abubakar’s Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), ADC, was on hand to speak to the moment: “The president must hear, we have suffered the danger. That’s what we have suffered before. We don’t want any glitch again. We want things to come back to normal. No more glitch”.
As I see it, the texts of a programmed de-legitimisation by potential losers may have begun in earnest. Hopefully, this time around, Nigerians, with due attention, might yet come to a fuller appreciation of how the crude, relentless savaging of the delicate architecture of 2023 election came close to de-legitimising an entire process which although imperfect, substantially reflected the choice of the voters.
In 2023, the world was led to believe that the issue was what the chief electoral umpire promised, as against what the law actually said in fine print, taking into cognisance the limitations of technology. Mahmood Yakubu, the INEC chairman, we were daily harangued, had promised not just the moon but everything to ensure the upload of the scanned results on Forms EC8 into the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IREV)!
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And so the logic went – that the upload, as against the collated results on the prescribed Form EC8 duly signed by the representatives of the different political parties in all the polling units across the country, was all that mattered.
Interestingly, the question of what happened to the hard copies of the results collected by the parties from the polling units across the country never came up again – not in the electoral petition tribunals to establish the credibility or lack thereof of the elections and certainly not in the course of the parties internal audits of the process, thereafter.
With the glitch in the Form EC8 upload, a minor element in the electoral management chain would become the anchor on which the entire process was said to have fallen apart. By it, the case of electoral fraud was sold to unsuspecting citizens – home and abroad – as fully made!
Now, the sore losers are back to the same beaten track. However, this time, the sticking point is the semantics of ‘mandatory’ and ‘real time’. That the senate has jettisoned Section 60(3) — the provision mandating real-time electronic transmission of polling unit results to the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) IREV portal.
Should it matter that the senate considers the very idea of a mandatory, real time transmission of results an unnecessary burden on INEC given that neither the electoral body nor the telecommunications service providers are in any position to offer full-proof guarantees? Or still more plausibly, shouldn’t the electoral body be allowed to retain the flexibility of adopting what methodology to adopt given the state of infrastructure, particularly those rural areas ill-served by telecommunications infrastructure?
Godswill Akpabio’s senate, it would appear, is being asked to press on the throttle, with answers to the legitimate questions to be reserved for later – or better still for post-election judicial jousting!
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As for the moment, the senate, already adjudged as sinning enough, must be compelled to beat a mob-inspired retreat!
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Now to the other matter, though less talked about, but no less consequential – the relentless cyber-attacks on INEC’s digital infrastructure spanning core servers, the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV), and the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS). We are talking here of a record 12,988,978 cyberattacks recorded during the 2023 elections with the election day alone grossing approximately 6.99 million hostile cyber events – attacks said to range from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attempts and brute-force intrusions to phishing and email-based exploits, each designed to overwhelm systems, gain unauthorised access, or compromise data integrity.
The big irony is the knowledge that the technical disruptions that followed, notably in the upload of presidential results to the IReV portal, actually precipitated the crisis of confidence from which the eventual losers had sought to harvest!
So much for concerns with transparency with process; everyone seems content with talking about the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and how much this has enhanced the integrity of the process. Yet, only a few are willing to concede anything to the manual process that ended in the preparation of the duly completed Forms EC8 – perhaps the most critical element in the entire voting and collation architecture – the very foundation of the so-called electoral integrity!
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Talk of a document in which the parties actively involved in its making being consigned into irrelevance by actors driven by bad faith. Reminds me of the story of the proverbial workman who always blames his tools; does anyone see potential losers already frontloading alibis as things will inevitably go wrong?
Who has bewitched us?
Those pressing the case for mandatory transmission surely have a good case. My problem is why the same argument could not be made for electronic voting since both naturally flow from the same basic obsession with real time technology for which our dear country has apparently demonstrated maturity, if not capacity! Seems the best conceivable way to save the nation the trouble of Forms EC8 and its associated costs!
Nigeria we hail thee!
