Election Updates - How We’ll Ensure Credible Polls, By INEC Chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega

[TGD]

NIGERIANS go to the polls today. This is after shaking off the disappointment of the postponement of the election of last Saturday.

To avert a recurrence of the challenges that led to the shift of the National Assembly polls which are taking place today, the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) has adopted some measures.

Jega observed that the late arrival of electoral officers to their places of assignment was inimical to the early commencement of the voting process.

He said that a review of the botched National Assembly elections last week Saturday indicated that on the average, polling officers came to their places of posting at about 10. 30-11 a.m., a situation he described as unacceptable. He therefore asked the Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) to ensure that they implement some of the resolutions reached during their consultative meeting in Abuja on Tuesday.

Speaking, while receiving a delegation from the United States-based National Democratic Institute (NDI) Observer Mission in the country to monitor the general elections in the country, the INEC boss, however assured that everything had been put in place to produce free, fair and credible elections beginning with today's National Assembly elections.

The INEC boss, who lamented the botched polls last week, admitted that it constituted a serious blight to the country's image, but insisted that the decision to postpone the elections was taken to return credibility and integrity to the process.

His words: "One major thing observed last Saturday was that on average, elections commenced around 10.30 -11 in many polling units and we said that that the situation is unacceptable because of the accreditation system that we have introduced, and we have taken measures to ensure that this time around, personnel and materials arrive on good time to the polling units so that accreditation can commence on time. There was the problem of managing the queue for accreditation."

He blamed the situation on the failure of INEC officials to comply with the guidelines the commission had put in place. According to him, "Obviously, it was a failure of compliance to our guidelines, I must admit. We had taken decisions that polling units that had a large number of registered voters, we should decentralize the accreditation system and establish what we called voting centres so that if for instance, a polling unit is more than 500 voters, then they should be split into two. The size of a voting centre we recommended is 300, but in substantial majority of cases it wasn't done last Saturday, so we have taken measures to ensure that that is done this time around and particularly in large cities where there are sizeable numbers of registered voters. We believe this will hasten the accreditation process and then make it easier so that the time it would take would be reduced."

He promised that so many measures had been put in place to ensure the integrity of the process, noting: "We will strengthen the security in the distribution of the materials, we had a meeting with political parties and all these issues were raised, security ballot papers, missing logos and so on and we came out of that meeting with a clear unanimous understanding of the plans that we explained to them that we found them satisfactory."

The INEC boss described the botched National Assembly poll as a sad moment for the country and the commission. According to him, "It is well known that by now the decision we took on Sunday was a very difficult decision, but it had to be taken because we believe that it is better to have a postponed election than a flawed election. This is widely recognized, it is unfortunate, embarrassing to our country, to the commission and we know it is a big disappointment to many other people who have very high hopes that things would go on well right from the beginning. But we have not allowed that to affect our preparations and focus, we have done our best since then to see what additional measures we can take to improve both our logistical and operational measures for the elections for Saturday. We have done quite a lot in this regard, we have learnt a lot of lessons and we have taken measures to improve upon our pitfall as we prepare for tomorrow (today).

"So I feel confident that there was a remarkable improvement as a lot of the challenges. We have taken measures to deal with them and to bring them to the barest minimum. One of the major challenges was how can we ensure that there is no demonstration of unfairness to parties or to candidates because of our own errors?

Source: How We'll Ensure Credible Polls, By Jega