Called to the Nigerian Bar in March 1995, with a Master of Arts (MA) degree in Human Rights from the University of Sussex, United Kingdom (UK); Bachelor of Law (LL.B. Hons) from the University of Calabar; and a National Diploma (ND) in Mass Communications from The Polytechnic, Calabar, the Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) for Rivers State, Obo Effanga, comes with a multi-faceted antecedent as a lawyer, journalist and human rights activist.
He won the Newspaper Columnist of the Year 2004 in the Nigeria Media Merit Awards (NMMA) while at NewAge Newspapers and has written hundreds of opinion pieces for many newspaper titles including The Comet; The Nation; NEXT; ThisDay; The Niche; Punch and Premium Times, before being appointed Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Rivers State inn 2017. His demonstration of resilience and courage in the face of daunting challenges and violence to conduct successful and conclusive election in the 2019 General Election in Rivers State has won him plaudits.
In this interview with Kristina Reports’ Associate Editor, Boma Waribor, on the sidelines of the Stakeholders Interactive Forum held on Saturday, May 8, 2021, at the INEC State Headquarters, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, the effervescent Effanga, a former General Counsel and Editorial Board member at NewAge Newspapers, Ford Foundation Fellowship scholar, philanthropist and community mobilizer, was firing from all cylinders when he pooh-poohed postulations that sit-at-home electronic voting was the best for contemporary Nigeria if the democratic space was to be fixed. This position adduced by him appears to run against the grain of popular opinion that with the background of bedeviling issues plaguing the Nigerian electoral system such as election fraud, results sheets’ hoarding, thuggery, voter apathy, violence, grassroots disenfranchisement, disintegration of persons with disabilities, and a plethora of others, electronic voting should be the way to go.
As popular as this clamour for electronic voting has been, the task of entrenching a legal framework, obviating the inherent logistics burden, and implementing a robust and all-encompassing awareness creation drive for Africa’s largest democracy; added to fears about possible compromise of e-voting devices by viruses or other malicious software; manipulation by people with privileged access to the system such as system developers, system administrators and malicious hackers; denial-of-service attacks (attacks that result in the e-voting facility being disabled or otherwise unavailable for voters to use); lack of adequate supervision mechanisms; and the difficulties of proving electronic attacks in courts of law among other things, which has for many years been a herculean challenge, has served as the strong argument against its adoption for the nation’s electoral system. Enjoy the excerpts.
Given the organization of all of what has transpired (polling unit expansion and GIS identification of units) and with the framework that is now obtainable, does INEC have any plan in the nearest future to migrate to electronic election? If yes, to what extent?
Well, INEC acts based on what the law says and at any time the law says that we can do e-voting, then we will do that. If you follow what the Commission (INEC) has been doing at the national level, there was a time they even had invited some vendors of electronic voting machines to have presentation to them and they had quite a number of them, so that is being worked out at any time that we need to run electronic voting, then we will work towards that. But you see, when people say electronic voting, it is good for us to have a clear understanding, what do we really mean by electronic voting? For a lot of people they think electronic voting means to sit in the comfort of your home and vote with your phone and the question I ask is, where in the world does that happen?
It doesn’t happen, in election anywhere the world over, you have to go physically somewhere to vote. There are few instances where you can mail your votes and that is what happens when they have early voting. So, people, like journalists like you, electoral officials like us, who want to vote, security agencies who want to vote will be given opportunity to mail in their votes ahead of the election, so that on the election day they can still do their work. That is different. Now, if you are talking about the electronic voting, I imagine what people are looking at is a situation where on Election Day, you go to the election venue and there is a machine that you vote through, like you have ATM where you go take money. So, it works that way and I have seen it happen in different parts of the world.
I participated in the election in Venezuela in 2018 as an observer from INEC here and I saw that is what they had. They had machines that when you go, you insert your voters’ card, it recognizes it and then it displays the ballot and you punch the one you want and then you key it in. It goes in there and, interestingly, it generates a ballot that shows how you voted and you still put it in the ballot box.
Now, the question would be why do you still have to put it in the ballot box when it has gone into the machine already? So, what happened in that country is that for about 30% of the polling unit, they have a provision for double checking. So, when election has finished, they now come to those selected polling units, and print out what has gone into the electronic voting machine and they physically count what is in the ballot box to be sure that it’s the same thing and they sign it off and once that is done, because they are using the machine, once they close the election there, the result is generated and transmitted to the last point. So, when I went for that election, by the time the election was over that evening by 7pm, at about 11pm we just went to the headquarters of the electoral commission and the results was ready, they just displayed it and a winner was pronounced.
So, does this mean that the Polling Units will always exist even if we finally migrate to e-voting?
That is what I asked, what do you mean by e-voting? Let us have that understanding first. The idea of e-voting is where one sits at home with the comfort of a smartphone with an interface or a software and vote and somehow there is a control room from where it is regulated. So, my question is where in the world does that happen now?
The Ijaw National Congress just held its election and….
(Cuts in) We are talking about national elections, where in the world does that happen? You know why I’m saying so? Let us also look at the reality, number 1: that doesn’t happen anywhere in the world, and in any event if that happens, I’m a lawyer, have you observed elections of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), which is electronic? People still complain and accuse whoever that there were some manipulation. So, even now that you vote physically, you see the counting physically, you see the recording physically and you take your own copy and then it is collated, people still complain. What would now happen if we tell people that election starts at 9am and closes at 4pm, vote wherever you are electronically and at 6pm INEC says this is the total number of votes, this is the person that won, will people, will the generality of Nigerians accept such?
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