How voter apathy, low turnout marred FCT council polls

The Federal Capital Territory (FCT) area council elections might have come and gone, but some of the recurrent issues that dogged the exercise last Saturday will continue to linger for some time.

Apart from the malfunctioning of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines, late arrival of materials from the Independent National Electoral commission (INEC), low voter turnout and apathy by members of the public was a great challenge, especially its power to either mar or make the outcome of the poll.

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The issue of low turnout during elections has been a recurring decimal in the election history of the country, with at times as low as less than forty per cent of the registered voters deciding the fate of the whole registered voters in an election.

According to INEC, voter turnout across Nigeria hovered around 30 to 35 per cent of registered voters in the last two electoral cycles.

INEC Chairman Prof. Mahmood Yakubu disclosed this in Abuja at the Commission’s first consultative meeting with Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) late last year.

Yakubu said while some elections recorded higher percentage of voter turnouts, it was lower in some other elections.

“Over the last two electoral cycles, including off-season elections, voter turnout across the country hovered around 30 to 35 per cent,” he said.

In last Saturday’s election, across the six area councils, Daily Trust gathered that in so many polling units, the turnout was very low, as low as even in some units the whole registered voters failed to turn up to vote.

A voter in Giri area of the FCT, who simply identified himself as Alhaji Ibrahim, said some actions of the electoral body also encouraged voters’ apathy as some of the voters come early to cast their votes, but were discouraged by the late arrival of materials from the INEC office.

“Look at the situation we are facing, people have been here since and these BVAS machines are not working, it is already afternoon only one or two have been able to cast their vote. Some people have gone back to their home; many of them will not come back again. It is only a few that are committed to the process and really want to exercise their voting rights that will come again to vote.

“So, you can see that even INEC is contributing to people not voting for their preferred candidate.”

On his part, Mr. Bako John Paul said, “Many people in the urban centres don’t really like voting, they believe that at times their votes don’t count, so they just allow the politicians to do what they want.

“For me, I always vote and leave the rest to God. Many things are not the way they are supposed to be in the country, but I believe it is a gradual process, with time, everything will be okay. Many people believe that no matter who you vote for, the officials will announce their own candidate. But I believe if all of us come together and vote for the person we want, the situation might be different.

“INEC should also encourage voters by putting in place necessary measures that will make people feel safe, like security and overcrowding, if people can come in, cast their vote and go back home, it will help.”

In the Saturday council election, INEC put the number of registered voters at 1,373,492 but only 261,485 voters were said to have collected their Permanent Voters Card (PVC) to vote in the 2,229 polling units spread across the territory.

The commission also said that at the Abuja Municipal Area council (AMAC), out of the 659,870 voters that were registered only 32,419 came out to vote.

In the other area councils, the situation was not different, in Bwari 22,706 voters were accredited; for Gwagwalada 21,776 voted for the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party, (PDP), similarly, 20,995 voted for the two main parties in Kuje; at Kwali 14,991 voted and Abaji 11,343 came out to exercise their franchise.

Stakeholders said the prevailing apathy may be a breeding ground for usurpation of power as politicians will find it easy to manipulate when voters don’t come out and show the needed enthusiasm about who governs them.

Speaking on the development, Tunde Salman of Good Governance Network, a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), said the continuous voter apathy may lead to usurpation of power in the country.

He said that an unpopular candidate might even be able to win an election as long as those that were supposed to vote refused to come out, adding that voter apathy has become an embarrassment to democracy in Nigeria.

Salman said since 1999 when democracy returned, Nigeria has been struggling to draw at least fifty per cent voter turnout in all elections.

He said: “The grassroots election, particularly the just concluded area council election in FCT, was another low that is quite worrisome to democrats, the political parties and other actors within the Nigerian electoral circle. In spite of all the resources the government has spent through INEC to print electoral materials and to make sure that logistics arrive at the polling station on time, it is quite embarrassing that the number of people who eventually come out to vote is insignificant.

“For example, some of the few locations I personally observed have registered voters of almost 3,000 but it was less than 100 that turned out to vote. Some will say most of those registered in the city centre do not live there, but at the outskirts, thus, the distance will deter them. But in the outskirts, there was low turnout too. Others will say some of the election is about the indigenes, but it is not only about them, what is the situation in the local government, the one they had in Lagos also had low turnout.”

He said that in order to grow democracy in the country, people need to see democracy as a viable best kind of governance for the country to pursue.

While lamenting the voters’ apathy even with the increase in the sensitization by INEC, NGOs and the media, Salman called for a new voter education approach that will lead to action instead of focus on awareness.

“What we need is for people to cultivate democratic culture. Most of the culture people declare in Nigeria is antithetic to democracy; they are commanding an autocratic kind of political culture,” he said.

Even before the elections, INEC had declared that the election would not take place in about 593 polling units in the FCT.

According to the INEC boss “From just 562 polling units, the Commission established an additional 2,260 units and relocated some of the congested locations to proximate but underserved areas.

“We gave voters the opportunity to transfer to some of the new polling units. Unfortunately, voters did not take advantage of this opportunity as we had expected in all cases.

“Consequently, there are 593 polling units in the FCT without registered voters, 1,328 polling units with between 0-50 voters and 546 polling units with over 1,000 registered voters. We have already informed political parties, civil society organisations, the media and security agencies at the national level about this development.

“The Commission has decided that no election will take place at the polling units without registered voters. No materials have been produced for these units and no personnel will be deployed to them,” he said.

Some also said this underlined the path to the voter apathy that the election experienced, because in some polling units the registered voters were as low as 10, with almost all of them failing to turnout, while in others the crowd did not allow people to cast their vote.

According to the INEC, Nigeria ranked as one of the countries in Africa with the lowest election turnout, with as low as 30-35 percent.

He, however, said the commission would work to improve on the situation, adding that “in countries where the voter turnout is high, the polling units were close to the people and convenient for them to access.”