On February 11, 2019, CERLSI officials visited the INEC office in Benin City. Our mission was to register CERLSI’s position on our being sidelined from the voter enlightenment and education campaign programmes of INEC that would lead to the voting on Saturday, 16 February 2019.
We want to state first that our organisation, the Civil Empowerment & Rule of Law Support Initiative, CERLSI, has had some experience with voter enlightenment & education. Prior to 2014 and after our registration with the CAC and with the Special Control Unit Against Money Laundering, SCUMUL of the EFCC, key members of CERLSI were already in the business of voter enlightenment and education.
They have carried out series and series of radio and television analyses, and many newspaper articles analyzing the import of the vote and its relationship with the rule of law in Nigeria. As a matter of fact prior to the 2015 general elections, CERLSI was part and parcel of the team which went to Edo north, specifically Igara, Ibillo and Ossoso markets and schools and the general public.
We must also add that there was a curious twist to the process before we eventually participated in that voter education & enlightenment activity. In 2015 before INEC sent us out, they mobilized each invited NGO for the exercise with N150, 000.000 (one hundred and fifty thousand naira) in addition to voter enlightenment & education materials.
Right there and then, certain organisations that were not invited crashed in and cashed in. Right there and then too, the parent body responsible for the coordination of NGOs in Edo state demanded and received a percentage from that 150k as ‘running cost.’
With this kind of scenario in mind, but seeking to put the benefit our past experience to bear on the 2019 general elections, CERLSI wrote to INEC on August 7, 2018 seeking to participate in the voter enlightenment & education programme.
That letter was sent to Abuja via INEC email on their website. Five months after, we did not receive any acknowledgement from INEC. So we decided to write another letter to INEC Benin City, December 9, 2018, asking INEC to include CERLSI in the voter enlightenment programme.
CERLSI opted to enlighten voters because a curious aspect of the elections – vote buying and selling – previously unknown on the scale in which it became known, suddenly became known at the scale at which it became known. For us at CERLSI, we have an avowed mandate to educate Nigerians on the import of buying and selling of votes. The 2019 elections therefore was an opportunity we could not afford to waste.
The letter to INEC Benin was addressed to the Resident Election Commissioner, REC. His secretary put the INEC stamp and a number, 08053399384 on the copy he acknowledged. He said the REC would delegate someone to deal with it. After the Christmas holidays, in January and just a few weeks to the general elections, we had not heard a word from INEC Benin nor from Abuja.
So CERLSI decided to put a call through to the REC’s secretary. He told us not to worry, that whenever they were ready for any voter enlightenment & education activities, they would get in touch with us.
In the meanwhile however, we came across several NGOs like ours who told us that they were already taken on by INEC for the voter enlightenment process. Instead of having the conversation through phone, CERLSI decided to visit INEC Benin and try to find out if the exercise had indeed taken off without us.
Our findings reveal that our letter stopped at the desk of a certain officer who said he was Head of Department, HOD of the Voter education & enlightenment. This is his cell number – 08064951777. He told CERLSI that indeed he was dealing with our matter, and would get in touch as soon as the voter enlightenment process for NGOs begins.
According to him, only the Abuja office of INEC takes final decisions on organisations to be invited for voter education. He said that the only organisations he had processed for voter enlightenment programmes were people living with disabilities and women groups. This was mid-January and the elections were only a couple of weeks away.
The question that kept nibbling at us at this point was this: with a big problem on our hands like vote buying and selling poised to make nonsense of the general elections in February, why was INEC still waiting for the Zero hour before initiating a massive voter enlightenment & education programme?
Only about three weeks to the election, we put another call to the voter education HOD, 08064951777. He said he was away and had been transferred to Bayelsa state and that INEC Abuja was yet to decide on organisations to invite and give an orientation for the exercise to begin.
At this point, we were convinced something fishy had taken place.
Obviously, we had been sidelined, and INEC did not even have the balls to tell us why they thought we were unfit for the voter education process. Therefore, we wrote again, to register our protest and took our letter to the REC’s office.
It was at this point we found out that selection of NGOs for voter education & enlightenment had been on for months. The INEC official responsible for making the call on which organisation to invite was not the HOD voter education or the chaps in Abuja, but the INEC Benin Public Affairs officer, 0805517385.
According to that official who spoke with CERLSI, ‘over the past month there have seen all kinds of NGOs coming here and we have mobilized them for the voter education & enlightenment campaign. Sorry you are late.
There’s nothing we can do about you now’, the INEC official told CERLSI.
This is what we believe happened: certain NGOs were mobilized with some sums of money for the voter education programme. We believe the HOD Voter Education in Benin City told us that Abuja was responsible for the selection of NGOs because he expects us to appeal to him to use his office to get us in and come to a certain arrangement with him.
We say all this with a sense of responsibility judging from the following: when we carried out our voter education in 2015, we were armed with an interpreter, and voter materials from INEC to the designated local government area. We went from market to market, street to street with our megaphones educating and enlightening Nigerians.
The organisation we worked with at that time wrote a report and submitted it to INEC. As we go to press, there is currently confusion among Nigerians as to which of the fingers to use for the voting: is it the thumb or the ‘accusing finger’. Most Nigerians don’t know. Chances are that most will cast their votes and most of these votes will be invalidated because Nigerians do not have enough information about the voting process.
In the coming days, CERLSI will be asking INEC Benin, vide the FOI to give us a full list of the NGOs that participated in the voter enlightenment and education process. We will also be asking INEC Benin to let us have their reports as well.
CERLSI believes that a free and fair election can only be achieved if the systems and processes leading to an election itself are not opaque but follow the rule of law.
Etemiku is deputy executive director of Civil Empowerment & Rule of Law Support Initiative, CERLSI.
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