IN an age of biometric systems, when machines can determine the ownership of a thumbprint to an infallible degree, it is within the realm of possibilities to have elections that are also difficult to rig. I mean difficult to rig. Not impossible. Such, however, was the hope invested in the possibility of some magic by Professor Attahiru Jega, the new Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, as a result of his reliance mostly on the veracity of the machines he had imported, that there were only a few misgivings here and there about the 2011 elections!Not even the cynical belief, quite widespread, that too many eligible voters were denied registration by the misbehaviour of the machines and many underage children and aliens were registered during the exercise, appeared capable of damning the faith in technology that he had successfully sold to the country. Barring logistical hiccups, including the mis-deployment of election materials and the mal-mobilization of security forces, it seemed well within reason to say that the era of free and fair elections had come upon us.That was it, until the Big Hiccup on polling day, April 2nd, after voting had started in many parts of the Federation.It happened that Professor Jega who, only a day before, had assured the nation of a peerlessly free and fair election, decided to cancel and postpone the ballot for another 48 hours. The rationale for postponement was least expected: he volunteered that the materials for the elections, which he had described as safe in a Central Bank vaults only the day before, had actually not yet arrived in Nigeria. The materials were only just arriving from Japan on that day.Haba! It was the first such pleading by the head of a National Electoral Commission since elections began in Nigeria in 1908. Usually, the errors piled up on polling day with the disenfranchised left to nurse their wounds without recompense. In living memory, no mid-stream cancellation or postponement of the polling day such as Jega has delivered was conceivable. Even when things were really so bad, they were papered over with attendant disfigurement of the will of the people.The point is that Professor Jega has had the gumption to differ. Taking full responsibility for the hiccup, he has presented postponement as the only option left to him after he figured that so many of Nigerias 36 states would have had no election materials if he allowed the exercise to continue. Although not unaware of the storm of disappointment that would meet his announcement, he had to exercise courage rather than invite tragedy in the manner of many of his predecessors in office.He bowed to panic, however, when he chose the following Monday as the next date for the postponed elections. What was the guarantee that he could perform the feat of distributing the just arrived materials to nooks and crannies across the country in the face of so many unmotorable roads for which Nigerians needed to thank many of the chief executives running as candidates in the electionsBesides, as the Action Congress of Nigeria argued, he made no allowance for political parties that would need more than a work free and bank free Sunday, to access funds for the purpose of re-mobilizing polling agents across the country.No question about it: it would have amounted to deliberately bargaining for nightmare if INEC, as an organization, had failed to yield to the pressure to change the date from 4th to the 9th of April, as many political parties demanded on pain of a boycott. The new date has yielded a one week postponement of all the other scheduled elections: the Presidential election is now to be on April 16th, and the Gubernatorial and House of Assembly elections on the 26th of April.As if this was enough, two days to the first of the re-scheduled elections, Professor Jega announced another set of postponements, as he could not guarantee correct election materials for 15 out of 109 senatorial districts and 48 out of 360 House of Representatives constituencies. These, he told a nation almost numbed by postponements, would now take place on the same dates as the April 26 elections. What a hazard of postponements and more postponements!Hoping that we have seen the last of them, the time, it may be argued, has come to deal with many substantive questions raised by the hiccups: such as, couldnt Jega have saved the country all the trouble by cross-checking with his subordinates in the cockpit of his Operations Department before he went to town with promises and assurances that soon proved so thoroughly embarrassing If he did, it obliges us to wonder who misled, sabotaged or swindled the boss of the Independent National Electoral Commission Or did he swindle himself in pursuit of an agenda yet to be disclosed The latter could be true or false.The good part is that he still has enormous empathy across the country: as proved by people who are more willing to apply to him the old proverb about the mother who is prepared to vouch for only the child in her womb rather than the one strapped to her back whose hands may be free to pull unimaginable stunts.Hence, the newspapers and the Internet are awash with a rash of speculations about resident electoral commissioners who may have sabotaged their boss because he did not let them into deals in the award of contracts or because they were sidelined and their egos and purses bruised by Jegas use of National Youth Corps members as polling officers. This has turned the whole issue into one of how to stop such personal interests from ruining the success of the job of destiny that they have been given to do.At the same time, it points to the need to deal with the culture of muddle or planned failure at the heart of a bureaucracy that could induce its head to have to tell the electorate something that was not only patently untrue but had the effect of removing one massive workday from the calendar, imposing upon the already overstretched finances of not only the political parties but millions of daily paid workers who do not eat unless they work.To think of it, it involves spending so much more money on polling officers as well as risking election fatigue that could muck up faith in