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Malpractices were prevalent in South East, South South -Observer

How do you rate the atmosphere and conduct of the general elections that have just ended? The National Assembly election of April 9 and that…

How do you rate the atmosphere and conduct of the general elections that have just ended?

The National Assembly election of April 9 and that of the presidency on April 16 showed progress when placed side by side with elections of past years. We saw progress. But there was a decline in the governorship/state houses of assembly election (of April 26). On the part of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), there was late arrival of voting personnel and materials when compared with the first two elections. On the part of the electorate and evidently people seeking votes, irregularities were observed around the country but were particularly so in the South East and South South. We (Project 2011 Swift Count) noted this in our report on the election. In analyzing critical incidents; we said yes, there were issues of intimidation, illegal voting, ballot box snatching, and such vices. We stated plainly that while 628 critical incidents we recorded in the presidential election, the number jumped to 937 during the governorship/state houses of assembly election.

What could have been responsible for the drop in the standard when it came to the governorship election?

The elections into offices at the state level drew keen contests. The candidates were seeking election to be governor or state house of assembly member. They have more diehard supporters at the local level than those who sought to be president or NASS members. The various states comprised people who wanted to become governor or House member by all means possible. The way things are, everyone wants to win, there is so much to gain from winning that losing is something they do not want to contemplate. There is so much easy funds which the average Nigerian politician has in mind when he seeks office.

Could anybody or organization have done anything to avoid the tendency to rig that led to the irregularities?

Our politicians need a more refined attitude to public office. If politicians will accept that public office is meant for service and that you can actually make your money from honest business, we will begin to see good politics and great electoral success.

Many who are complaining already also place part of the blame on security agents who played roles during the elections. To what extent do you fault the security system?

A vital finding of Project 2011 Swift Count is that security personnel were to be found more in the urban centres than rural areas. It was a major failing in the deployment of security officials. And much of what questioned the credibility of the electoral process were perpetuated in the rural areas. You would see underage voting, for instance, but you can’t arrest because the people will lynch you. I will give you an example of where our observers were chased away. The community leaders insisted that government should write them a letter saying that they were sending election observers to the communities. I had never heard of anything like that, but it happened. Ifyou send just a couple of security men to such communities they would do nothing because they could be overpowered and possibly lynched.

Come to that, election observer groups were accused of not sending their members to rural areas. Where did your observers cover?

Not having enough observers to adequately cover all areas was about the most vital inadequacy of past electoral observation that the Project 2011 Swift Count was assembled to correct. Here is how we deployed our observers in the elections in question: We did random sampling of polling units. Observers didn’t go where they chose, they went directly to where our random sampling indicated. We were in each of the 774 local government areas of the country, which means every nook and crany, urban and rural areas alike.

How did your observer mission help the conduct of the 2011 general elections?

Everything we did was scientific and holistic. We didn’t sit in any one place and allege situations in isolated manner. We came up with facts that were holistic. We didn’t view a problem in one place and announced that the problem was everywhere, nor did we notice a prospect in one place and make it look as if it was the case all over. Generalization is mostly responsible for the bad blood that the elections created. People saw a form of rigging in one place and condemn the whole process and sounded as if such isolated case applied to all other places. People saw a candidate being overwhelmingly voted for in one place and rushed to the conclusion that the candidate had been similarly supported in all other places. Through our large observer-deployment we were able to collate aggregate voting patterns and verified figures brought from across a constituency to arrive at a true representation of the entire constituency. Many appreciative communities invited us to send observers to their polling booths during the elections because they had by the end of the first election realized that we had informed data and statistics of voting across the country.

Project 2011 Swift Count says it differed from past election observation culture and succeeded in lifting election observation to a higher level. How do you mean?

The idea behind the concept was to create for us the capacity to be able to take a close look at the votes INEC releases for candidates and confirm and verify. Happily, our figures showed that INEC was on the right track in terms of how the elections were won and lost.

How did Project 2011 Swift Count came to be; what informed the coalition?

The four partner organizations in Project 2011 Swift Count:  Federation of Muslim Women’s Associations in Nigeria (FOMWAN); Justice, Development and Peace/Caritas Nigeria (JDPC); Nigerian Bar Association (NBA); Transition Monitoring Group (TMG) decided in the main that although the individual organizations had been involved in election duties on their own, they had not attained their aim well enough. We said why not come together so that we could pool resources and stop duplication of efforts. Besides, there was serious voter apathy because people had come to the conclusion that there was no need to vote because their votes wouldn’t count. We felt we could cause a change. We felt we could bring trust into voting and raise the credibility level of INEC and the polling system. Thank God that government insisted that it would be one man one vote. We said instead of struggling and achieving little, why not come together so that we can have the right capacity and voice. We needed a strong voice and a voice that is credible because the organizations involved are organizations that know the system and can be trusted. We purposed through our collective strength to up election observation in this country. We said we would cover all of the country’s 774 local government areas and give Nigerians election verdict that they can believe in. To get here, we were not only confirming INEC results, we were also verifying them. In the presidential elections, for instance, we found that our conclusion differred from INEC only within our margin of error. And our figures were raw. We didn’t collect data at collation points. No, we took our numbers and figures direct from the various polling booths. And what we had in the different elections tallied with what INEC got. If we differed from INEC in any election, we had all the liberty in the world to say it.

In that case, how does it feel that in spite of your efforts to let Nigerians believe that on the whole INEC did well in its conduct of the elections, lots of people are questioning the elections, so much that countless frustrated candidates are doing petitions alleging all forms of rigging?

I am not excusing anyone, but we haven’t got to that time in our electoral history when you can beat your chest and say that a particular election was 100% free of rigging. There was rigging and we pointed them out in the reports we were making after every election. You know this because your paper was at our numerous press conferences and published our statements as the elections progressed. We were very specific but there is no way you could publish all the details. Don’t forget our expression of dismay that, by the reports our observers sent from across the country, while the presidential election was affected by 623 critical incidents of election malpractices, the subsequent governorship/state houses of assembly election suffered 937 such occurrences. But we summed the total outlook of both elections and arrived the conclusion that they were good enough to stand.

A related issue is the violence that broke out in some parts of the country when results being announced by INEC showed how the presidential candidates were faring. How did Project 2011 Swift Count feel about it?

There had been feelings about who should get what and such feelings were not helped by the reality that votes were not evenly spread all around the country. The tendency, even among the elite who should know, was that where one candidate did extremely well, the voters there would aggregate the votes to the rest of the country. There was trouble because such projections failed.





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