By Temitope Ajayi
Some of the commentary on television this morning about President Tinubu’s assent to the Electoral Law amendment was astonishing in its detachment from reality.
One argument that is recurrent is that POS operators in the remotest villages prove Nigeria can seamlessly handle real-time electronic transmission of election results. That sounds clever until you remember how often those same POS transactions fail because of weak or unstable networks.
In fact, even in major cities with supposedly robust coverage, bank ATMs go offline and POS terminals decline payments, followed by the familiar ritual of “transaction failed, please wait for reversal.” We live this experience daily. It is bizarre to act like it disappears once the conversation becomes political.
Technology does not become magically reliable because we need it to win an argument. More established democracies, with deeper broadband penetration and far more resilient digital infrastructure, still rely on ballot papers and manual counting. They deploy technology to support transparency, but they have not made real-time electronic transmission the singular test of electoral credibility. The integrity of an election rests on a chain of safeguards that include accreditation, collation, verification, and audit trails. It is not a one-click affair.
What truly stretches this prefabricated belief is the comparison between POS transactions and a centralised electoral portal. A POS payment ends on different bank networks, distributed across multiple servers and systems. An election results portal such as IReV is a single destination.
On election day, tens of millions of citizens, party agents, journalists and observers would attempt to access that same portal, often at the same time. Even globally, systems wobble and buckle under that kind of simultaneous demand unless they are built with enormous redundancy and contingency planning. And that is before we factor in rural connectivity gaps, power instability and the very human reality of overloaded systems.
To insist that the mere existence of POS machines in remote communities proves the infallibility of nationwide real-time results transmission is to confuse possibility with capacity. It replaces optimism with engineering. Elections are too important to be reduced to technological wishful thinking or convenient talking points.
Credible elections require transparency, but they also require sober assessment of infrastructure, risk management and fallback mechanisms. Denying everyday realities does not strengthen democracy. It actually weakens it.
*Temitope Ajayi, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media & Publicity
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