After nearly a year of proposing this coming Saturday for the first of two days of general elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has suddenly come under intense pressure to shift the date. The first open suggestion of this was from the National Security Adviser (NSA), Sambo Dasuki, while speaking in Chatham House in London. His reason for the unexpected call was that INEC needed more time to ensure that all registered voters received their Permanent Voters’ Cards (PVCs) before the elections.
Like a scripted plan, many more individuals and groups latched on to that to push for the same postponement. But while it is true that the distribution of the PVCs took off rather very slowly, that has changed significantly in the last few days with many citizens reporting the ease with which they picked up theirs at the designated centres. In fact, as of Tuesday last week, the electoral management body reported 65 per cent collection.
At the rate and with the effort at publicity given to this process, there is a high likelihood that we could hit about 80 percent by the close of the exercise, more so, with some states declaring work-free days to enable residents take advantage of the exercise. The point must be made however that since the basis of this present voters’ register is mainly the 2011 registration, so many things could account for the failure to collect some of the cards. Many owners of the yet-to-be-collected cards may have died anyway. So many others have moved from the locations they were in 2011 to entirely new locations, distant from their earlier locations. In my voter education activities, I have met so many citizens who say they have since left the state where they initially registered and were either not aware of or never applied to transfer their information to their present locations.
There are equally some citizens who are waiting for the last few days of rush to pick up theirs just as there are some who, claiming they have no real choices in the candidates they see in this election, see no clear reason for bothering to pick up the cards. So, even if we extend this PVC collection to the end of the year, we are unlikely to have ‘everyone’ pick up theirs. Having said this much, one submits that the election should go on.
Another reason the election should go on is that most citizens are simply tired of the shenanigans that has characterised this electioneering season that they cannot wait to have this cup pass over. What is more, having raised so much interest in the election up to this moment, a shift is likely to lead to a sudden reduction in that momentum and voter apathy whenever the voting is then called for. By even going into that discussion last week, a feeling of disenchantment and dismay was already welling up in the citizens.
The suggestion that the Thursday’s meeting of the Council of State was likely to order the postponement or that the presidency was likely to do so, sounded very mischievous, if not offensive. This is because the power to fix dates for elections is with INEC alone. The Council of State is only an advisory body to the president and to no one else. So, even if they had advised the president to postpone, there was nothing the president could do about it if INEC said it was ready to go ahead, as they did. Rather than procure jobless and easy-to-manipulate citizens in different locations to hold baseless protests asking for postponement, the politicians, who seemingly are themselves not ready to face the voters, should be mobilising people to go to the collection centres to pick up their PVCs. They should focus on telling their supporters to eschew violence by informing them of how elections are won and lost. Those supporters need to know that their candidate or party may win in a polling unit, ward, local government area, state and even geopolitical zone and still lose the election. This is because to be declared winner, a candidate must win the majority number of votes cast and a spread of such votes across the country in the case of president and across the state in the case of governor.
And for the politicians, clergy and leaders of religious organisations who have been deceiving their followers with hate messages, trying to browbeat them to vote in a particular way in the name of religion, my summation is that such people are involved in religious bigotry and spiritual terrorism. They should not be taken serious at all and must be condemned. Their avowed ‘love’ for God and their religion amounts to hatred for their country and its people and therefore translates to hatred for God. Theirs is a panacea for violence before, during and after the elections, one which nobody is guaranteed to come out alive from. They must be condemned by every right-thinking member of society. After all, if we lose our country after the elections, it would not matter who won the elections because every one of us would be the loser. We must not allow this to happen.