The presidential and National Assembly election was held across the country on Saturday, February 25, 2023. The result of the presidential election is still being collated and has not been released. But the election recorded some challenges which raises questions about the credibility and fairness of the election. Happily, there is an opportunity for the electoral umpire and the security agencies to make amends and take steps that would erase these challenges. This discourse reviews the critical developments which need to be addressed to strengthen the faith of Nigerians in the democratic system.

It is imperative to state that democracy presents citizens with the opportunity to exercise their franchise of choosing their elected representatives and leaders. The Independent National Electoral Commission has requested sufficient funding in excess of three hundred billion which was provided by the authorities.

Even the challenge emanating from the cash crunch was taken care of directly by the Central Bank of Nigeria. So, while citizens were excited and looking forward to the polls, the government played its role of providing the needed resources. Thus, one of the questions to be answered by this discourse is whether Nigerians got value for the taxpayer’s money given to INEC in expectation of free, fair, and credible polls.

INEC gave several assurances of its readiness for the polls while the security agencies told Nigerians that they were roaring to go. INEC claimed to have planned for the elections, embarked on simulations, mock and test exercises. They were expected to have anticipated risks and planned for mitigation and course correction to ensure credible poll.

The first challenge was the issue of logistics. Logistics is not rocket science but a specialisation that can be best managed by certificated and experienced persons. In terms of the late arrival of poll officials and materials to the polling units across the federation, the officials did not stick to the advertised time and this led to many voters facing disenfranchisement if INEC fails to adequately respond. In some places, voting was going on till the middle of the night. In some other locations, the officials to conduct the elections did not turn up while in others, the election has been postponed to Sunday, February 26, 2023.

In some other instances, elections did not hold and INEC has not given any directions to ensure that duly registered voters who turned up to vote but had no officials to attend to them were given the opportunity to vote. INEC can resolve these issues simply by ensuring that every eligible voter who is ready and willing to vote is given the opportunity on or before Monday to exercise the franchise.

Some of the logistics challenges bothered on the ridiculous. Officials complained about not having ink and stamp pads while others did not have forms to record the result of the election.

This raises the poser; why did the officials collect their work pack without verifying that all needed forms and materials were available? These are matters of negligence that should have been cured by competent oversight and supervision. For the logistics related to vehicles for transportation, INEC could have entered contracts with companies providing transportation services with tracking devices, provisions for payment of liquidated damages in the event of default, etc.

Polling staff would have been grouped under supervisors who would be responsible for their early resumption and performance of duties according to the regulations. INEC should have trained and retained backup poll officials who will be deployed at short notice in the event of default by already allocated officials.

Poll officials would have been required to be at their proposed polling units in the evening of the day before the election so that they would familiarise themselves with the environment and would not be looking for the venue for the first time on the day of the election.

One of the key new provisions of the Electoral Act 2022 is the electronic transmission of results to the online results portal which was supposed to be open to all Nigerians. This was supposed to provide for real-time uploading of polling results as soon as the election is over. It is designed to increase transparency and faith in the system and ensure a speedy declaration of results. There will be less secrecy and opportunities to manipulate the vote. As of Sunday, February 26, less than 20 per cent of the results were available on the presidential results portal. This is not only a failure of duty but a failure that may rob the election of the much-needed credibility. The expectation was that voting and counting would have been concluded in the day and given few opportunities for negative characters who operate mostly at night.

Nigerians were bewildered watching thugs carrying ballot boxes, wounding innocent citizens whose only offence is that they came to exercise their franchise. A woman was so badly wounded and she had to be stitched; now in a blood-stained dress, she came back defiantly to exercise her franchise.

A notable thug in Lagos was filmed asking Nigerians of South-East extraction not to vote in a particular polling unit, using ethnic slurs and the police simply watched without attempting to arrest the thug who evidently thinks he is above the law. The thugs in some other parts of Lagos declared that they were working for a particular party and all persons who did not intend to vote for that particular party should not vote in the polling unit.

In all these failures, will any person or group of persons be asked to explain their roles and reasons leading to the failures and possibly face sanctions if the explanations are not reasonable? This is the crux of the matter that always leads to repeated failures.

Being the seventh round of elections since the return to civil rule, it is expected that INEC would have drawn lessons from previous engagements and the minimum expectation was for INEC to improve the performance from previous elections or as a minimum, maintain the status quo. But this is not the case.

Nigerians did not get value for money and INEC needs to be engaged after the elections to give an account of how the resources were spent and how we spent so much to get so little. Sabotaging the use of technology in elections is such a retrogressive, reprehensible and unbecoming action. INEC owes Nigerians explanations on all fronts.