How prepared is INEC for the elections?

Despite several assurances that it was prepared to conduct the general elections today (Feb. 16), INEC has showed its unpreparedness by postponing the polls by a week.

INEC’s chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, says the polls were no longer feasible today after the commission reviewed its logistic and operational plans. According to reports, the commission is experiencing a shortage of voting materials, especially ballot papers in many states.

The logistic challenges were legion. On Friday, in Niger State, ballot papers for two senatorial zones were missing. Sensitive materials for Enugu State were taken to Port Harcourt and are being transferred to Enugu by trucks.

Sadly, INEC has not shown that it has the sophistication to manage over 80 million ballots papers in 119,793 polling units in the forthcoming presidential elections.

The printing and the distribution of ballot papers constitute more than 60 percent of the cost of elections in countries where paper ballot is the primary voting system. And here is where all the logistic problems come from.

In 2011, elections were postponed because of shortage results sheets. But what many Nigerians did not know was that on the polling day, more than half of the result sheets had not arrived Nigeria. Reason: The materials for the elections were printed abroad, and because of the Tsunami of 2011 in Japan, aircraft scheduled to deliver Nigeria’s election materials were rescheduled for Tsunami relieve operations.

Logistic problems were even worse in 2007. There were ballot papers still waiting collection in 2010 in South Africa, after printing was sub-contracted to a South African firm by Nigeria’s national printing company.

Though INEC blacklisted the contractor, who caused her this embarrassment in 2011, from participating its 2015 procurement process, the fundamental logistic issues were not addressed.

Fundamentally, the printing of ballot papers starts after the submission of nomination forms to INEC by political parties. For the presidential elections, parties had up to December 3 to submit their nomination forms to INEC.

This means INEC had less than 10 weeks to design and print over 80 million ballot papers for the presidential elections. And this ballot paper isone the longest in Nigeria’s history: It has over 73 parties in one sheet of paper.(Obviously, the logistics of printing and freighting these materials within 10 weeks would be herculean.)

Even though electoral materials for some state elections have been printed in Nigeria, in the past, it is highly unlikely for any Nigerian printing company to comfortably print such volume within a very short time span.

Due to INECs poor planning and self-imposed tight schedule, itis not surprising that the distribution of the sensitive materials appeared to be done in the eleventh hour.Little wonder, Nigeria’s central bank (CBN) – which is used to distributing currency notes to the nooks and crannies of the country — was overwhelmed with the late arrival of materials in most of its offices around the country.

Apart from ballot papers, it is worrisome that since the collection of voter’s cards ended last Monday, INEC has not been able to present to the public the number of uncollected cards nor the total number of collected cards in every state of the federation.

This inefficiency on the part of INEC has given room to all kind of conspiracy theories from political parties. It also has significant cost implication for INEC and the country.

The current logistic problem experienced by INEC shows that the commission has not learned from the logistic challenges it has been encountering in the last 12 years.