Awaiting the verdict

After the false start of the upper weekend, Nigeria finally made it to the poll last Saturday as citizens got to cast their ballots, hopefully in full accordance with their electoral wishes. Done now with the voting, we face the harder part: awaiting the declaration of outcomes by the umpire.

Waiting on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to declare results for various constituencies involved in the poll is typically a nerve-wracking game of suspense. But appreciating the scope and design of the activity at play should help in understanding why the wait, and perhaps how to.

The elections last Saturday were the national elections. The state elections, for governorships and state houses of assembly seats, are scheduled to hold a fortnight from now. Polling units nationwide where voters expectedly cast their ballots and from which vote counts are being pooled number 119, 973, with some of these further decentralised into 57, 023 voting points. There are 91 political parties as registered players, although differing numbers fielded candidates in respective election. Last Saturday’s poll involved the single constituency presidency, for which a return is by law to be made by the electoral commission’s helmsman, who is the nation’s chief electoral commissioner. There was voting also into the 109 senatorial constituencies and 360 federal constituencies of the House of Representatives, and officials that INEC has appointed as returning officers for those constituencies are declaring winners at those levels. But for the presidency, vote counts are being tallied up from the polling units, through collation centres at the ward, local government and state levels, and up to the National Collation Centre in Abuja where the results are being entered for final computation upon which the INEC helmsman will make a return.

Only the electoral commission is empowered by law to declare results for all the constituencies. However, the procedure of results collation is open to all that are interested in keeping a close watch on the process – especially the political parties, which are expected to have agents at all the levels of collation starting with the polling units. That is to say each party can track and be abreast of the unfolding outcome even ahead of a formal pronouncement by the electoral body. Observing and tracking INEC’s collation procedure is helpful to ensure that the electoral body stays true to the trend of results issuing from the polling unit level up to the last constituency collation point for respective election. But it is by no means a licence for any player to preempt the umpire in making a declaration of the results.

Preemptive or unofficial declaration of results, either by political actors or the media, has a huge potential for disrupting the public peace because partisans could readily seize on such declaration to violently avow a preferred outcome and reject the official verdict the electoral body may eventually come up with, especially if it does not accord with their avowed preference. But because the collation is open to observation, it is quite possible for an interested stakeholder who has representatives reporting in from all levels involved in the process to have a conclusive picture of the outcome even before the electoral umpire makes a formal pronouncement. To be sure though, such advance insight is strictly for personal advice and eventually for measuring the accuracy / validity of the official declaration when it is made by INEC. Where there is a discrepancy, it provides a helpful basis on which to challenge the official pronouncement through the legitimate channel of judicial adjudication.

‘Waiting on INEC to declare results for various constituencies involved in the poll is typically a nerve-wracking game of suspense’

The electoral commission has since the 2011 general election come a long way from those days in our electoral history when arbitrary outcomes that did not accord with the trend of results issuing from the polling unit level could be announced unchallenged at the final constituency level. This is because when the ballot count is done at the polling unit in the presence of party agents, interested voters and other stakeholders, the result is not only to be publicly announced but also entered in the statutory EC 8 form and pasted on the polling unit wall where anyone could take the record. Wherever that is not done, it is a breach of prescribed rules that should be taken up with the electoral body. Similar procedures are applicable at all other levels of collation up to the point of returning a winner for a particular constituency, making independent tabulation of the results by interested persons possible. But again, we must underscore that this is for personal advice and measuring the accuracy of eventual declaration by the umpire.

The big one at the moment is the presidency, and at the National Collation Centre where the final computation of results will be done and a return made, relevant stakeholders have seats provided for their close observation. These stakeholders include party agents, international as well as domestic observers, civil society organisations, the media and diplomats. Because extant Nigerian electoral law prescribes manual collation of the results, state collation officers are required to bring in the paper trail of results they already made public at the state collation centres for tallying at the national level. At the national centre, they are required to make another public presentation of the results they came in with, and these are double-checked against what is known to have been announced at the state level before being admitted for computation in the national score. The waiting game for the final outcome has much to do with awaiting the arrival of state collation officers at the national centre with state results.

While emerging results are being admitted at a higher level of collation, any interested party could flag a discrepancy with figures already in public domain or do their own computation. At the national centre, these figures and progressive computations are projected live on a screen. With the way the process is designed, the final outcome to be announced by the umpire must be an accurate computation of state figures already made public, both at that level and subsequently at the national centre. Where there is any inaccuracy, it should be swiftly flagged by relevant parties.

The implication here is that the umpire cannot declare an arbitrary outcome, even if it wants to, without being effectively confronted with ample evidence of the field trail of results that are already in public domain. The possible challenge is where a relevant stakeholder, like a political party, lacks the capacity to track the electoral body’s conduct of the collation, or where there is outside interference in any guise with the commission as to infract its processes. If everyone keeps a close eye on the bottom-up trail of results collation as they should, it was so much ado that an electoral chief was feared to have the capacity to swing the final outcome out of alleged primordial motivations.

If the process goes according to design, there is the need to recalibrate our political culture in this country for the survival of our democracy. Specifically, political gladiators need to be at their sportsmanly best. The mood of electioneering leading up to the poll last Saturday was fierce and fractious, but political actors and their supporters must learn to accept official outcomes as signposting the wishes of voters. Where there are valid issues to be taken with compliance to set procedures, the appropriate channel of redress is the courts.

It is the fact that the culture of conceding defeat is notoriously rare in our clime. Considering, however, that INEC, just before the poll, listed 1, 800 contenders in the race for the 109 senatorial seats, 2, 600 jostling for the 360 House of Representative seats and 73 political parties fielding 146 presidential candidates and their running mates, it will be extremely chaotic for our polity to have sore losers on such hugely crowded fields unless we mainstream readily conceding defeat.