Still on procedure and timetable, today, seven working days after the display of the Register of Voters opened across the country, the exercise will come to an end.
Andy Ezeani
The home stretch is always a mix of excitement and challenge. Interesting things often happen there. With 95 days to the commencement of the 2019 General Elections, Nigeria’s giddy quadrennial political contest is clearly on its home stretch.
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On November 18, 2018, six days from today, the presidential campaign will formally commence, pitching candidates of 74 out of the total 91 political parties around in a battle for the plum political office in the land. All the candidates in the presidential race are, of course, equal before the law. Weighted on certain apparent parameters, the 74 candidates may not be equal before the scale though. Time will confirm or debunk any ratings.
There is, of course, the unfinished business of political party primaries. The spillover of venom, abuses, litigations and blackmail that have characterized the primaries will surely not end soon. The publication by the Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC] of the particulars of candidates for the elections ought, in a normal setting to bring to an end the bickering over the primaries in the parties. That has not happened. The contention has shifted to the courts. If antecedent is anything to go by in our politics, some among the aspirants or their promoters who believe that they must be candidate will eventually end up at the ECOWAS court. For the desperadoes in Nigeria’s politics, tomorrow does not exist. They just have to have it today or the house should come down.
Give credit to the Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC]. it has, to all verifiable extent done all that is expected of it and sometimes more, to ensure a steady, focused progress on the road to 2019.The Commission has yet to lose any step in the elaborate timetable and procedure laid down by the law and its own regulations for a smooth and successful conduct of the elections in 2019. The Commission has been firm on the procedure and time line for parties and candidates to hold their primaries and submit names of their candidates. The challenge now is to stay the course and remain firm and even-handed in administering the rules.
Still on procedure and timetable, today, seven working days after the display of the Register of Voters opened across the country, the exercise will come to an end. Thereafter the Election Management Body will proceed to produce the clean copy of the Register of Voters on which the elections will stand. It remains doubtful though, that many fully understood not to talk of appreciating the essence of the exercise of Display of Register of Voters. But then to paraphrase the inimitably humble Ethiopian in Acts of the Apostles, how can the people know how crucial the Display of Register of Voters is unless someone guides them.
Under normal circumstances, the entities that should have the duty of enlightening and guiding the electorate on such matters are the political parties, but then here we are. Hobbled at all times by all manner of crisis within their folds, and having not managed to even appreciate their very essence, the political parties are permanently on AWOL at all crucial junctures when they ought to be on the forefront of voter enlightenment and sensitization. That leaves the Election Management Body shouldering the responsibility of enlightening the people simultaneously as they are carrying out programmes in the electoral process.
From all indications so far, INEC has reconciled itself to the duties of deepening democracy as the Law assigns to it. The broad gamut of activities which this assignment entails stretch from enlightening the electorate on basic rules, regulations, rights and expectations in the electoral process to learning the nuances of representative democracy. The Commission and its many foot soldiers from its Voter Education Department and other departments do not seem to have problems with taking these crucial messages on the dos and don’ts in the electoral process to even the remotest parts of the country.
What is obviously a source of frustration is the difficulty in getting the electorate to understand that what they are being called upon to do by INEC officials is for their own good. As it was in the course of registration of voters, so it has been in the Display of Register of Voters in which registered persons are expected to come up to crosscheck and confirm their names and details. The common question by many of why they should leave whatever they are doing to undertake these civic exercises speak of a pathetic lack of appreciation of the steps necessary to obtain the power to determine one’s future.
The matter gets a lot more serious when people ask INEC field officers for encouragement [read inducement] for them to come out and get registered as voters. While in the rural communities the folks in their plain nature ask for inducement for them to go out to register, in the urban areas the same demand is made, more or less, but masked in sophisticated banal language; what is the guaranty that my vote will count? Who is to give another that guaranty? The expectation that any person, no matter his station or work schedule will provide any guaranty for a citizen before he goes to register as a voter or goes out to collect his voter’s card, speaks of the substantial distance that still needs to be covered before electoral democracy can blossom in our society.
A vital aspect of the Display of Register of Voters exercise is the opportunity it offers for claims and objections by people. The failure by any registered person to go out to crosscheck his name and details in the course of the Display simply translates into a waiver of the right to complain subsequently when the final Voters Roll is published.
Until people realize that the little sacrifices of time and physical presence they have to make at various intervals in such exercise as registration either as voters or for national identity card form a basic ingredient of the development of man and the society, various efforts to enhance the level of our social development will continue to stutter.
From all indications a lot more enduring public enlightenment programme on citizens responsibility and civic duties are needed.