17th January, 2011
It may be too early to express doubts over the ability of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to register all Nigerians of voting age within the two weeks allotted to the exercise by the commission.
However, the hiccups that have dogged the exercise in the last three days give cause for serious concern. Reports from all over the country point to the fact that the voter registration exercise is mired in a myriad of problems. Some of these are faulty Direct Data Capture, DDC, machines INEC acquired for N87 billion, batteries of the machines going flat after a short period, ad hoc staff not being able to operate the machines effectively, late arrival of ad hoc staff at registration centres, etc.
The massive awareness created by the media about the registration of voters generated a lot of excitement among the people who have been trooping out to get registered since last Saturday. But most of them have been sorely disappointed as the problems INEC’s ad hoc staff are grappling with seem insurmountable. At some registration centres, the situation was so bad that on the first day of the exercise, only a handful of people were registered while hundreds of others who queued to get registered went home disappointed. In some cases, those registered could not get the printout of their registration cards.
Zinox Computers, one of the companies which supplied the DDC machines, said it had deployed 74 support staff to all the 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory to assist registration officials intsall the equipment properly. We are yet to see the impact of the trouble shooting effort of Zinox.
Days before the exercise, we had raised an alarm on our front page that the ad hoc staff were finding it very difficult to operate the DDC machines. The problems the ad hoc staff had encountered in the course of their training have reared their heads again now that the exercise has begun. Some of the staff are so flustered and frustrated that they want to opt out.
The Chairman of INEC, Prof. Attahiru Jega, had assured Nigerians that the exercise would take off smoothly and admitted that the commission faced some challenges which he did not disclose. Perhaps those challenges are the hiccups we are now seeing. When Jega was advised to deploy the DDC machines to Delta State to test run them by using them to register those who would vote in the governorship rerun, he ignored the advice. Perhaps, all the hitches his commission is encountering now would have been corrected if he had heeded that advice.
Since rigging begins with voter registration through the manipulation of the register, the problems associated with the ongoing exercise must be quickly solved in order not to give crooks and their sponsors room to hijack the process for their selfish ends. If these problems persist, we doubt if all Nigerians of voting age will be registered before the end of the exercise even as INEC has repeatedly insisted that it would not extend the exercise beyond the two weeks slated for it. This is the first major test Jega’s INEC must pass ahead of the April general election. If it is bungled , then we’ll be in for serious trouble in April.
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