Nigeria Content Online

The Independent
National Electoral Commission said yesterday that its attention is
focused on verifying and authenticating the results of the state
governorship elections.

Opposition parties
who rejected the outcome of the presidential poll cited rigging and
other electoral fraud, criticising the commission’s oversight of result
collation during a protest that turned into riots in Kaduna, Bauchi,
Katsina, Kano, Gombe and Adamawa states.

The parties said,
in many states, their agents were shut off from collation points where
the results were allegedly doctored in favour of the ruling People’s
Democratic Party.

Since the
governorship and state assembly elections concluded yesterday, the
commission said, while results of the elections are expected, it has
placed greater attention on the collation of results in the 24 states
where the elections were held.

“The only thing
which we have done for today’s election differently,” said Solomon
Soyebi, INEC’s national commissioner in charge of information and
publicity, “is that we have shifted our attention more to the collation
centers. We are trying to make sure that whatever is done at the
collation centre is more transparent.”

An imperfect process

Election monitors
have also picked at holes in the commission’s multi-tiered election
collation process, which sends results from polling units to the state
collation centers through the wards and local government area collation
centers.

In its report after
the presidential election, the National Democratic Institute said this
approach created a tendency for “malfeasance and human error.” Speaking
yesterday on behalf of the chairman of the commission, Attahiru Jega,
Mr Soyebi said the electoral body has improved the way it monitors the
processing of results for the governorship polls.

“If there is any
party agent denied access to the collation center, he or she has our
hotline to call and that will be remedied,” he said.

Damage control

The commission also
acknowledged, for the first time, the challenge it faces with a large
number of its ad hoc staff – the corps members – withdrawing their
services in Kaduna and Bauchi where elections were moved to Thursday
due to the large-scale violence that hit the two states.

Mr Soyebi said that
while the fear about personnel shortage may not be so real in Kaduna
state, the situation in Bauchi was serious enough that the commission
planned to deploy its permanent staff for the exercise.

He said full-time staff in Bauchi and neighboring states and the
headquarters, as well as other trained ad hoc staff, are to be drafted
for the election if the youth corps members stay away on Thursday.