Victoria Ngozi Ikeano
Top officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) are now literally running helter-skelter to television stations trying to do what in media parlance is called ‘damage control’ as the full weight of Nigerians’ anger and frustrations at its 11th hour postponement of the much awaited presidential and national assembly elections begins to dawn on them. Professor Mahmood Yakubu, INEC’s boss who has been on the saddle for about three years is now trying to convince us that the sudden deferral was in the greater interest of integrity of the elections –that if he had not taken that ‘courageous’ and ‘painful’ decision at the last minute, the polls would have been wishy-washy, resulting in greater embarrassment for the organisation and the nation at large.
The impression being given is that it chose the lesser of two evils, notwithstanding the huge socio-economic costs associated therewith. One estimate put the economic cost of shutting down businesses on Saturday at over one trillion naira. The social costs are largely unquantifiable as they relate mainly to sociological, mental and other deprivations.
These deprivations arose not so much because of the postponement per se but due to the fact that the shift came at the last minute when people had already set things in motion and could not turn back the hand of the clock so to speak.
Chairman Mahmood announced the decision at about 2.20 am on Saturday, when most Nigerians were already asleep. For the average Nigerians, they became aware of it when they were literally heading to their polling units to cast their votes, eager to be among the early birds to do so.
‘Rumours’ of a postponement started flying around in the social media on Friday evening; it was said there that the election had been moved to Tuesday. But this was flatly denied by an INEC official who urged people to ignore it. This gave people added impetus to continue with their preparations, with many boarding night buses to enable them get to towns where they registered before 6 a.m. when restriction on vehicular movement would come into force
From the time when Yakubu’s chief press secretary told the assembled reporters who had been keeping vigil at INEC’s headquarters in Abuja that the chairman and his team had concluded a meeting and that the decision taken would soon be conveyed to them by the chairman himself, hours elapsed. One thought that the chairman was conferring with the powers that be on the decision he was about to relay to Nigerians. That this speculated ‘consultation’ took a long while again led one to conjecture that perhaps, those in authority did not quite agree with the decision Yakubu was going to announce.
It is therefore, very surprising to hear President Muhammadu Buhari disclose at the APC caucus meeting called in the aftermath of the shift that he got to know about the postponement at 5.15 am on election day. Indeed,
Mr. President’s disappointment was palpable when he tweeted at 11.20 am on Saturday, “I am deeply disappointed that despite our long preparations both locally and internationally, INEC decided to postpone the election a few hours to the election”. He stated on Monday that INEC cannot take Nigerians “for granted”, adding that an investigation would be launched after the polls to unravel what happened.
Is the postponement due to force majeure? Is it due to circumstances beyond INEC’s control? Force majeure relates to natural disasters and an all out war. The military has said that the postponement did not emanate from their end as the country is largely safe and the war against insurgents has yielded positive results generally; unlike in 2015 when the plan to postpone the polls by some six weeks was initiated by the then national security adviser and approved by the national council of states, Mahmood stated that the decision was made after a meeting of the organisation to “review its preparations” for the elections.
This review meeting was held on the eve of the elections. Couldn’t INEC have the review days before the D- day? Why on the eve when nothing can no longer be done to put right whatever was asunder? And why didn’t INEC call a meeting of stakeholders to brief them before hand about the logistics challenges it said it was facing (perhaps some of them may have proffered some suggestions) rather than calling them after it had taken a decision – to intimate them of a fait accompli.
As it is, this appears to be a unilateral decision of INEC which maintained that the shift has nothing to do with security or security. If INEC had gotten the nod of stakeholders, furnishing them with the logistics reasons why it wanted to shift the polls, the anger and shock at the postponement might not have been fierce as the stakeholders would have found a way to calm frayed nerves of the citizenry and party supporters.
The logistics problems INEC cited has to do with distribution of materials as it said it was unable to airlift many electoral materials due to bad weather conditions that hampered flights. But Aviation Minister, Hardi Sarki has debunked this, averring that flight operations were ordered to be on standby for 24 hours. Nevertheless, INEC did have accompanying logistics problems as many of its ad hoc staff still had not been deployed as at the eve of the election.
There was no way it could have solved this problem on Election Day because it would have been tantamount to confusion. While blaming INEC for not dotting the is and crossing the tees days before the Election Day, one cannot discountenance the possibility of sabotage especially given that three INEC offices were razed by fire in a spate of about ten days. All of these call for vigilance by all concerned. The responsibility is now higher on INEC to deliver largely hitch-free general elections. Let us all support INEC directly and indirectly, in whatever way we can, to deliver credible elections devoid of any major hiccups on February 23, 2019.
Ikeano writes via vikeano@yahoo.co.uk
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