After great apprehension that the worst will happen, the February 23 presidential poll has come and gone. But the aftermath will be with us for a very long time. The incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has been declared the winner having polled he highest number of votes cast and fulfilled all conditions in the statutes.
But his closest contender, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has rejected the result and vowed to seek redress at the tribunal. It is within his right to challenge the outcome of a poll he felt did not go the right way. We have witnessed such scenarios in past presidential polls from 1979 till 2015. However, Atiku’s decision is a marked departure from the situation in 2015 when former President Goodluck Jonathan conceded defeat and congratulated the winner even before the final result was declared. Also, the National Assembly election was exciting as old members were soundly defeated while new ones emerged.
The face of the 9th Senate will surely be different. It is a victory for Nigerian democracy. It is good to see new faces in the National Assembly so that it should not be business as usual. Those lawmakers who didn’t represent their people well were shown the way out while new ones were voted in. For the victorious ones, the challenge should be to do well and attend to the needs of their people.
Since President Buhari has gotten the four years he asked for, he must use it to serve the interest of all Nigerians. His cabinet must reflect the nation’s cultural and religious diversity. He must change his attitude to the South-East in terms of appointments and allocation of infrastructure to address the imbalances of his first term.
He should use the next four years to do those things he could not do. The war against the insurgents is not yet over. The rot in the education and health sectors must be frontally tackled. The era of education and medical tourism should be done away with. The nation’s varsities should be well equipped and adequately funded to check the incessant strikes by university teachers.
Development of road and rail infrastructure must be given priority attention. The economy should be diversified through the development of agriculture and exploitation of solid minerals. The power sector must be given the necessary push to make electricity available to all Nigerians. We must develop the capacity to generate enough electricity for our industrial and domestic use.
The solar power option and wind power system must be tapped fully as well as hydro and thermal sources of electricity. Government’s social investment programme must be vigorously pursued with some improvements in terms value and execution to benefit many Nigerians rather than party faithful. For this to be more effective, the government should retool the N-Power, Conditional Cash Transfer, TraderMoni, MarketMoni and FarmerMoni. The Home Grown School Feeding Programme ought to be improved and extended to all the states in the federation.
Before attention shifts to the March 9 gubernatorial and state assembly elections, there are noticeable hiccups in the February 23 Presidential and National Assembly polls that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) will urgently address. One of the lapses of the poll is malfunctioning card readers. The card reader has not been performing well since its advent in the nation’s electoral system in 2015. It is either the umpire gets the device working well or we forget it. It makes voting tedious when it fails to work. The procedures for the poll are too cumbersome and time-wasting that they should be simplified. There is the need to adequately train all INEC ad hoc staff. The performance of some of them in some polling stations left much to be desired.
There were no security agents in some polling booths in many states, including Lagos. This can explain while thugs had a field day in some parts of Lagos and other states. Electoral violence in some states and the killing of some voters clearly demonstrate the absence of security. The exercise witnessed high number of voter apathy. Ballot snatching is still one problem that the electoral umpire has not found a solution. The conduct of some politicians shows that INEC will do more on voter education. Our politics is still prebendal. It is still a ‘do or die’ affair. Our politicians are yet to see politics as an avenue to serve the people. They still see election as a contest that must be won by all means possible. That is why our election is characterized by warfare tactics. This mundane attitude to politics and election must change before we can make progress as a nation.
If the conduct of the February 23 presidential poll is anything to go by, there should be more voter apathy in the March 9 gubernatorial poll. The wanton killing of people during election is unacceptable. Nobody should die because he wants to cast his ballot. The waiting game that trailed the release of the presidential poll result must not be repeated in future presidential polls as well as the ritual of Abuja collation centre in a digital age.
Keeping Nigerians waiting for days before the declaration of the presidential result is not tidy. There is no point flying returning officers and others to Abuja before Nigerians can be told the outcome of the election at state levels in an era of information and communications technology (ICT). Are we moving forward or backward? The results ought to be transmitted to Abuja through computers and screened to Nigerians and the world simultaneously to make the exercise more transparent and credible.
We must change with time. INEC must be thinking of electronic voting in 2023. That is indeed the right way to go to stem the killings and ballot snatching during elections. The forthcoming bye-elections can be used to test e-voting. We must move with the world. While there were no cases of brazen vote buying and vote selling during the poll, the menace has not died. Politicians have devised other strategies to buy votes. Rigging is one problem that INEC has not done enough work to stamp out in our electoral system. Rigging can come in diverse forms but the worst form of rigging is the re-writing of election results which can occur at different collation centres.
This is one menace facing Nigeria’s elections. We must use technology to check the electoral evil before it ruins our nascent democracy. INEC should make the next election more transparent, free, fair and credible. It should use the March 9 exercise to correct the lapses of the February 23 poll. In future polls, the number of parties should be reduced. Having over 70 parties on the ballot is cumbersome.