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This is not looking good. The Independent National
Electoral Commission (INEC) has been revealed to have huge gaps in its
processes, and through those cracks have fallen N21 billion worth of
‘excess’ polling booths.

The chairman of the commission had asked for and
received N87.7 billion to conduct these elections, based on a claim
that there are 120, 000 polling sites in the country, and that data
capture machines at each of these polling locations would cost N308,
000. In between the commission chairman’s loud cry that the elections
were at risk if these funds were not released timeously, there was a
hurry to approve the monies – and processes were skipped. Nigerians,
wary of any excuse to slow down the electoral process, seemed to look
away.

At the basis of this was a collective desire to
give INEC all the support it needed and when the commission asked that
elections be moved forward to give it time to fulfil its mandate the
request was readily granted. But an analysis of the data published by
INEC on its website, conducted for NEXT by citizens advocacy group
WangoNet, shows that INEC has 28,000 fewer polling stations than it
claimed – nearly 8000 polling booths were counted up to thrice.

Chairman Attahiru Jega’s spokesman has denied any
attempt to defraud the nation, saying the numbers were not verified
because the commission was pressed for time. “The number of machines
that have been projected for procurement will be fully procured,” said
the spokesman, Kayode Idowu, in a telephone interview.

This excuse is not only unacceptable but is
precisely the root of the problem. As many Nigerians have pointed out,
an issue that has been the bugbear with the conduct of elections, even
intertwined as it is with straight up vote rigging, is systemic
failure. By relying on numbers and data that local and international
bodies had discredited under Maurice Iwu, his predecessor, and seeming
to consistently ignore informed critics on his way to organizing new
elections, Mr. Jega was clearly refusing to heed the warnings of
history.

It is alarming: the INEC website for instance has
plenty of data that is incorrect. There are 774 local governments in
the country, but it claims 930; there are 9, 572 wards, but it
identifies 11,118. The number of polling booths was not spared in this
misrepresentation. INEC had publicly advertised that 120,000 polling
booths will be available during the next elections, but its database
suggests that this estimate may have been grossly inflated.

The danger of electoral abuse with inaccurate data is obvious.

More worryingly, all evidence points to officials
who inflated the numbers through a mixture of duplication and
falsification. This paper’s analysis reveals for instance that each of
the skewed data has a unique serial identification number, indicating
that the errors might have been inserted on purpose.

Mr. Jega’s house needs some cleaning up, and the buck stops at his table.

As the president of the Nigeria Bar Association,
Oluwarotimi Akeredolu, said in August, Mr. Jega’s reputed integrity is
not enough. It is the integrity of the system and it processes that
must be seen to be believed.

This point has now to be made most emphatically.

Accountability, first and foremost is at the
heart of this issue. Since the finance minister has confirmed that the
funds were released to INEC only last Thursday, the more urgent
question now is what happens to the excess N21 billion?

More than that, Mr. Jega needs to respect the enormity of the task
before him and the short time he has to complete it, even with the
change of date. The knee jerk defensive stance taken by his lieutenants
will not do. Mr. Jega has taken the first step by asking for more time.
Now he has to heed the advice members of the National Assembly gave him
last week: he needs to speak less, and begin to search for and get the
help that he needs to do his job. As it is now, the commission is
clearly in over its head.