Connected Development (CODE) has called on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to review its voting hours to avoid disenfranchisement of more than 30 million eligible voters in Nigeria’s 2023 general election.
Speaking at the official launch of the organisation’s latest inclusion and accountability report, CODE’s Director of Democracy and Governance, Emmanuel Njoku, said the call became necessary after the organisation’s observation of the recent election in Kenya.
The report detailed CODE’s various interventions and efforts to institutionalise accountability and transparency in governance across Africa.
Development Diaries understands that Kenya, like Nigeria, used the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) device and also transmitted their results electronically.
CODE, it was gathered, was in Kenya to observe the election and to also see how the BVAS would work.
‘Kenya’s voter register is just 22.1 million and the voter turnout was 65 percent, which was about 14 million votes. In Nigeria, we are expecting around 45 percent voter turnout which is close to 40 million people’, Njoku said.
‘Yet Kenyan polls open as early as 6:00am and close by 5:00pm, that is 11 hours for a voter register of just under 2.1 million. What that means is that everybody gets to vote.
‘However, persons in Nigeria with higher voter’s polls open for just six hours from 8:30am and close by 2:30pm, that is just six hours for a voter register of 95m people.
‘With the BVAS, it takes a person two minutes to accredit and vote, mathematically. If it takes one person two minutes to go through the process to vote, it means in an hour, it will take just about 30 persons to vote’.
With regard to security, CODE’s Head of Research and Policy, Ani Nwachukwu, said that there was a need to address the security situation in Nigeria, especially at the grassroots.
‘One of the key findings of the report is the trends of attack in the month of June, we discovered that out of 114 incidents reported across mainstream media, we recorded a number of 3,120 victims. Out of this, 465 were killed’, Nwachukwu said.
‘Then 350 persons were kidnapped, 120 persons sustained various degrees of injury, then 2,000 persons were displaced, 60 percent of all recorded incidents in June were attributed to thuggery as the rural-urban distribution of attacks across the federation showed that majority of attacks happened in rural areas’.
For his part, the Chief Executive of CODE, Hamzat Lawal, said CODE, with support from Ford Foundation, supported local leaders at the grassroots in Rivers State as the organisation addressed pervasive corruption, poor accountability, and the negligence of community development.
Photo source: CODE
