INEC Must Make 2015 Work

THE outcry over the failure of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, is a bit late in the day. Politicians and their parties have often seen advantages they could gain from the foibles of INEC, which makes strong cases for itself about its imperfections. It expects us to claim them, maybe, as national assets. INEC believes in the magic of words. It is ready for every election.

It is armed with excuses for failure of plans it sells to the public as tamper-proof. Every election INEC has conducted since 2011, under the current leadership, has been greeted with irregulars. As proof that it had given up on itself, INEC dubs every election a “practice” for the next one. It learns no “lessons”, but it dabbles into new areas of troubles, raising national tension with its ineptitude.

Jega

The latest INEC confusions are its promotion of the Advance Automatic Finger Identification System, AAFIS, and the extra polling centres it created. For INEC, it is an achievement to identify lapse with the voters’ register, more than three years after compilation of the register. The tainted register has been used for all elections since 2011. We must remember that INEC deployed high technology which Nigeria acquired at more than N75 billion in 2010. It has capacity to thwart multiple registrations, once the details were linked. INEC never bothered with linking the inputs from the various centres.

The charade that is going on leaves us wondering what INEC plans for the 2015 elections. Rather than clean up the voters’ register, INEC was more interested in creating more polling booths, a controversial decision INEC made without proper reason. The size of the voters’ register, the breakdown by States, right to the wards, would naturally establish the need for more voting points and how the new ones would be distributed.

Without crossing the first hurdle, INEC decided to create new polling centres. What sense does this decision make, when we do not know how people would vote and their locations? Optimism over the success of the 2015 elections is over-stated and without proper bases. If INEC cannot manage one-off elections, the voters’ register, and distribution of voters, cards, INEC has a lot of work ahead of its preparations for the 2015 elections. For all the importance elections bear to our future, INEC handles them with levity. It fails to provide transparency required to make them credible.

INEC should produce a clean register for the 2015 elections. More importantly, it should work to avoid exclusion of voters, which its current chicanery does. Finally, it should punish those who inflated the voters’ list, which partly accounts for the present mess.