Real Time Electronic Transmission Of Results Is A Judicial Ambush, By Rotimi Fasan

Some opposition politicians, their supporters and other actors in the civic space on Monday made their way to the National Assembly in protest. They were unhappy that the Senate leadership rejected, as they claim, the position of the majority of the legislators that the results of the forthcoming 2027 elections should be mandatorily transmitted electronically in what they described as ‘real time’. The alleged stance of the Senate leadership was first made public last week in a supposed clarification made during a press briefing convened by the Minority Caucus of the National Assembly led by Senators Enyinnanya Abaribe, Victor Umeh and Ireti Kingibe. It’s only in Nigeria that minority members of a legislature speak in the name of the majority unprompted. This is the stuff of which chaos is made and it was the first sign that something was amiss. 

All Mr. Abaribe and his group set out to do and in fact achieved was at once to lay the foundation for and amplify the false claim that the Senate has rejected Section 60 (5) of the electoral reform bill that made the transmission of election results in so-called real time mandatory. The Senate simply retained what the 2022 Act prescribed. An opposition in need of strategic direction, their bored supporters, together with career agitators and common anarchists; CSOs and their collaborators that must justify every donor fund to the last cent, suddenly found a subject that is downbeat enough to unite them in tearful humour.

A media station that went live to the protest venue brought to Nigerians the excited screams and noises of the protesters. When I started writing this, only Peter Obi, the Labour Party candidate in the 2023 election and a member of the ADC coalition had, it was reported by Arise News, arrived at the venue.

It is easy to visualise him in his favourite black apparel in which he mourns everything Nigeria except when it concerns the South-East.

His quarrelsome supporters, practising fascists that turn every issue into a grievance, either in their LP or IPOB incarnation, are at the vanguard of this reckless attempt at stampeding the national legislature. We saw the same game play out with the ‘all-eyes-on you’ campaign against the judiciary in the weeks following the 2023 election. The repeated appeals for military intervention at the time obviously yielded a coup plot that ongoing investigation tells us could have been executed way back in May 2023 but for inadequacy of funds. An opposition that is stubbornly insistent on real time transmission of results seeks a potent judicial ambush for an election it knows it is poised to lose going by observable metrics. If the majority must agree to it, it should be by consensus not brazen imposition. And when they do, they should realise that they have consented to the creation of a force majeure that would as likely as not leave the country in such legal bind that will only overinflate the relevance of marginal political parties and their promoters.

The question before us is not about broadband penetration. It is about its reliability in a country where tens of thousands of frustrated clients daily besiege banking halls and customer care units of mobile telephone companies to complete or rectify botched online transactions. The only Nigerians blind to this are those determined to cheat and their spokespersons who sit in panels and newsrooms where they lay claim to knowledge they don’t possess in the name of editorial analysis. One of them mouths ‘empirical facts’ from the desks where he receives ‘intels’ on live television from his fellow Obidients. His latest gambit is to call Nigerians who don’t share his perspective ‘daft’ even as he laughs rudely at guests. Yet, he hopes to be taken seriously as an impartial news anchor. It’s been a long time from when he ‘put it’ to his guests.

Electoral fraud, a recent study by Joachim McEbong of Pan-Atlantic University indicates, is a multi-party affair. According to McEbong, LP recorded the highest irregularities in the 2023 election. It’s no use pointing fingers at others. In the orchestrated chaos that has trailed the latest controversy, it has been said that the Senate replaced the word ‘transmission’ with ‘transfer’, thereby opening a gap between the time a voter cast their vote and the time the result is uploaded on the IREV portal. Nigerians should kindly note that what is to be transferred or transmitted, irrespective of the word being used, is the scanned or photographed copy of an election result as recorded on INEC’s Form EC8A and endorsed by all parties’ agents and security operatives.

The information on that form is manually entered as is the voting. Strictly speaking, therefore, only the results of votes cast digitally can be transmitted or viewed in real time. Anything else begs a different name. Yet this is what has got our typically shiftless opposition leaders hot at the collars and the likes of the minority members of the Senate titillating their base with conspiracy tales. The retained section of the current Electoral Act permits electronic as opposed to real time transmission of results, while making room for manual imputation as backup.

It is interesting that Mr. Abaribe asserted during his presser that the majority of senators, across ‘the aisle’, unanimously agreed that the results of the election should be transmitted in real time. Abaribe’s action is the very definition of disinformation. A dangerous and ultimately shameful rhetorical war one would think is beneath a respectable-looking person of his standing. He knew before coming to address the press that the minority position had been defeated up to the point the bill was processed, but he still went out on a limb to speak from both sides of his mouth in the name of the entire Senate. The issue was put to the vote. The minority did have their say, footage of the Senate proceedings later showed, but the majority by voice vote had their way.

Even at that, what we saw and has so far been reported as the definitive position of the Senate is but another stage in a legislative process that is at least two stages shy of conclusion. Senator Abaribe, however, chose to spin the truth. It was a sleight of hand that set the tone for the confusion that has attended discussions of the so-called electoral reforms bills since last week. What Senator Abaribe and his fellow travellers in the Minority Caucus did with their do-gooder press conference was to demonstrate in real time the backdoor antics of politicians who leave court rooms only to give divergent interpretations of unambiguous judicial rulings. It was a grubby attempt at preempting and arm-twisting senators in the Majority Caucus. That is not acceptable.