The legitimacy of the Nigerian state has, no doubt, taken significant bashing in the last few years. Citizens increasingly question the credibility of the ways and means by which elected public officers get elected and assume leadership positions. They are increasingly disappointed by what elected officials do with power and they are also profoundly frustrated and angry, with the failure of those who preside over the state and its governance processes to satisfy their basic needs and aspirations, be it in socio-economic provisioning, security of life and property, or in the management of the economy to drive employment, productivity, economic opportunities for the citizens, or in the management of diversity in a plural society.
The failure of those in power to enable the Nigerian state to discharge its obligations to the citizens, has today made Nigeria to be one of the poorest, insecure, poorly managed and fragile states in the world.
One of the ways to begin to halt the decay is to bring remarkable improvements in the ways and means by which public officers are elected. The electoral process must have integrity to enable people with integrity to be elected freely and fairly by the people. A situation in which vandals and ‘bandits’ commandeer the electoral processes to perpetuate their strangle-hold on power and continue to mess the country and its citizens up, must be opposed, struggled against, and reformed.
Manual transmission of election results has been one key area in which reckless, unpatriotic and self-serving politicians have undermined the integrity of the Nigerian electoral process. Bringing remarkable integrity to the Nigerian electoral process would no doubt require the jettisoning of the traditional, obtuse, manual transmission of results and replacing it using appropriate technology, with electronic transition of results. Globally, this has been proven to add remarkable value to the integrity of elections, the quality of citizens choices in elections and the minimization of litigation and conflicts associated with electoral outcomes. Hence, electronic transmission of results also, ultimately, enhances the quality of governance by improving the responsibility and responsiveness of elected officials who would be compelled to see citizens votes and choices as truly counting in determining electoral outcomes.
It is therefore necessary that all patriotic citizens work together to draw the attention of the members of the national assembly to respect Nigerians’ demand for electronic transmission of results and effect necessary reforms to the electoral legal framework to bring this about. The time to do this, is now!
We must not lose this opportunity!!
It is worthy of note that although our focus in this Summit is on electronic transmission of results, there are other important issues, which the members of the National Assembly need to properly address in the draft Bill currently before them. For example, the threshold for financing campaigns, which has been considerably raised, needs to be drastically reduced, to avoid turning our democracy into a plutocracy. Also, the unwholesome situation, which reared its ugly head in the 2019 general elections, when some desperate politicians, literally put guns to the heads of returning officers to get favourable returns, must be addressed otherwise it would become a trend in electoral politics. On this matter of fraudulently compelled return under duress, INEC should be given the power of review, to resolve it even before the return is made.
Being Opening Remarks by the Co-Chairman, Attahiru M. Jega, OFR, Department of Political Science, Bayero University, Kano, at National Political Summit Organized by the National Consultative Front (NCF), held at the Rockview Classic Hotel, Wuse, Abuja, October 1, 2021.
