Paul James is the Programme Manager, Elections, Yiaga Africa. In this interview, he speaks on the Edo State gubernatorial election, issues around allegation of manipulation of election results by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), unprofessional conduct of security operatives, among others. JOY ANIGBOGU brings the excerpts:
What is your assessment of last Saturday’s Edo State governorship election, in terms of allegations of manipulations?
To a large extent we thought that everything went well. It was at the collation process that we raised our concerns. With specific spotted local government areas, such as Egor, Esan West, Oredo, Ikpoba Okha, where we thought the results were manipulated meaning they fall outside of our margins. So to understand the context like you have mentioned, we deployed the process of result verification for transparency. If you consider the sample based methodology for observing the election. This is something that we do every day but because of limited resources people will tell you that we took a sample which is representative and reflective of whatever must have happened in those locations. So what we do in our own case is that we have 300 samples from each of the 18 local governments using influential statistics and in the polling unit we have an equal chance of acting on the sample. At the end of the day based on what we had we were able to extrapolate. If you had seen we didn’t mention numbers we were mentioning statistics ranges within which we thought the results should fall. So based on what INEC had announced we thought some of those results fell off our own range and so we had reasons to question the outcome. You may want to ask, why Edo? This is not the first time Yiaga Africa has deployed the methodology. We have deployed it in over 19 elections. So this is the 19th time Yiaga has deployed the methodology. It is a proven methodology that has been deployed in over 52 countries, over 200 times across the world. So, we believe in the methodology to detect if there is manipulation. We have detected in the presidential election where we exposed that results were altered in Imo State specifically and in Rivers State where results were altered for parties. So we saw similar trends in the last Edo election but what we saw specifically happened during the collation process. There were attempts to subvert the process. For instance, in Etsako West there were sporadic gunshots at the polling units, people scampered for safety and at the end of the day when I reached out to our supervisor at Esako West he had mentioned that there were results from two wards that were not collated at the ward level but we saw those also on the IReV and if you think about places like Oredo, they simply moved the collation from Oredo local government collation centre to INEC office, citing security concerns. Our supervisors were there. We reached out at that point and they told us that they couldn’t fathom what exactly the reason was. In Ikpoba it was the same thing. What they did was to smoke everybody with tear gas. They tear gassed observers, they teargased INEC officials and moved the collation from local government. So, what we have seen in the polling units in their purer form we thought that they were altered because to a large extent what we did when we had concerns with Egor and Oredo was to go back to the IReV to the results that were submitted online and tried to match up with the results that were posted online against what our observers had sent to the database and they matched but it was the final figure that INEC announced for the local governments that we thought were altered.
It’s very disturbing especially at the collation centre where you noted about the potential of the results being altered. We had an analyst yesterday from the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), one of the things that he mentioned is that in spite of the introduction of technology to our voting system, nothing has changed for the better and also the observations that you made, what would you say is the way forward when it comes to future elections?
I think what has not improved in our process precisely is the human element, especially the kind of pressure that we saw in the Edo election. I’ll say that we have to move to where we will have all elections conducted in one day, maybe it will reduce the pressure. If you see the number of politically exposed persons that were in Edo last week. Almost every state governor was in Edo including the Senate President. If you think about the limited resources that were in the state even for the security concerns that had to provide support to these politically exposed persons. It was huge on the commission. There was pressure on the INEC to manipulate the election, perhaps in some places they yielded to that pressure. This is not what we want to see in our election. This is also an election where there was so much reliance on technology. Like I said, there was a point where the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) was not accessible from like 3am. On the night of the election the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) was not accessible where it had opened up at the moment, I don’t know. It was difficult to download any of the polling unit’s results from the BVAS and so this raised a lot of security issues, a lot of concerns especially on the part of the voters. Moving away from technologies is about citizens’ participation which was abysmally poor. As much as we know people that showed up defiled all the rains and other issues and were able to participate. This was also an election that had over 85 percent of Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs) collected and had a shift from the number of PVCs 2.2 million in 2020 to like 2.24, with 19 percent increase in the number of registered voters but then you will see the sharp decline from the 24 percent that participated in 2020 to the 22 percent that participated in this election. I think we can do better. For the political class I think this is not going to be a template or a play book for election manipulation in the future. Electoral body must be allowed to do what they have been mandated to do and as well citizens’ participation must be a meaningful participation. We can’t plan for an election for three months and politicians will come on the weekend of the election and rubbish everything. The vote buying that happened was in the full glare, everybody saw that. Money exchanging hands between N10,000 to N15,000. We cannot subjugate our future to election manipulation or election rigging or highest bidder war. I don’t think that should be the practice of electoral democracy.
