By Chris Otaigbe
A former national Vice Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Chief Bode George, says Nigeria is ripe for electronic voting.
Speaking exclusively to KaftanPost, the PDP Chieftain said, without equivocation, that Nigeria can manage e-Voting successfully.
Applying the use of technology for communication and transaction across the length and breadth of the country by both the high and low, literate and illiterate parts of the country’s population, Chief George affirmed that anyone who says Nigerians are not educated or literate enough to participate in electronic voting would be lying to the people.
“What is our population in this country? Over 200 million. Now, if you pick your phone, no matter where you are in this country, you can reach out to anybody. If you have a bank account today, somebody takes money out of your account, you get an alert. No matter where you are. If they put money there, you get an alert. Then what else is technology? What is hard about voting, then? You may back it up with hard copy but electronic voting is possible,” he asserted.
According to Chief George, e-Voting is very attainable especially when communications and transactions are now seamlessly conducted across platforms and spectrums of the society, from the urban to the rural areas.
“That bit of it our government tried but the National Assembly scuttled it. Prof. Maurice Iwu is still alive. He brought all the gadgets, we tried them and we saw it can work…,” he said.
To push his conviction further, Chief George said he has thrown the challenge to the current Chairman of the Independent Elections Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmoud Yakubu, to organize electronic voting for Nigeria.
“I have challenged the current Chairman, 2023 is still way back there. Before I go back to my Creator, I pray that will be operational in this country. It would be a gift from Mahmoud to Nigerians,” he said.
He recalled that Mahmoud’s predecessor, Prof. Attahiru Jega, had also affirmed that Nigeria is ripe for electronic voting. “Why didn’t he (Jega) do it? So, for Prof. Yakubu, electronic voting is a must,” he said.
According to him, the country has reached a tipping point where disaffection against the state of affairs in the country has gone beyond one section of the country against the other. For him, the discontent has spread across ethnic and religious divides in the country.
“You can see the lack of happiness not only of one group against the other but of all the different groups in the country because there is so much hunger in the land. Most of our younger generation graduating from school today, leave school and discover there is no future.” He lamented.
Stating the reason why the e-Voting would provide Nigerians with the opportunity to elect via a transparent voting system, one which would give them the kind of life the system provided while he was growing up, Chief George said the younger ones today would love a situation, where, as it happened back in the day, employment was a given for every graduate. “When I graduated, we were eighty in the final class. Before I wrote my final exams, we were offered jobs. All I needed to do was to pass my final paper. But can that happen now?
One other notable Nigerian who has lent a voice to the call for e-Voting, justifiably because of her portfolio, is the Chairman of the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission (NIDCO), Mrs Abike Dabiri-Erewa.
She made the case for this during a budget defence session at the House of Representative in 2019.
“Diaspora voting is in your hands and I think it will be a legacy that you can leave. It does not have to be in 2023 but put a timeframe to when they can vote. It is something we owe Nigerians in the diaspora. “We are also hoping that you are going to amend the law to make electronic voting possible, at that point in time, diaspora voting, you can make it a reality.” She said.
Since independence, Nigeria has been in search of a credible voting system because of the irregularities that dawdled previous elections. Absence of transparency, accountability, probity, and trust on the part of government has been, largely, responsible for poor turnouts in elections. e-Voting system is long overdue because of the magnitude of human and material resources, the country is endowed with.
Regardless of the demerits of the system, E-Voting has the potentials of solving many of the electoral problems. Like the introduction of any new technology, which must be adopted with caution, e-Voting could be disastrous if rushed on the electorates without regards to the accompanying hazards.
Its adoption, in the developed world, was heralded by trial arrangements. European countries such as France, Spain, UK, Denmark, and Ireland had had test runs preparatory to its wide-scale adoption.
Of course, it is no news that in Sub-Sahara Africa and Africa in general, elections had been marred by gross irregularities leading to wanton destruction of lives and properties.
Thus, e-Voting is seen as a liberator from the awful and horrifying experiences of the past as it promises confidential, free, fair, transparent and convenient elections as well as the speedy processing of results.
So, Chief Bode George inferred, mobile devices have been the most widely used electronic gadgets with over two billion users worldwide and over 100 million Nigerian subscribers with over 85% active users. This is what makes the digital voting option more preferable as it offers a good platform for enhanced participatory democracy.