the electoral process itself. THE heartening part and a matter of great importance is that so many Nigerians are forgivingly ready to wait for another day. Many had refused to leave the queue on that ill-starred polling day when the postponement of the election was yet a mere rumour. They were not going to take any disruption from anybody.Jega certainly was being given the benefit of the doubt. Or lets just say that he is lucky. Since his appointment in the heat of the seeming unsackability of Professor Maurice Iwu, his predecessor, most Nigerians have warmed up to him because of his track record of forthrightness. Although many knew that he was Iwus ASUU President, and that he was allegedly a consultant to Iwu in the very recent past, nothing could taint him.The worry that he might be unfair to the dictators-turned-democrats, IBB and Buhari, whom he had fought against as President of ASUU, did not dent his reputation for integrity. Not even the fact that he voted with the Northern Establishment during Obasanjos political reform conference could make anyone doubt his wonted objectivity. Even with the recent hiccups, still mounting, many Nigerians appear quite ready to give him his due. Which is why President Goodluck Jonathans refusal to accept his rumoured resignation may be argued as arising from a tested poll.Quite plausibly, it can be imagined, Professor Jega waited too long to award the crucial contractsless than a month to the election because he wanted to avoid the usual administrative debilities that plague our climes. It may be viewed as sheer misguided caution by the boss of a much-abused electoral commission thrown into a situation besieged by fellow nationals with well-authenticated rigging propensities.But had he printed the materials early, it is not unlikely that he would have been jumping into the jaws of those already adept at rigging. In a country where chief executives of state and inspector generals of police, and generals in the military have been known to personally intervene to ruin national projects that they swore to defend, the need for precaution and caution cannot be underplayed.It obviously led him to keep things too close to his chest, thus becoming a virtual hostage of close associates who did not necessarily have his sense or compunction. It turned out to be too much precaution, as his distrust of all the known and unknown forces can now be seen to have contributed to the delay in getting the election materials to the polling booths across the country.One more substantive question: why was there need, in the first place, to import election materials from abroad It is a curious predilection that Jega apparently inherited from his predecessor and from the ritualized trend that government bureaucracies across the country have been induced by habit to accommodate.If security was considered the problem, he could have sought and found at least one detachment of the Nigeria Police and the Nigerian army to protect any printing establishment that he decided to use for the purpose. Corruption may be everywhere but it was time we all started to design a means of putting it at bay. And if it was about poverty of installed capacity, what may we say for a country that could budget such humungous sums for an election and yet, could not think of creating the infrastructure to meet the challengeOn the matter of having so many computers for the electoral process, a self-respecting country ought to have a crash programme for the establishment of an industry that could, on a continuing basis, provide the needed framework for production and reproduction. It would have been a less self-denigrating fiasco if the postponement of the elections had happened as a result of genuine failures arising from a resort to a homegrown attempt that failed to meet the bill. By now, we would be talking only about how to correct and add the corrections, cumulatively, to the experience that we must deploy for future purposes.As things stand, in spite of the faith reposed in the much-vaunted efficiency of the offshore printers, the Independent National Electoral Commission has ended up with many party logos missing from the ballot and a mix up of materials meant for different states. Only because of this, and because there is no time to go back to the off-shore connections has it become imperative to resort to local printers, which is what should have been done in the first case.With Professor Jega ordering local production of election materials, Nigerians may no longer have to behave like worshipers in a cargo cult, bound to an importation syndrome that will strike again and again. What it says for our national self-respect is that we must return to our installed capacities, re-jig them for effectiveness and efficiency, and learn to correct mistakes with a renewed maintenance culture rather than ceding experience to externalities. This, in my view, would be the only rationale for risking more hiccups as in the latest postponement of elections in 15 Senatorial and 48 Federal Constituencies.If Jega can pull it off, there ought hereafter to be a law or at least a convention that national security printing should never be contracted offshore. Those who wish to benefit from the largesse of the Nigerian market should be encouraged to move into and function within the local economy. It will re-engineer jobs and engender untold synergies. Where, as now, the fate of the country is hanging in the balance, the fair deal is to develop a homegrown format that can bear stumbling and falling and getting up to walk again.In the final analysis, let us hope that the fallouts from the disgraceful postponement of the elections will have empowered Professor Jega and his team to circumvent or overcome INECs debilities. Whatever happens, he must know that the candle of his luck is burning from both ends. Meaning that: tension will remain high as to where it would all end. Another dead end Mayhem Or breaking the jinx that had continued to bedevil the goal of free and fair electionsI think an enduring answer can be found by looking fairly closely at how we landed ourselves where we are today.
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