Nigeria Content Online

When some four
years back, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)
threatened to deploy digital data capture machines as part of the
review of the voters’ roll, a frisson of excitement ran through certain
sections of the country. The possibilities for change was in the air!
After all, many recalled, a central aspect of the reforms in Mexico
that led in 2000 to the victory of Vincente Fox’s National Action Party
(PAN), after almost 70 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary
Party (IRP), was the use of voters’ biometric data. These rendered
traditional rigging practices obsolete.

Apparently, so
unique are the whorls on our fingers, that properly implemented, poll
management software (currently available off-the-shelf) is able to tell
several iterations of an individual’s fingerprints, and correctly
programmed, it either consolidates all such impression as one vote, or
otherwise invalidates all the impressions. It can also determine the
non-human impressions of palm kernel nuts. Of course, this means that
the traditional restrictions on movement during voting (for fear that
some voters might, from a surfeit of enthusiasm for the polls, be
minded to impress themselves on more than one ballot paper) have become
unnecessary. We could also save money on the practice of daubing the
voting thumb post-ballot with indelible ink (which indeed is “delible”
applied on a film of cheap hand moisturising lotion).

Imagine then how
shocked some of us where, when it turned out that the machines deployed
by INEC then were neither online nor real-time. They were batching the
data collected for upload at some future period. It did not surprise
much thereafter that the fancy gadgetry didn’t leave up to
expectations, or that the results from that exercise were so badly
traduced in so many post-election court rulings. I have not registered
yet in the current exercise, in part because I think the interruption
of the school year on account of the registration exercise, another
pointer to the unrepresentative nature of our governments. However,
I’ve held off largely because of the concern to establish that the
much-touted direct data capture machines that INEC has procured this
time, at considerable costs to the commonweal can at least approximate
Mexico’s experience: allow every vote to count; and every vote to be
counted. A more transparent voting process, especially one based on
digital data, has clear implications for the economy. The easiest one
is that it allows us to start building a national database. We then
dispense with these time-consuming, resource-diverting regular voter
registration exercises, and instead, when adults come of voting age,
especially when they apply for their driving licenses (presumably after
taking proper driving lessons) they then process their voter
registration in tandem.

A more difficult
implication for the country of a transparent voting process was
underlined by an earlier experience of a different kind of process:
“Option A4”. I was in the vanguard of the opposition to what I then
felt was an atavism. How could we (Nigerians, i.e.) in 1993, be called
upon to line up, like badly behaved schoolchildren, before the symbols
of those we would have rule us? For this perspective, the runaway
success of the June 12 1993 election was moderated by the low turnout
at the polls. Of course, so we thought, with so many qualified voters
dissatisfied with the process, it was inevitable that turnout would be
low. Now, several years after, and upon reflection, a new narrative
recommends itself. First, the bare outlines of this new thinking.
Inevitably, the voter turnout should bear on adult population numbers.
Thus, if elections, which we all generally agree to have been plagued
by irregularities constantly produce results that agree with our
population figures, then, might something not be wrong with those
figures? Might the low turnout of voters associated with the “Option A”
experiment not speak to the authenticity of our population figures?

If this narrative
has even an outside possibility, then a proper voter registration
process might also help us prepare new parameters for the ten-yearly
censuses. Anyway, INEC is presented by the chance of getting this
registration process right, with a win-win opportunity.