Obo Effanga, Resident Electoral Commissioner of Rivers State in this interview with ISHAYA IBRAHIM, reveals the extent some politicians went in trying to sabotage the 2019 elections. Excerpt….
There is no doubt you conducted the toughest election because even the result of the governorship poll was known 25 days after the votes were cast. What were the factors that made the Rivers election so tough?
Looking at it globally, politicians in Nigeria need to come to terms with how elections are conducted, the minimum standards for elections, and the people who want to occupy public office by election have to understand the rules, they have to be guided by what the constitution and the electoral guidelines say. If they are conversant with these, they will conduct themselves in such a manner that they can easily contest election and win.
I think that for too long, the culture of politicians doing everything just to access political office in the name of elections even when they breach the rules and then expect that once they get elected, it will take the opponent a long time and sometimes having to face the technicalities to get that upturned by the tribunal is being in the past.
Politicians should make sure that they understand the rules and play by the dictates of the rules. What we did in Rivers State has gone to show that things can be done properly and we would not allow people to take advantage of the system.
The belief out there is that REC’s come under the pressure from politicians to do their bidding. What is your experience, have you got that kind of pressure?
I don’t have that experience because I don’t put myself in a situation where I become accessible to politicians. But the one thing I know is their strategy of using violence to disrupt the process when it is not going in their favour. That was why when we saw that the situation was becoming too violent, we had to suspend the process so that we could guarantee the safety of the voters, the safety of our personnel and to ensure that the integrity of the electoral process is preserved.
This election depicts the kind of people that we are. If we have not been condoning this kind of behaviour in our communities, it would not have got to this extent. And it is unfortunate that certain security agents made themselves available to be used.
How can the general problem of election rigging be solved? What are the human and material things needed to address election rigging?
The first thing to do is to make public office less lucrative. When you have a system where people think that getting into an office is the only way to be comfortable, people will do virtually everything to get there. We have one of the best electoral systems in the world, but how do we get the politicians to accept the minimum standards for elections? Many of them are not motivated to occupy public office for public service. And this is sad, and that is why the elections are looking like a war.
The truth is that our elections reflect who we are as a people. Our communal and public interests reflect what we make of the elections. There are rules laid down for the conduct of elections and for persons aspiring for positions. If everyone does the right thing, we would not have problems. But the problem stems from people who think they can assume office by whatever means and do anything just to get into the office.
Are you hopeful that the electoral bill if signed into law will help mitigate some of the shortcomings of the last election since one of the provisions allows for electronic transmission of results and we know that it is during collation of results that allegations of rigging are made?
I agree that electronic transmission of results will help reduce the incidence of rigging and violence since it will limit human contacts with the process of collation of results. That is, after voting is concluded at the polling units, the results are transmitted electronically to a central server.
But do you know what the politicians will do when you have this kind of scenario where you cannot manually collate the results? They will take the violence to the polling units. If they know that they are not winning at certain polling units, they will disrupt the process. In Rivers, they hauled dynamite into one of the collation centres. That is how far some people can go in doing the wrong things.
Another thing about electronic transmission of results is that some politicians will allege that something has been planted into the device that will reduce their votes. So, people must trust in the electoral umpire for the process to work.
There have been allegations of involvement of some agents of the military in the election. Going forward, how do you think the security agents can be made to know their boundaries?
It is clear that the police take the leading role in providing security during elections. They can however collaborate with other agencies. But I think that we also need to look at our political culture as Nigerians and see what we need to change. There is a lot of civic and political education that needs to happen. In other parts climes, it is unheard of for people to steal election materials, to destroy them or tamper with them. It doesn’t happen. It is unacceptable in those societies. How come we don’t feel disgusted by these kind of behaviours? When you see such things happen, how do we feel? Do we condemn it or we tolerate it? It is disgusting and the society should speak up against those kind of acts. And it is unfortunate that some highly placed people are involved in this kind of brigandage. It is time for the society to point out those members of society who are involved in this.
