It is a mantra in product, project, and brand management that it is better to under promise and over deliver. In my years of involvement in PR and other media/brand related projects, it is always best to manage the expectation of your clients, tell them what you can concretely deliver, especially when it is what you have perfected and delivered for other clients over the years. Then, you strategically and deliberately avoid over-promising what you have tested, but yet to deliver before to any client, even when you have the know-how and expertise to deliver it.
INEC over-promise on a digital technology that has been tested but has never been deployed on a large scale before, and at the end under-deliver on that promise. Did INEC break any law? No! Did non-transmission of scanned results in real time affect the final presidential election result? No! But, in a country where people lack trust in government institutions, especially as it concerns an election where citizens have support and loyalty to different candidates, it is hard to make people see reasons why a promise made and not kept it’s not tantamount to breaking the law.
Without mincing words, INEC Chairman ought to have resigned, not because he broke any law or manipulated the last presidential election result, but for forcefully promoting, and promising what he was unable to deliver. As the head of that institution, the bulk stops at his table and he must take responsibility for what happened during the election that resulted further in the loss of confidence in an institution as important as the INEC.
The Electoral Law as amended gave the INEC latitude to organize and deploy what they believe would make the elections more seamless and promote further transparency. But the law did not MANDATE them to use a certain digital technological innovation called iRev. The Electoral Law legislates a process but does not legislate a particular digital technological procedure for an electronic transmission of result in real time. Digital technology is dynamic in nature and can be changed or substituted with another depending on the ability and user friendliness of a new technology. In other word, the law allows the institution (INEC) to determine whether to use or not to use a certain technology or the other.
That is why both opposition parties (PDP & LP) that went to the Tribunal to challenge the result of the election based on non-usage of the iRev lost their cases in court, and they would further lose at the Supreme Court. The reason is not far-fetched, you cannot base a petition on the fact that INEC promised to use a certain technology to transmit results in real time but failed to do so. You sue an institution based on what the law mandates it to use and fail to use, not based on a promise it made and did not fulfil. The question is, did failure to use (transmit result in real time) affected the results of the election and the declaration of a winner? The answer is No! In fact, the iRev by its composition is not particularly for the political parties but for ordinary citizens (voters & non-voters) sitting down at home and able to see the results online as they trickle in.
Electoral law empowers every participating political party in an election to deploy an agent in each of the 176,874 polling units in the country. Also, they are to have an agent in each 8,806 wards all over the country, each 774 local governments, and they are to have agents in each 36 states and FCT and finally an agent at the National Collation center at Abuja for the Presidential results. Now in each of these levels, election results are collated. And at each of these levels starting from the polling unit, a copy of the election results recorded into form EC8A are countersigned by each party agent having witnessed the voting and counting of results. A copy of the form EC8A is thereafter given to each party agent including a police officer stationed at each polling unit.
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION:
Presiding Officers send results of the poll to the RA/Ward Collation Officer.
RA/Ward CO collates results and sends them to the LGA Collation Officer.
LGA Collation Officer shall collate results and send them to State Collation Officer.
State Collation Officer collates results and sends them to the Chief Electoral Commissioner (Chairman INEC).
The Chief Electoral Commissioner (Chief Returning Officer) collates results from the State Collation Officers, declares the result and returns the winner as President elect of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
NOTE:
The Presiding Officers/Collation Officers at the various levels from the polling unit to the national collation centre in Abuja complete the result sheet and request the party agents available to countersign. Duplicate copy of the result is made available to each one while the original is taken to the next level of collation. The Presiding Officers/Collation Officers at each level complete the notice of results of poll and paste at the Polling Unit or Collation Centre.
Each party has what is called the National Situation room. What do they do there? Their party agents scattered all over the country who already have copies of the election results in their hands send it to their situation room so that they can compute results as it’s coming in from every nook and cranny of the country. Therefore, each party even before the final declaration of the winner already has the result in their hands through their agents from the polling units up to the state level.
The iRev in essence does nothing for the political parties. Same results that were supposed to be transmitted in real time from the polling units even if the iRev had worked as it was planned is the same result in the hands of each party agent. The BVAS machine which was used for accreditation is supposed to be used to scan the form EC8A (result sheet at polling unit) and sent to the INEC’s iRev by INEC’s polling agents, just like each party agent can scan or take picture of the copy of the same form EC8A in their hands and send it to their party situation room. Therefore, the fact that INEC’s iRev did not work as they promised took nothing away from the 2023 election.
In reality, all the political parties have the results in their hands days before INEC’s final declaration of the actual winner. If a party now says the election was rigged, you must come to court and prove how it was rigged. You must show that the result in your hands is different from the one INEC declared. It is as simple as ABC.
Most importantly, one major development that happened in the 2023 election which people did not applaud is the fact that BVAS prevented over-voting like it used to be. What is BVAS? Bio-Modal Voters Accreditation System. This system is to help prevent manipulation of figures. When a registered voter has been accredited by face and finger recognition, it is entered into the machine. So, if for instance, the number of BVAS accredited voters in a polling unit is 20, there is no way the total result of vote in that unit can be more than 20. If votes are more than the number of accredited voters, that polling unit result is deemed cancelled. This is really a game changer which was not applauded because a lot of people were majoring in the minor, which is iRev.
The major problem of the 2023 election is over sensationalism of events, emotional outburst of supporters of different candidates and the ethnic and religious sentiments deployed to either sway, win over or de-market a particular candidate or the other, which translates to voter intimidation in some parts of the country. No election is ever perfect anywhere in the world, and the Nigeria 2023 presidential election is one that’s not perfect, but the result of the vote clearly shows who won the election. Yes, it is hard to take by those who lost the election, but that is the truth and even the Supreme Court will not say otherwise.
Selah!
©Kay Lord, 100923
