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2023 General Election

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27 views5 pages

2023 General Election

Uploaded by

ugbedejeh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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INTRODUCTION

The Joint Election Observation Mission (JEOM), involving the International


Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and led
by Joyce Banda, former President of Malawi, said in an official gazette
released on Monday.

“We congratulate the people of Nigeria for their resilience and enthusiasm to
participate in the process,” said Ms Banda. “Despite large crowds in some
polling stations and long waits, Nigerian voters demonstrated commitment to
participate in the process and a strong desire to have their voices heard.”

The presidential election ended with Mr Tinubu, the APC candidate been
announced as the winner of the hard-fought contest with 8,794,736 of the
over 24 million votes cast in the election followed by his closest rival, Atiku
Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) while Peter Obi of the
Labour Party (LP) was further behind with a 25 per cent share of the ballots.

The opposition party PDP and LP has refused to concede defeat, and the two
closest contestants have launched a formal challenge of the results in court.
They are alleging electoral fraud. In addition, they are lamenting the failure
of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to upload
screenshots of polling station results to a web portal, IReV, created for the
purpose. Even at that, though quite ironic, some of the election results at the
national legislative levels favourable to these parties have been endorsed
and celebrated.
Observers from international communities believes that INEC’s failure to
upload the results, as promised, is a major flaw that has cast doubt on the
credibility of the election. The electoral commission’s explanation for the
failure, offered two days after the election, was that technical glitches
hindered it from uploading the results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal
(IReV). The agency has since uploaded and published over 90 per cent of the
results which a number of voters have alleged discrepancies between what
they witnessed as votes that were collated at polling units on Election Day
and what was published on the result portal by INEC.

Some opposition politicians have also questioned INEC’s interpretation of the


law on the national spread of winning results. The Constitution requires the
winner of the presidential election to secure at least a quarter of the votes in
each of two-thirds of the states of the federation and the Federal Capital
Territory (FCT). Mr Tinubu crossed that threshold in 29 of the nation’s 36
states, but his challengers are saying he also needed to have done so
specifically in the FCT, where he didn’t. INEC believes that is a wrong
interpretation of the law.

Some media organisations, as well as a number of local and international


observers, have corroborated the opposition’s claims of lapses in the
conduct of the election. In its interim report, the Nigerian Bar Association
(NBA), which deployed 1,000 members from its 128 branches to monitor the
poll across the country, identified some of the challenges it observed. These
include “late arrival of INEC officials and ballot materials at the polling
stations, malfunctioning of the biometric voter accreditation system (BVAS)
machines, limited or non-transmission of results from polling units to the
INEC Result Viewing (iReV) portal, insecurity at some polling units, including
violent attacks on voters and officials, voters’ intimidation, snatching and
destruction of voting materials.”
YIAGA AFRICA, a non-governmental organisation which did a parallel
tabulation of the results from many states, reported variations between its
results and those of INEC in Rivers and Imo, two states also flagged by the
media and some of the opposition parties for significant levels of electoral
irregularities.

The last presidential election also presented some shocker result like the
President-elect who lost his home state, the National Chairman of the party,
Abdullahi Adamu, and the Director-General of Mr Tinubu’s campaign
organisation, Governor Simon Lalong, were also lost in their Nasarawa and
Plateau States, respectively, to Labour Party. President Buhari’s home state,
Katsina, as well as Kaduna, Kano and Kebbi, which have governors fiercely
loyal to Mr Tinubu, all fell to the opposition. Also Labour Party, which had no
elected official in its ranks and had been derided by opponents throughout
the campaign for lacking political structures across the country, recorded a
stunning victory in Lagos, polled nearly 90 per cent of the votes in Mr Obi’s
home South-East zone and disrupted long-established voting patterns in the
South-South states of Cross River, Delta, Edo and Rivers. It is difficult to
explain how a completely rigged process would deliver such outcomes. At no
other election in Nigeria’s history has so many shocking upsets been
recorded, including the loss of seven sitting governors seeking election to
the Nigerian Senate.

A coalition of international election observers has blamed the Independent


National Electoral Commission (INEC) for lack of transparency in the conduct
of the 2023 presidential and national assembly elections in Nigeria.
The foreign election observation group said 40 of its members were
deployed across all six geopolitical regions of Nigeria to observe the voting
process, noting that despite the clamours for reforms to the Electoral Act
2022, “Nigerians were mostly not impressed by the conduct of the 2023
presidential and national assembly elections.”

“Logistical challenges and multiple incidents of political violence


overshadowed the electoral process and impeded a substantial number of
voters from participating.

Identified challenges and Limitations of INEC


The election observers said they observed that the late opening of polling
locations and logistical failures created tensions and the secrecy of the ballot
was compromised in some polling units given overcrowding.
They noted that “at the close of the polls, challenges with the electronic
transfer of results and their upload to a public portal in a timely manner,
undermined citizen confidence at a crucial moment of the process”.

“Moreover, inadequate communication and lack of transparency by


the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) about their cause and
extent created confusion and eroded voters’ trust in the process,” the
coalition stated. “The combined effect of these problems disenfranchised
Nigerian voters in many areas, although the scope and scale are currently
unknown.”

THE AFTERMATH AND RESPONSE FROM CITIZEN


Although the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) called the
election free, fair and credible, several observers, including the European
Union, said the election was not transparent. A joint observer mission of
the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic
Institute said, "The election fell well short of Nigerian citizens' reasonable
expectations." Samson Itodo, the head of YIAGA Africa, said there were
serious concerns about the elections process because major issues such as
violence and technical problems had hampered public trust in the election
process. The United Nations urged "all stakeholders to remain calm through
the conclusion of the electoral process.
Nigeria's main opposition parties said the results of the election were
"heavily doctored and manipulated" in a joint news conference. "We won this
election as Labour Party, we are going to claim our mandate as Labour
Party," said Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, the party's vice presidential candidate.
Ndi Kato, the Labour Party's presidential campaign spokesperson, said, "We
are defiant. The elections were rigged.
Both the PDP and Labor Party separately filed formal petitions challenging
Tinubu's victory on 22 March.
In addition, the failure of the presidential election resulted into a worrisome
voter apathy during the governorship election of March 18 th due to lack of
trust on the electoral umpire INEC.

RECOMMENDATION

Nigeria as a country needs a transparent and formidable process and system


of election which can rival our current process and especially which cannot
be determined or controlled by a group of people at will but would be
trustworthy enough.

The electoral process can be woven around our Bank Verification Number
(BVN) or the National Identification Number (NIN) and a process in which
every citizen can have the opportunity to cast their votes in multiple location
and at a convenient time away from hoodlums who forcefully hijacks votes.

This will ensure that every vote casted is valid and everyone is given a very
good opportunity to speak with their votes.

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