Several civil society organisations (CSOs) in Nigeria say the 2021 Anambra State governorship election was generally peaceful but had widespread vote buying.
The election observers also raised concerns over the malfunctioning of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS).
Nigeria’s electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), on 10 November declared Chukwuma Soludo as winner of the election.
The INEC Returning Officer for the state, Florence Obi, said the candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) polled 112,229 votes, more than half of what his closest challenger, Valentine Ozigbo of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), polled.
Ozigbo got 53,807 votes, Andy Uba of the All Progressives Congress (APC) secured 43,285 votes, while Ifeanyi Ubah of the Young Progressives Party (YPP) came next with 21,261 votes.
INEC had on 07 November declared the election inconclusive because election did not hold in Ihiala local government area (LGA) on 06 November. A supplementary election was held in the LGA on 09 November.
Before the conduct of the supplementary election, Yiaga Africa had noted that results already announced by INEC reflected the ballots cast during the 06 November election.
Executive Director of Yiaga Africa, Samson Itodo, said that the CSO deployed 500 observers and 27 mobile observers to monitor the election.
Itodo said that Yiaga Africa, through its Watching The Vote citizens movement, deployed the Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) methodology to verify the official governorship results as announced by INEC.
PVT is an advanced election observation methodology that employs well-established statistical principles and sophisticated information technologies in elections.
‘The release of these figures speaks only to the accuracy of the tabulation process for votes cast on [06 November, 2021] and not the overall credibility of the Anambra gubernatorial election’, he said at a press conference in Awka, the state capital.
Yiaga Africa also reported that it analysed over 60,000 pieces of information in relation to the Anambra governorship election.
‘#WatchingTheVote Preliminary Results Estimate shows that INEC official result of the 20 LGAs released is [consistent] with Yiaga Africa’s estimate’, a tweet on its verified Twitter handle read.
Another election observer group, the Nigeria Civil Society Situation Room, in a statement, reported the election to be peaceful despite ‘pockets of disturbances’.
In its report, the Situation Room gave some specific instances of vote buying to include the sale of votes for amounts ranging from N1,000 to N6,000 at various locations.
The organisation noted that this was carried out very discreetly in some polling units, while in others, the vote buying was done openly without prevention from security operatives.
Nevertheless, the Situation Room disclosed that voters in a particular polling unit in the state rejected an inducement of N5,000 per vote.
Situation Room also noted that INEC ad hoc staff and election materials arrived late in 67 percent of polling units visited by its field observers.
Also, there were reports of the failure of BVAS to authenticate voters’ fingerprints and other details. As a result, the electoral umpire extended the voting time till 4:00pm in some polling units to make up for time lost.
The Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), which observed the election through its CDD Analysis Centre, raised concerns over the BVAS failure on 06 November.
But the CDD commended INEC for the ‘significant improvements’ in the functionality of BVAS during the Ihiala supplementary election.
‘We commend @inecnigeria for promptly taking remedial action to improve the underlying technology for the device’, CDD tweeted.
Another CSO, Enough is Enough Nigeria (EiE), raised concerns over the 10.3 percent ‘abysmal’ low voter turnout in the governorship election which it said was ‘bad for democracy’.
According to INEC, the total number of registered voters in the state was 2,466,638, while the total votes cast for the election was 249,631.
A think tank, SB Morgen Intelligence (SBM), and the CDD had predicted low voter turnout due to issues tied to security, voter card, and activities of secessionist groups in Nigeria’s southeast subregion.
Photo sources: INEC, Yiaga Africa, Situation Room
