Nigeria Decides

We're gearing up for Saturday's gubernatorial and state-legislative elections, but there is a lot of apathy towards these elections and though many will still come out to vote, it's unlikely they'll come out in their numbers.

This Voting apathy can be traced to how INEC has always handled elections in this country. Hundreds of billions of naira are spent every election year and INEC always falls short of expectations.

The first reason people don't come out and probably won't come out for this year's gubernatorial elections is because they believe their votes won't count, that was why the BVAS was introduced, to bring some level of transparency and reduce vote tampering but for some reasons the BVAS machines failed to do just that. They failed to transmit the results as they were intended to. Whether this was down to technical glitches or was a deliberate plan to manipulate the votes will continue to be debated.

Late arrival of electoral materials and INEC officials is another major reason people don't come out to vote. Across the country thousands of polling units began voting late and some never even did because INEC officials arrived late or never did. INEC attributed that to logistical difficulties but this is an all too familiar tale, INEC had 4 years to prepare for this election and they were given billions yet logistics was a major problem across a lot of polling units.

Security threats is another major reason people don't come out to vote, and it's a shame that despite the massive deployment of security officers, there are always reported incidences of voter intimidation and attacks by political thugs that lead to injuries and deaths.

The electoral act was meant to address some of these issues, but it did not address them. INEC and the government need to do more to gain the trust of citizens in our electoral process because it is the bedrock of our democracy.