The war is over, the battle won and lost. Warriors with different kinds of wounds stagger home. Even the victor, is limping as he does his victory dance.
This is the time to take stock. Why was the battle lost? Was the god of far fair to all combatants or was the field tilted to favour one against the other?
In this first part, we shall look at INEC and her preparedness for the election.
INEC held series of press conferences, stakeholders meetings ahead of the February 12 FCT Area Council Election. At each of these meeting, INEC assured Abuja residents of its preparedness to conduct an excellent, free and fair election. It further threatened that it shall prosecute electoral crime offenders.
But on Election Day, INEC performed abysmally below best practices.
Materials were not distributed on time, accreditation and voting did not commence in most polling units in Kubwa at 8:30.
Despite claims by INEC that it created more polling units to decongest crowded ones, we still saw crowds at polling units.
The failure of Biometric Voter Accreditation System, (BVAS) was legendary. Either it was technical failure or due to incompetence of INEC and ad hoc staff to manipulate the machine. This caused delay and voters were agitated with some leaving the polling units without coming back to vote.
There was open vote buying. INEC and the police appeared helpless and couldn’t apprehend any violator. In Area Councils where the incumbent had interest, he used his incumbency to stretch INEC staff and in some cases, out rightly bullied them.
At the end of voting, the manual tabulation of results from different polling units at the collation centers, was slow and there were marginal errors. Most of these collation centers were not properly lit and the tired ad hoc staff, were not enthusiastic about maintaining the integrity of the process.
