YNaija Editorial: INEC’s additional polling units and the deficit of trust

The curious proposal by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to add 30,027 extra polling units to the existing 119,973 created by the National Electoral Commission of Nigeria in 1996, just months away from the 2015 elections has been meet with wide spread opprobrium, mostly from the south of the Niger. The reason for this isn’t so much INEC’s decision to make pivotal adjustments so close to the February 2015 date, but that the spread of the proposed polling units appears to mightily favour the northern part of the country.

According to the details made available by INEC, of the 30,027 new polling units that are expected to make the 2015 polls less cumbersome for the general populace by reducing the number of prospective voters at a particular polling centre to a minimum 500, 21,000 (70%)of them have been yielded to the North while the South will have to make do with 8,000 (30%) units. This uneven distribution pattern sees the North West geopolitical zone enjoying an additional 7,906 units, a sum that is almost equal to the 8,412 units shared amongst the entire South-East, South-West and South-South zones. Figures like this are instinctively bound to create storms in a country that is already deeply splintered along ethnic and religious lines.

INEC chairman, Professor Attahiru Jega while explaining the commission’s rationale for this new distribution patterns chose to downplay the role that population dynamics can and will play at the forthcoming polls. With a protracted war on terror ravaging large swaths of the North, especially in the North-East and a steadily rising death toll as the military moves to take full control of the area, there is no doubt that there is a serious population flux going on.

Human Rights Watch, an international NGO has put the Boko Haram casualty figure at over 2000 this year alone, and about 650,000 persons have been displaced from their homes since the insurgency started, about 250,000 of these have occurred this year alone according to data released by the Internal Displacements Monitoring Centre. Most of these migrations have been to neighbourly countries like Chad or Cameroon and to the relatively peaceful Southern environment that continues to thrive and create economic miracles.
In failing to account for these patterns, or choosing to ignore them totally and relying bullishly on the commission’s voters register- a document that despite corrections via the Advanced Fingerprints Identification System (AFIS), as evidenced in previous outings, has not managed to achieve error proof status,- INEC is perceived by a significant section of the country to be acting in bad faith.

Public trust in government institutions are at a nadir, expectedly so and INEC as custodians of the people’s electoral trust, must not only play fair but must be seen to be playing fair at all times. Adopting an improbable computing formula that invokes doubt and fear of partisanship even before a single vote is cast is not the way to go and creates an avoidable credibility crisis as we approach the elections.

Already, an aggrieved group has dragged INEC to court over the polling units. The defendants pleaded before a federal high court sitting in Abuja that the electoral body acted beyond its powers under section 73 (1) and (2) of the 199 constitution when it created the extra polling units. This is a distraction INEC can do without. If INEC is truly interested in making the voting process smoother, there are other forward thinking issues begging attention; like strategizing on how to commence online voting and accommodating the growing community in the diaspora.

But INEC is convinced it is on the right track and the only true solution out of these niggling issues may not arrive till Nigeria begins to practice true federalism, a system where the centre is weakened and much of the power is transferred down to the states. That way, the man from Ebonyi state could care less about how many polling units are added to Jigawa state as he would be too preoccupied in making sure he gets it right at home.

Until such a time as that arrives, we may remain doomed to viewing every important issue that crops up through the same myopic lenses of tribalism or ethnicity.

No serious country gets ahead on such parochial values.

Comments (10)

  1. NA DEM KNOW. WE SABI ALL THEIR SCOPE

  2. I understand the reason for creating more polls. it dosent make sense to me.

  3. serious something.

  4. No serious country gets ahead on such parochial issues. Hmmmmm.

  5. We have even started election, wahala don dey shele..na waoooo

  6. I for see war in the coming election

  7. Is still dont understand the issue of surrounding, the polling issue. is it illegal?

  8. Nigeria dey always turn everything to issue sha.

  9. I thought the creation of new polling boot is for the betterment of the election.

  10. Well written

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