So, you find that a lot of these is because of technical problems in particular locations because you will find out that in some places, you can’t print in the entire polling unit, which means something is wrong with the equipment during the capture. That’s why you will find out that in many polling units, we said they all have to come out and re-register. Our data base is very good. We want to ensure that it is a very good, accurate and functional data base. There is no point gathering and keeping information that you cannot use properly. So this is the reason.
Whenever we say come and re-register, it is not because our data base is corrupted. It is because when we did the registration, for some technical reasons, we were not able to capture two finger prints on each hand. We have all their details in our database, except the fingerprints and we cannot print a card reader because if there are no two fingers on each hand, at the least, then we may not be able to read the cards on the election day. So, that is it and we have done our best to explain this to people.
Is INEC’s decision to cancel the creation of the 30,000 new polling units not an admission of the charge that the move was being done to favour the North by some people true?
It’s not true. I can tell you categorically even now that that was the best decision and it is in the best interest of this country. The whole objective of creating additional polling units is to make it easier for registered voters in a polling unit to vote. We have, as I speak to you, a polling unit that has more than 6,000 registered voters. There is absolutely no way how all of those people can be accredited and vote on an election day even if each one them spends just one or two minutes. And what we’ve been doing since 2011 is that if a polling unit has this size, we split it into smaller voting points of 300, 300 each administratively. So we said, why don’t we create permanent, small polling units so that everybody knows that this is the polling unit I belonged, it has a small size and it is easier for everybody to vote? So, it is the best decision anybody can take under the circumstances. Unfortunately, that decision was misinterpreted. We did our best to explain and we defended our position and nobody can look at the statistics that we have given to point to any deliberate intention of trying to favour one group or one region or the other. Unfortunately, mischief makers have entered into this; they are creating division nationally, trying to make it appear as if it is a North versus South issue.
They are even trying to divide the Commission. And they are the people who we know are anti-democratic forces, who would rather see this election not take place. So we sat down and said, ‘Look, the objective of creation of these polling units is to make things easier for voters.’ But there is a bigger objective, which is to have free, fair elections take place in February as the constitution requires. If people are trying to disrupt the conduct of the elections because of politicisation and creation of division over creation of polling units, even though it is good, let’s leave it until after the 2015 general elections.
In any case, by leaving it until after the 2015 elections, we would now have more time which we would have used in the creation of polling units to devote for doing other things that can make preparations for 2015 better. So, that is the reason. We want to avoid a situation in which those who have a deliberate agenda of disrupting the electoral process will not use the excuse of INEC decision to do that. If they want to disrupt the process, let them use another excuse. Not the excuse of INEC is favouring this region or that region because we know our intention was sincere, we have defended it. Nobody has faulted our explanations, but still people are going to court, others are making all sorts of extrapolations. So, we said we suspend it. There are others things that are not related to creating numbers which will add value. We said those things, we will do. And now, it means we have to continue with using these voting points.
I can tell you, for example, when we went to Ekiti, politicians were even saying don’t use voting points; that it is not in the law. And we told them, how do you think that in this polling unit, with this number of people, you can do election like that? And the voting point is there, say it is in a school, one polling unit but it has over 1,000 voters. So, if it has over 1,000, what we did in Ekiti and Osun is that we split it into about 300 and things were done faster and everybody finished on time. But if you have one long queue of 1,000, not to talk of 6,000, you know what will happen? Somebody will come and look at the queue and just go back home. Many people will just go away.
One of the criticisms of the efforts by INEC to create the new PUs was that you created them overwhelmingly in the northern part of the country and even more in places where people have been displaced by the insurgency…
You see, we wanted to create the polling units very objectively and rationally and we used the register of voters. People register in those places. Now, if there is an insurgency and now people have to run away, are we saying that is going to be permanent? Are we not all hoping that before 2015 elections, normalcy would have returned and all of these people would have gone back to their places? And their data has not been transferred to any other place. So people were saying there is insurgency, were they saying because there is insurgency we should not create polling units to serve those people? Are they saying they have permanently left that place? It is a temporary crisis. What about the people who have been displaced by flooding? There are many people who have also been displaced by flooding; are we saying that is not temporary?
So, are we saying because people have moved temporarily we should not create new polling units when they registered there and their names are there? And the hope of everybody is that if people are temporarily displaced, they will come back. We are not creating, it’s based on facts anybody can verify.
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