September 29, (THEWILL) – The results of the local government polls held last week in Enugu, Imo, Kwara and Sokoto States predictably turned out in favour of the governing political parties in those states.
In Kwara State, the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, won all 16 Chairmanship and 193 Councillorship positions in contest, leaving nothing for any of the other five participating political parties. In Imo, also governed by the APC, where 17 of the 19 registered parties participated, all 27 Chairmanship and 305 Councillorships were won by the party.
In Sokoto State, the State Independent Electoral Commission, SIEC, like its counterparts in Imo and Kwara, declared the governing APC as winner of all the 23 Chairmanship positions. The same pattern was repeated in Enugu State where the governing Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, won all 17 Chairmanship positions and 260 Councillorship seats.
In these months of rash LGA polls being conducted by state governments, following the recent Supreme Court judgement that granted administrative and financial autonomy to local government areas and imposed non-disbursement of federal allocations to Caretaker Committees, that many state governments had instituted in place of elected local government councils, the outcome of the polls, always predictable as before, merely became a circus, as many of the state governments’ electoral umpires simple got officials to thumb print ballot papers and declared their preferred winners without announcing results.
Typically, these scenarios aptly capture the hackneyed phrase that he who pays the piper dictates the tone. In practical terms, LGA polls in Nigeria do not reflect the wishes of the people, but that of the governing party, by the governing party and for the governing party. In political terms, this feature called machine politics, works from the instruction to the answer.
There is no reason to believe that this situation will change in the nearest future as long as internal organs of political parties lack democratic processes, not to talk of the systemic structure that favours oligarchs.
What happens at the LGAs is a reflection of what goes on at the larger level, either at the state or national level during elections conducted by INEC.
Times without number, stakeholders have given the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, the benefit of the doubt after it organised a fiasco in the name of election. Whether the election is off-season as it happened in Edo State last week, or the one coming up in Ondo State on November 16, 2024, INEC, as currently constituted, cannot be trusted to deliver a free, fair and credible poll.
Now, politicians from across political divide who perform all kinds of electoral malpractices from rigging, to vote-buying, thuggery and ballot box snatching, to mutilation of result sheets and attack on electoral officers, are known for their dodgy character and therefore may be pitied in comparison to polling officers of the Commission who deliberately falsify and manipulate figures on result sheets, on the one hand and on the other hand, deliberately refuse to activate the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System BVAS, to capture voters. Yet, the Commission would go ahead to announce results it even at times claimed were different from what was uploaded in its INEC Result Viewing Portal, IREV.
Presumably neutral parties speaking on the collation process at the just concluded Edo poll, adjudged the process not transparent. The body, a coalition of accredited civil society organisations made up of the Nigerian Civil Society Situation Room, Yiaga Africa, Kimpact Development Initiative, Nigerian Women Trust Fund, ElectHER and TAF, the transparency of the collation of results by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), said: “Widespread disruptions at ward and local government collation centres, including intimidation of INEC officials and attempts to collate results, contrary to the provisions of the Electoral Act and INEC guidelines, raise significant concerns about the credibility of the results collation process.”
“In the light of this, we urge INEC to invoke its powers under Section 65 of the Electoral Act 2022 to review any declarations and returns where results were not declared voluntarily or violated provisions of the Electoral Act and INEC regulations and guidelines.”
Similarly, Yiaga Africa, noted for giving wide, observed coverage to elections in Nigeria, based on reports from 287 of 300 (96 per cent) sampled polling units, Yiaga Africa’s statistical analysis shows inconsistencies in the official results announced by INEC. If INEC could fall this low in the conduct of a state election, how different is it from SIECs?
It is time to heed the stand by stakeholders that for INEC to deliver on its mandate, it must be unbundled, the appointment and financing structures redefined to make it serve the public, rather than official interests.
