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22 — Vanguard, SEPTEMBER MONDAY 19, 2022 EETE TT M PPP The baseline is that in stable democracies, the cost is far lower, and part of the cost that we pay is the cost of absence of trust in public institutions •Prof Mahmood Yakubu N305 BILLION 2023 ELECTION BUDGET We are paying for lack of trust — Prof Mahmood Yakubu WITH approximately 97million voters, who will vote at 176,846 locations scattered around 8800 wards, 774 local government areas in the country, and a deployment of 1.4million (one million, four hundred thousand) staff for a six-hour election to be held twice or national and state elections, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, the National Chairman of Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, along with his national and resident electoral commissioners have their work cut out for them. "There are 15 countries in West Africa, excluding Nigeria. The voter population in the other 14 countries as at last year was 73 million. The voter population of Nigeria as at 2019 was 84 million. So, there are 11 million more voters than the other 14 countries combined. Each time Nigeria goes to the polls, it is like the entire West Africa voting. This will give you the idea of the size of what we are facing”, according to Professor Yakubu. Being a prayerful nation, INEC needs our prayers. But prayers alone do not make a free, fair and credible election. Nigerians must participate and do what is right so that the N305billion cost of the election does not go to waste by being complicit in disrupting the process or by not voting for the type of leadership that will provide good governance. At the interactive session organised by the Nigeria Guild of Editors, NGE, last Friday, Yakubu fielded questions and expressed the desire to deliver the best election in Nigeria’s history: "Our vision for the 2023 election is actually to conduct one of the best general elections in Nigeria which is going to be free, fair, credible, transparent, inclusive, and verifiable. People can sit down to see the result of their polling units Online from the comfort of their homes. The most important place during an election is the polling unit. Once you protect the integrity of the process at the polling unit, what we need to do is to protect the coalition. Once the people see the result online, we would have taken a very giant step." Doing the yeoman’s job of this transcipt is Olayinka Ajayi who sat through the about four hours of the session. By Jide Ajani Cost of election The Appropriate question to ask is why are elections expensive or how do you determine the cost of elections? Elections are expensive simply because of the way we conduct our elections. The baseline is that in stable democracies, the cost is far lower. And part of the cost that we pay is the cost of absence of trust in public institutions. In France, the ballot paper is like an A4 sheet of paper because it is unthinkable that anybody in France would snatch the ballot paper. But here in Nigeria, we print the ballot paper to currency quality, entrust the ballot paper with the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, for instance, then move the ballot paper like the movement of the national currency just to protect the process. This is not going to be done cheaply. Paying for lack of trust So, we pay for the cost of lack of trust in the system. But how do you measure the cost of an election? You spread the entire cost per voter and if you do so, Nigeria’s election is not even the most expensive. The last election we conducted in Ghana, if you take the voter population per capita in relation to the cost, it was actually more expensive than Nigeria's election. Kenya had its election last month, it was actually the most expensive election ever conducted in Kenya and the most expensive in Africa. What they spent was much higher than Nigeria for a voter population of 22million as against our Elections cannot be better than the . context in which they are conducted projected 94 to 95 million registered voters. The cost per person in Nigeria I think, is $9 as against what happens in other countries. Once you browse the internet, you will see the cost of elections. So ours is not even the most expensive election. The cost of the election in 2023 is N305billion of the national Budget. The national budget this year is over N17 trillion, the cost of election is just 1.8 per cent. it's not even 2 per cent of the national budget. So, yes, while N305 billion is quite a huge amount of money, but if you remove technology cost, 60 per cent of the cost of election is spent on logistics and personnel allowances. For the two elections, we will engage 1.4million Nigerians. They have to be paid, they have to be transported to various locations. I must also say every Nigerian is an auditor of INEC. In fact, the Electoral Act says that when you go to your polling unit the first thing you do is to check an inventory of all the materials: from ballot boxes to the voting cubicle, to the result sheet, to the ballot papers, to scissors, envelops and in one of the polling units they'll have to see the stamp pad because the law says so. All these materials are delivered, there's a cost associated with these materials. There is a joke that in a remote area where there's no development, ballot boxes get there. But what Nigerians don't say is that the ballot boxes did not just get there, somebody took it there and each time we make preparation for elections budget because we do our elections in two faces, (National and State Elections) actually some of the ballot boxes never come back, some stolen, some smashed. The last time we conducted general elections, we had to engage more than 80, 000 vehicles for the elections and in the riverine areas we engaged boats for electoral logistics. So each time we make procurement, we have a 10 per cent buffer in case. So that is the reality of conducting an election in Nigeria. As we continue to build trust, the cost of elections is going to come down. Support from donor agencies I know that the commission receives support from global partners, but we don't receive cash from global partners. There are areas where we never accept support from anybody. The core electoral activities like election technologies, sensitive materials, voter registration are the responsibilities of the federal government. So they have to make resources available for this. In other words, it may look expensive once every four years, because it doesn't happen every year, but we will continue to build public confidence in the system that would have a consequential impact on the cost of elections. Continues on page 23
