A president’s final dance, and they accuse technology

President Muhammadu Buhari sought to use the elections as a redemptive opportunity to burnish his tenure in office, mostly blighted and blemished by sustained bad performance and wrong decisions. He wished to give the nation such a free , fair and transparent election that would seal his place in history as a very good man who gave his people the latitude to make democratic choices in a very free environment devoid of coercion.

It was the President’s last dance with the people, unfortunately the Independence National Electoral Commission (INEC) ruined that dance with bad music.

The President wasn’t ready to take any chances or yield to excuses. After years in the legislative wilderness, President Buhari exercised the boldness which leaders before him lacked, and signed the Electoral Bill into law on February 25, 2022. A major meat in the Act is the provision for INEC to transmit election results electronically from the polling stations.

Nigerian politicians have long been associated with fraudulent practices, of electoral malpractices and voter manipulation. Instant transmission of results immediately after voting would wipe all that and bring credibility to the process and respect to our dear country.

INEC got all the approvals. Not even the National Aasembly could question it’s financial request. Over N300bn. Even what it did not ask for it got. Free to take any decision that could make the electoral process look cool and acceptable.

Enter BVAS – the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (just a little coinage to make the purveyors look smart), some little tech pad that will flash up your details in a moment and capture your activities at the polling station. Without a voter’s card containing all your details, you have no presence before BVAS. The machine wipes everything evil about voting.

Once elections are concluded at a polling station and all the recordings done, the result would immediately be transmitted to the INEC server. Voila! The deed is done.

I was at the polling station shortly after 7am. Some young little girls, the age of my children, who got there at about 6am had taken it upon themselves to organise the activities at the unit before the INEC officials would come shortly after 10am. Nobody was angry. Everybody chatted and cracked jokes under the watchful eyes of the security personnel.

Everything went smoothly until the young fellas failed to upload the result to the INEC server or transmit the results electronically. They gave what now seems to be a choreographed answer: after the password is inputed, the result is not going. Tempers flared but with my age neatly tucked into my velvet trouser, I tried to make interventions. But this was an unfolding national scandal clearly orchestrated by INEC at a very high level.

Technology is not stupid. It would always offer what it is given. Technology has little stomach for empathy. While it can easily be manipulated no matter the sophistication, it would throw up the truth when properly solicited. The details are always interred in its cold heart. The BVAS is a little piece of machine that enjoys no unusual sophistication. It’s only a matter of time for truth to come into the open.

There is something about character, competence and consistency. This INEC, headed by Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, lacks them all. Unfortunately, Mahmood maintains a rile smile that is most taunting and irritatingly insulting. His failure at INEC has invited the international community to feast on the nation; the election observers are telling us all the little things we should have done to clean up the electoral process. The insult we are receiving is nonpareil, all because of the calamitous failure of one man. Yakubu fails to, or has refused to understand that from the moment the BVAS failed to work at the polling units, his integrity has attracted that indelible mark of condemnation in perpetuity, like the mark of Cain.

There was always something about this election season, some kind of precursor to a bad outing. Months preceding the election, the petrol stations across the nation simply ran out of fuel, and the managers in the supply chain gave all kinds of reasons and promised to nail the problem before last Saturday. Prices within the period fluctuated upwards and not downwards, to the extent that no member of this administration can tell a motorist the real pump price anywhere in the country. The problem remains unfixed, one of the reasons people could hardly leave their abode to vote in places where they had registered.

Another sign. Few weeks ago, the Central Bank introduced a currency policy that took nearly Three Trillion old Naira notes away from circulation but injected less than N500bn redesigned denominations into the systems, leaving the people reeling in pains with some going to sleep at ATMs and a few stripping naked or dying in the banking halls. There were restrictions that pegged the amount of money somebody could withdraw. Even that little amount which could be as little as N5, 000, was not available. They said it was to constrain the easy flow of illicit funds at the election on Saturday. It worked, although not totally foolproof.

But there was to follow the wonder of all wonders. The nation is so fractured that even anything is believable. You simply withdraw it from the realm of phantasmagoria and give it a reality jab. Just a few days to the Presidential election, the rumour swirled that the mobile network operators in the country were going to shut down their networks, render impossible the use of bank cards while all fund transfer within the period would be suspended. The explanation being that the authorities, and there are so many of them in Nigeria, didn’t want politicians to be able to transfer monies to voters. Remember there was a trader money in the last election which was nothing more than a hoodoo, if you were able to sample the living standards of some of the beneficiaries today.

It never occurred to any of those spin doctors that if the networks were to shut down for one minute, the election was dead on arrival. Reason being that there would hardly be any communications going on in the country, the various communication arteries from the Federal Capital to the States and State capitals, and rural areas, would be dangerously compromised. But the rumour was strong enough to force out the Public Affairs Dirctor of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Mr Reuben Muoka, to make clarifications, stressing that the communication grid across the nation would be alive and running, and that, in fact, the NCC had dedicated a 622 short code to aid communications.

One could understand the frenetic concerns of the phone users. With telecommunications being one of the few dividends of democracy since 1999, nobody wanted to endure the ripples of nomophobia while being denied a ubiquitous equipment that makes their life tolerable in the painful hell the politicians have created.

This takes me to the final point in this material. I want to express profound gratitude to former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, whose administrative wizardry brought life to the communications industry in the year 2000. He democratised the use of phones in the country and this has therefore made it possible for the failure of institutions and individuals to be documented in real time. Citizen journalism is making life impossible for dinosaurs who want to hold the nation down to the past.

Last weekends woeful performance by INEC has been documented in the cyberspace by millions of young people across the nation. When they see the smiling face of Yakubu, they will remember the story of a man who was given an important assignment but failed to deliver so miserably.

Buhari’s reign as President fractured the nation but Yakubu and INEC aimed at a complete dismemberment of the country which the resolute will of the Nigerian people has conquered.

My last line. Technology didn’t fail. Yakubu failed this nation. My little prayer is that the building blocks of a new nation should begin from the ashes of this disappointment by ensuring that those connected with this comprehensive failure be punished comprehensively.

Congratulating a Minister
Last Friday, the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy inaugurated the Board of the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF). For convenient recall, Section 114 of the NIgerian Communications Act 2003, established USPF, while the Board which is headed by the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, is established by Section 115 of the Act. The EVC of the NCC is the Vice Chair.

The Board which is constituted by the President on the advice of the Minister, draws its members as follows: 2 Commissioners, one representative of the Ministry, one representative of the Minister of Finance, one representative of the Chairman, National Planning Commission, and four private sector representatives.

The Minister, Dr Isa Pantami assumed office in August 2019. For nearly four years, the minister was the Board. However, last Friday, wisdom and the Constitution prevailed as he decided to constitute the Board. My only observation here is that this is the time to write handover notes and not to constitute boards. All the same, congratulations to him and to the new Board of the USPF!