Mobile government, referred to as mobile e-Government involves the deployment of government’s services and administration on mobile devices. At over 100 million subscribers with over 85% active users, e-Voting can indeed leverage on this statistic, which can be aptly adjudged relatively informed enough to vote intelligently. In other words, electronic voting will produce intelligent electorates.
When one considers the fact that the population of Nigerians who register to vote have, consistently, been less than 100 million, it would be safe to nurse the confidence that the number of subscribers on the nation’s telecom platform is standing on good ground for a credible and productive E-voting operation in Nigeria.
At over 200 million people, Nigeria remains Africa’s most populous country with over 84 million registered voters in the over 18 elections held so far in the country, as at 2019. This has been acclaimed to be a 25% rise from the last such vote five years ago, according to INEC.
However, the turnout was just 44% in 2015 and just a little above that figure in 2019 with less than 20 million votes counted in the end.
That puts Nigeria 41st out of 44 African countries, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance on their last presidential election turnout.
Elections show how men dominate politics in Nigeria. Although, 47% of registered voters are women, according to the electoral commission, female political representation is limited.
Nigeria has never elected a female president or state governor, and women only make up just a little above 6% of the 469 national parliament members. For national and gubernatorial elections, women make up an average of one-in-eight of the 8,878 total candidates, while for the presidency, alone, they are 7% of the 71 candidates.
Almost a quarter of registered voters, 24% of them, live in Buhari’s heartland in the northwest, according to INEC, while the next-largest region, by vote, in the southwest.
This concept would definitely result in fostering closer link between government and the electorates with the resultant effect of enhanced participation in the polity. Similarly, on the Internet platform, there are a number of nations that had experimented with the possibility of adopting it. Particularly, in Geneva, Switzerland, where plans are in an advanced stage of adopting it.
With the rate of diffusion of mobile devices, other voting media can be sought such as m-Voting as well as SMS texting for better governance and administration
It is a system that has modernized electoral processes and electorates are able to cast their votes through an electronic device as against the traditional manual system. The three types of e-Voting include:
Polling station e-Voting: where voters cast their votes electronically on an electronic machine within the polling booth. There is Kiosk e-Voting, where voters cast their votes at pre-selected stations through ATM-Iike terminals; and Remote e-Voting, where voters cast their votes anywhere, and anytime, there is Internet access; as well as voting through mobile devices.
For the larger part of the population, the last option would be more readily applied, as it appears to be the most convenient of the three types of electronic ballot system of voting. The other two would equally come in handy for those who cannot afford data (internet) and electricity to power their personal phones or computers as the case may be.
However, the disadvantages could also be as daunting as its merits are excitingly tempting.
Over-voting, a cacophony of broadcast deriving from the simultaneous transmission of results from polling booths to the headquarters; equipment malfunction during elections and taken offsite for repairs, poorly implemented security measures and election rigging through code manipulation from proprietary software developers among others.
From the look of it, these problems are, dangerously, too similar to the ones the nation is trying to run away from, in the existing manual system. The only difference, here, is that there are no physical ballots boxes to snatch by political thugs and hoodlums. But then, the codes can be said to be the equivalent of a ballot box, which can be snatched (in this context, manipulated) online to twist or thwart actual results.
In spite of these identified possible hiccups, it is believed that if the system is properly deployed, electronic voting has several advantages over the conventional methods. The Brazil Experience makes Brazil the first country in the world to have a complete e-Election, through an indigenous technology called the Brazilian Voting Machine.
Developed through a partnership among OMNITECH, Micro base and Unisys do Brazil, the machine won the South American country many accolades for its affordable and uniform electronic voting machine (EVM) called Urna, which was used by its 115 million voters.
For audit trail, the machine was used with printers in some elections to produce paper receipts but in the last presidential election, printers were not used and the country was able to save over $100 million. There were significant savings using indigenous technology; while Diebold costs $3000 in the US, Urna (non-touchscreen) costs $420 on the average.
Exported to other countries like Argentina, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, there was a series of roadshows, it was set-up in bus and train stations, and other public places for all and sundry, before its adoption.