Continues from page 22 BIVAS and Bandwidth On election day, they accredit voters, after the election, they snap the image of the polling units results and transmit them to the INEC portal. Bandwidth comes in only in two respects: when we configure the BIVAS before we deploy, and we take a number of days for us to do so. So, it is not something that has to be done within six hours and when we transmit, it is preserved. But the thing with the result is that once you transmit from the polling units, even if there is no network, as you move to where there is network, even if it is a freak network, it will transmit the result. On election day, some people think that we consistently operate on connectivity during voting. You don't require internet connectivity during voting. It is done offline once you configure the BIVAS. If there's a problem with the BIVAS and you want to reconfigure it then you need bandwidth but if it's operating normally at the polling unit, then it works offline. CUPP allegation and the Suit in Owerri trying to stop use of BIVAS Officially, INEC is not aware of it, we have not been served. When we are properly served, we would respond accordingly. And if the matter is in court, there's a limit to what we can say. Just like you read the story in the media, that was how we read it in the media. Attempt to hack INEC system People are worried about what I said last week but I did it in a context. All web resources are consistently attacked, whether it is a voter registration portal, or other resources, they are consistently hacked. It is the responsibility of the organisation to be fortifying and defending the system. I also added to the statement I made, that the whole attempt actually failed and we will continue to defend it. But we are not under any illusion that the system will be attacked. In Anambra, there were several attempts to attack the portal, in fact at one point we had to create a dummy portal to divert the hackers and we successfully delivered the Anambra election and posted the result online. So far, we used the portal to conduct 105 by-elections, and off cycle elections nationwide without any incidence. I know that the general elections are huge, but we have learnt a lot from what we have done. As to the defences that INEC is going to employ to protect our web resources, that is not a matter of discussion in public. Discipline of INEC staff and the reward system The reward system is consistent with what can be done under the public service rule. They are among the most committed public servants in Vanguard, MONDAY SEPTEMBER 19, 2022 — 23 'We are paying for lack of trust' •Prof Mahmood Yakubu I think the best thing we can do is to set an example, as a matter of principle the commission doesn't register underage voters and we don't encourage the violation of our constitution this country. As much as possible we do what we can to take appropriate steps against transgression but there's no electoral commission in the world that conducts elections on the basis of their regular staff strength. Some call it temporary staff, in Nigeria we call them ADHOC staff. We can't recruit 1.4 million in INEC simply because you want to conduct elections once every four years. So we rely on temporary staff. Primary Election contributing to the cost of litigation We have more litigations challenging the conduct of the elections by political parties and litigations arising from the conduct of the elections by INEC. The primary elections conducted by political parties have become so acrimonious. But if you compare that to the number of cases challenging the conduct of the elections by INEC, it is insignificant. What it means is that we have to be working with the political parties to strengthen their own internal democracy so that primaries are less acrimonious and court cases are reduced. Challenge of underage voting in the Northern part of the country Recall that in 2017 or 2018, we were here in Lagos when in Kano State the SIEC conducted local government elections, there were so many pictures online of underage voting in that election. First, it's not an election conducted by INEC; and my surprise is that when elections are conducted by INEC, we go around and we don't see these underage voters. What I think will be helpful to us and to this country, when you come across this kind of situation, kindly draw the attention of the commission while the process is ongoing. That is one of the most effective ways of dealing with the problem. It is against the laws of this country for any Nigerian below the age of 18 to vote. I f they are voting by someone's identity, that is a different c a s e •Prof Mahmood Yakubu altogether. I think the best thing we can do is to set an example. As a matter of principle the commission doesn't register underage voters and we don't encourage the violation of our constitution. Electronic voting It would cut-out so many things, hiring of vehicles, printing of ballot papers among others. There are several conditions attached to electronic voting and you cannot do just the electronic balloting you are talking about as the first step. It comes as a last step. The first step is to have credible biometric registered voters. Until 2010, when the commission introduced the biometric register of voters, every general elections, citizens were required to register. With every election, we register afresh. But in 2010 when the biometric register was introduced, those that have already registered did not register again. For instance, the last CVR was open to those who turned 18, citizens who could not register in previous exercises. So, we have the biometric register and we are cleaning it up. The second condition is to have a biometric accreditation of voters and that is what this country has been experiencing from 2015 through all the elections, initially with the smart card readers and now with the BIVAS. The third one is the electronic transmission of results and we have started using the INEC portal supported by law. When you get the three processes right, then everything is collated with a box called the electronic machine. So the simple answer to your question is that we are almost there. But there are steps you take before you get there. Quality of Elections and vote buying Elections cannot be better than the context in which they are conducted. I asked a question deliberately at the polling unit in Berlin: I asked the equivalent of the presiding officer, 'are ballot boxes snatched here’? He looked at me for a moment, I repeated the question, they looked at one another and whispered. They didn't understand what I was talking about. It is because they did not experience that in their history, but I was talking about the environment. The quality of election is a direct reflection of the quality of the environment but it's also a chicken and egg. The environment won't change until we have quality elections that produce quality leaders. So, if people have confidence in the process, why should they buy votes? So the environment is what I emphasised on, not politicians. On vote buying, there are a number of ways to deal with it, the election commission has its own part to play, and we all in our own ways also have a quality part to play. We did two things; one, we talked about the configuration of the polling units such that it will not be easy for people who make their choices in the cubicle to express their marked ballot papers before they drop them into the ballot boxes. But remember the law says we have to do an open secret ballot system. In 1979 and 1983 we had envelopes and so the ballot papers were put in an envelope. When we tried it in the Ekiti governorship election in 2018, we introduced a ban, not only on smart phones, but photographic devices while voters are in the cubicle making their choices.
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