By Soni Daniel, Regional Editor, North
The postulation by Alexander Herzen, (1812-1870) became manifest during the last set of elections in Nigeria.
The Russian reformist had written in one of his famous essays “that the men who proclaimed the Republic became the assassins of freedom”.
Herzen submitted that those who claimed to be pure revolutionists in Russia had in a way abandoned the real struggle to secure true liberty for all, and that though they had broken the chains they inadvertently left the prison walls standing, making them assassins of freedom. The manipulations and high level intrigues that characterised the just concluded general elections in Nigeria can be likened to a coup of some sort by those who claim to be Nigeria’s most liberal politicians.
They proclaimed to the world that they wanted a free, peaceful and credible election but they connived with many forces to rob Nigerians of the chance to freely elect their leaders and deliberately arm twisted the electoral umpire, Prof Attahiru Jega’s Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to short change Nigerians voters.
No doubt the elections have come and gone, producing winners and losers but the ripples generated have left many Nigerians with sour taste because of the conspiracy of high-ranking politicians, who worked hard to subvert the will of Nigerians just to maintain their electoral status-quo and keep smiling to the bank.
Nonetheless, while the winners are in high spirit, working round the clock to fix themselves on the reins of power, the losers continue to gnash their teeth, wondering what might have hit them like a volcano. In a way, the just-concluded polls, made history, broke the jinx of incumbency and wrote a new chapter in the Nigerian polity.
Surprisingly, although the changes introduced by INEC to add credibility to the elections, succeeded in certain ways to checkmate mass figures of electoral victory usually associated with Nigerian elections, it failed in many ways to checkmate electoral fraud and violence, effectively defeating the goals of the innovations factored into the polls. It appears that once majority of Nigerians achieved the change they longed for in the Presidential elections they overlooked many flaws that marked the Presidential election and actually floored the governorship elections in some states.
Smart Card Readers and Permanent Voter Cards: The good, the bad
The vision of those who contemplated the use of the card readers and permanent voter cards for the 2015 elections shows a clear evidence of thoughtfulness and readiness to part with the ugly past of Nigerian elections. In the recent past, Nigerian leaders with an eye for rigging, simply engaged in mass thumb-printing according to the earmarked or ascribed voter population in their respective domains because there was no means of ascertaining who reported for voting or not. But with the introduction of the SCR the PVC, it became clear to election riggers that it would be difficult to continue with the dubious business as usual.
The SCR simply put a ceiling to what governors, lawmakers and their parties could declare in the just-concluded polls. In fact, a clear pattern simply emerged as the results of the 2015 elections began to roll in: Out of the 36 states and Abuja, none of them was able to declare up to 50 percent score of the votes when juxtaposed with the number of the voter population claimed by the states and the FCT, leaving political pundits to wonder what might have happened to the remaining ‘voters’.
In the recent past, Kano, and Lagos, which emerged with the highest voter population figures of about 5 million, would have accordingly returned something close to that figure without the use of the card readers, which automatically pegged the number which any state could declare at the end of voting. But because of the application of the technology, Kano which registered close to five million voters and was actually issued with over four million PVCs,
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