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You did make reference to some previous elections in other states in the past, in this case what immediate action do you recommend should be taken to avert future issues with elections?
I think we should avoid this idea of moving too quickly into an election. We thought that in this election since concerns were raised that INEC should have employed the provisions of section 65 of the electoral act that allows a one week window for the welfare commission to review elections that were declared, especially those declared under duress. In Kogi we raised those concerns. If you recall the November 2023 election in Kogi State there were concerns about Kogi election results. We raised concerns with the commission, the commission promised it was going to investigate. Whether prosecution was done we don’t know, whether arrests were made we don’t know. You don’t inspire confidence in that manner. We also saw when there were concerns about the Orlu local government in Imo. There were also security concerns, whether elections were held in the local government, whether they moved votes from polling units to local. There was proper accountability for that. We shouldn’t continue elections in that manner. What I see is that wherever it is projected to be difficult, you see that things are done very quickly, announcements are made and we move on and start planning for the next election. This shouldn’t be the template. We need to have a moment of review, a moment of reflection to understand what exactly happened at the election and how do we rectify them before we move to the next election. I highlighted some things earlier, for instance, logistics challenges. It has always been a perennial concern. Like I said there was a meeting that was held in Edo, I was in that meeting, it was a close meeting with the INEC chairman. When we raised the issue as to whether there was adequate arrangement with the union for logistics, he assured us that to the extent that he knew there would be improvement in the election. But in the morning of the election people were complaining that they didn’t know the location. I thought they should have done their mappings before the election and know where all the polling units will be located. Even with the arrangements of picking these people and coming back to pick another set, I think we should move on from that era and begin to think about more creative ways of engaging the process earlier even before the election day. This is about a crisis of confidence that we’re talking about here because if you ask the vast majority of the people that didn’t participate in the election, what exactly will be the problem, they will point to the challenge of the election management body, and also the desperation, ‘do or die’ attitude of the political class that we saw in that exercise, that shouldn’t be the narrative in our election. I think we need to change from that.
I want to talk to you about some allegations that were made by stakeholders regarding the security operatives that were partisan in their conduct, does Yiaga have any evidence to support the claim from what you observed?
For us at Yiaga based on our data, we observed that there was deployment of security in 97 percent of the polling units and also in 12 percent of those polling units where we observed the security agencies appeared to be partisan, meaning they were unprofessional. We have reported cases of vote buying in these locations. They didn’t happen in isolated locations, they happened in full glare. In some instances, you will hear that security operatives aided and abetted that. I thought by now we should begin to make examples with some of these erring security personnel. These questions were asked during the stakeholders meeting, all we kept getting from security forces were assurances that people have been trained and they were going to be professional. I’m not sure in the history of our election that we have got any serious arrests, especially of security personnel that were involved in election malpractice. I’m sure some people will say, ‘he who alleges must prove. But if a security person is present in a location where vote buying is reported what was their action? How did they respond to that? That should even be the first question to ask. If there are allegations that we can confirm or verify that security agents stood by voting cubicles to aid or assist people on how to vote, which is not their responsibility. For us at Yiaga we have a situation where an army personnel in the morning of the election chased away our observer, it took the intervention of INEC ad-hoc staff at the polling unit to allow the observer to observe and that didn’t even happen until the army personnel finished with what he wanted to do at the location before they allowed the observer back to monitor the election, that shouldn’t happen. They have no business to be around our polling units if not because there is ulterior motive. So, like I said we have the reports of situations where these infractions happened. If the security agencies are ready to make examples of any of the erring personnel we’ll be glad to share the reports with them.
How do you view the PDP intention to challenge this result in court, you think I’ll restore public confidence in the electoral process?
In every election this is what you want to see, to the political maturity that people will think about a legal means to address their concerns about the process. That we’re enjoying the peace in Edo I think we need to even commend the political parties for the show of political maturity but also even the people of Edo State for maintaining the peace but that not also moving away from the fact that if they feel that the result is not reflective of whatever they have from the polling units they have every legal right to challenge the outcome. Of course you know they also have their agents in every location. The APC agents were in 98 percent of the polling units, the PDP agents were in about 99 percent of the polling units. So they were in almost every location. They saw first-hand what had happened at the polling units. If you look at the election most of the concerns were not about what had happened at the polling unit level but at the collation level. I think they have every reason to question the outcome of the election. They should pursue that within the limit of what the law allows them.