The world’s largest democracy, India; where most voters are poor rural dwellers, also applied a touch of the Brazilian home-grown flavour to its own experiment. The country developed its electronic voting machines (EVM) through indigenous technology.
Designed by Bharat Electronics Ltd, and the Electronics Corporation of India Ltd, with the microchip imported from Japan, India developed over one million EVMs for its 668million voters, which would have cost them a great deal of money had they been imported.
Modelled in pages of 16 candidates each, the machine was able to cater for 64 candidates per election, while the technology was able to solve numerous problems associated with the traditional voting system. Similarly, however, before its adoption, there were pilot schemes in five states to familiarize the voters with the technology.
This would be a game-changer for the way politics is done in Nigeria. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) spent N234bn on the just-concluded general elections. If we get to save that, it would complete scores of the federal roads that are now dilapidated.
Not just that, that would mean we’ve succeeded in translating from ‘sham’ politics to a real one like it is being practised in the developed world. It is no longer news that, at the moment, politics has almost become synonymous with thuggery, vote-buying, intimidation and their family of vices.
Then, politicians will now be compelled to campaign with practical solutions to people’s problems. Unlike now when the campaign of mockery, hate speech and tribalism are the political instruments we know about, diaspora voting compels politicians to discuss real issues.
They know that decision is left for the people, so they have the job of convincing voters to elect them. This also means that the position of godfathers would have been eroded. Left to them, the question of who rules has to be asked and answered by them, not the populace.
And there would be no fear of rigging anywhere. To a great extent, one would be sure that votes will count, unlike what operates today, where, votes can even get mixed up in transit.
In conclusion, it is heartening to note that the technology itself is resident in Nigeria, it is undergoing trials in the country. The University of Ibadan last year, 2019, held elections in which it employed the Electronic voting system for two or more elections.
Its report on the result of the experiment as culled from the university website speaks for itself:
UPDATE ON THE UNIVERSITY ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEM
In a bid to perfect the Electronic Voting System being presently developed by the University, another mock voting exercise was conducted today, Thursday, 4 July 2019.
The Information Technology and Media Services (ITeMS) deployed 1646 Electronic Voting requests to eligible members/voters of the University community to cast their votes as appropriate. After the end of the voting session, 260 members voted in today’s exercise as against 58 in the previous exercise conducted on Thursday, 27 June 2019.
There is a significant improvement in the exercise even though there are still some matters arising to be addressed to perfect the system before Monday, 29 July 2019. Some of the issues identified are as follows:
· Cleaning of the voters’ register
· Inability to vote
· Omission of names of qualified voters
· Apathy on the part of some voters
WAY FORWARD
It was resolved that the following steps should be taken to address some of the challenges encountered to ensure a free and fair election.
· The personalized PIN that enables people to vote should be in alphabets (Capital letters) and not in alphanumeric as previously deployed.
· The list should be updated to accommodate all eligible members of staff.
· Radio/Web Platform/WhatsApp announcement should be made to create more awareness.
· The list of eligible voters should be displayed online to address possible omissions, errors, etc.
Clearly, the Unibadan experiment has vindicated Bode George’s assertion that Nigeria is, indeed, ripe for the e-Voting system of elections. The success of the experiment further validates the hopes of the NIDCO Chairman, Abike Dabiri, for the possibility of giving Nigerians in the diaspora, the opportunity to vote via electronic voting, wherever they are in the world.
Worrying is the disturbing fact that for an ongoing experiment for such a nationally desired project, neither the Federal government nor INEC has acknowledged, publicly as of national urgency, the existence of that ongoing process. Its Chairman, Prof Mahmoud Yakubu, who is also a member of the Ivory Tower, seems to be silent about this development. At best, he may claim to have acknowledged it privately or behind closed doors. Unfortunately, that would not do for a project as huge as that. By this time, one expects heavy interaction, meetings (formal and informal, overt and covert) to be going on between the university and the INEC.
Nigeria can no longer toy with the idea, especially as the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed many public interactions indoors. Without a doubt, e-Voting is the answer and as the PDP Chieftain has affirmed, it is not beyond Nigeria to do even at this time.
Thankfully, one of the country’s cost-saving opportunities, for such an all-important project has been identified early, even before the start of the project, with the available technology already developed by the nation’s premier university, University of Ibadan.
