Recently, the Independent Electoral Commission, INEC, unveiled the election timetable for the conduct of the 2019 general elections, two years ahead of time.
According to the electoral umpire, the national elections in Nigeria would hold on the third Saturday in February of the election year while the state elections would be held two Saturdays later.
The public was yet to absorb the announcement, when it declared that e -voting would be used during that election.
Perhaps in anticipation of public criticism in a country used to expecting and getting fixed election dates announced few months to election, the electoral umpire gave copious, albeit genuine, reasons for its move.
Apart from the logistics constraints to overcome, technical challenges attending continuous voter registration and ward delineation, INEC detailed countries where the fixed timetables for election has become a norm.
These countries are found in the developed and developing countries, even in the African continent. They are the United States of America, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Costa Rica, Switzerland, and neighboring Ghana, where dates for elections are known well in advance.
Expectedly, politicians have hailed the move. Generally, they agreed that the new election calendar would enable them to plan well ahead of time.
One political party rep even took his party’s appraisal to a laughable level when he said that it would enable politicians to plan for other activities such as wedding and weekend parties.
Be that as it may, it cannot be gainsaid that INEC ‘s move is a test case. Planning for elections many years ahead of time is one thing, fixing the dates as sacrosanct is another. The reason that other countries, even less endowed than Nigeria, have done so, is yet another.
In Nigeria where the best is hard to achieve even though the worst never happens, according to a local philosopher, dreams usually die first.
The tales about infrastructural deficit, corruption and lack of patriotism is usually advanced to hobble even the best of intentions before they are started.
But what can be achieved without planning? Where else in an emerging democracy such as ours can theory be indulged in so as to inform practice? Can existential realities in a given milieu be addressed frontally without strategies and tactics?.
In any case, the above-mentioned African and South American countries with fixed electoral timetables cannot be said to be doing better than Nigeria in infrastructure, manpower and political discernment among their citizens.
Indeed, the huge voting public in Nigeria, almost a total of those in Costa Rica and Ghana combined, should be enough reason to plan well ahead in time as soon as possible. The INEC initiative is therefore commendable.
The case with electronic voting is another area where INEC hit the spot. Even though it still has to be tested, and the Commission has the conduct of future bye-elections and governorship elections to do so, it cannot be denied that the acrimony and violence that make elections here uncompetitive would be reduced, if not eliminated by the use of electronic voting.
Obviously, INEC is following in the historical footstep laid by the previous administration, which adopted card reader for the 2015 general elections.
But unlike that regime, which waited until the last minute to test the card reader and had little or no time to correct the defects that emerged to the distress of Nigerians and an over heated polity, the new INEC is being proactive in planning ahead.
Anyone who has been following the outcome of the 2016 US general elections can see that organization of elections, even in the home of modern democracy, are hardly near perfect.
Even so, there is another reason to praise INEC. It is the dominion effect INEC move would have on other institutions or agencies of government, if it gets its acts right.
The influence of personal idiosyncrasies rather than regulations and due process on the operations of organizations would be reduced to the minimum when the actors and participants of a scheme or an event are all primed well ahead of time.
When that event is the organization of genuine, periodic elections in a democracy, particularly in an emerging country such as ours where known thieves, gamblers, knaves, pimps and gigolos have emerged victorious through a warped electoral process oiled by laundered and dirty money, the need for the requisite planning cannot be overemphasized.
Nevertheless, it is safe to say that INEC alone cannot pull this laudable initiative through if other agencies of government and the public generally fail to support it.
In this regard, the Senate approval of the INEC’s e –voting plan is commendable.
Other agencies such the Ministry of Information and Culture, National Orientation Agency, NOA, the media and the security agencies must key into the INEC laudable objective for it to succeed.
On this note, we applaud the Commission under the leadership of Professor Mahmood Yakubu for its foresightedness, boldness and decisiveness in championing the implementation the e –voting and the new election timetable. We have no iota of doubt that Yakubu and his team means well.
For him and his team to do what they have done and then for him to go ahead to seek and win the election as President of ECOWAS network of electoral commissions, a wider domain, in Cotonou a fortnight ago, shows that he values integrity and transparency.
He has thereby broadcast the intention of the Commission to conduct credible and fair elections in 2019 to the world.
Even daring to unveil the plan as he did at a time the country was under a cloud over uncertainty about President Buhari’s state, is enough demonstration that the INEC Chairmen is not one for foolish sentiments where serious national matters are concerned.
While congratulating him on the cap he has just won, we urge him and his team to remain steadfast and committed in their determination to pilot the affairs of a key decider of our democratization process, INEC. Kudos.
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