Attahiru Jega And Goodluck Jonathan

At $585million, Nigeria’s voter registration exercise is being considered the world’s most expensive.  For a register of about 60 million voters, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is spending about $10.00 to register each voter.

  That would be about N1,500 per person in a country where over 70 per cent of the population, according to the United Nations, lives on less than one dollar per day, and the income per capita is $2,400.

Reports from parts of the country indicate all kinds of problems, including registration of children.  On Thursday, Lai Mohammed of the CAN said his party had been informed that some INEC operatives were being paid by certain politicians to compromise the exercise in their favour. 

In an article dated February 10, 2011, the West African correspondent of the Financial Times, Tom Burgis, considered the costs of preparing and cleaning up the electoral database:

Nigeria battles to clean up electoral roll
By Tom Burgis in Lagos

Published: February 10 2011 17:18 | Last updated: February 10 2011 17:18
If Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s president, is to keep his pledge to end a tradition of rigged elections, one test will be whether Nelson Mandela has been successfully stripped of the right to vote come April’s polls.

The name of the former South African president – along with those of former boxing heavyweight champions Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali – appeared on the discredited voters’ roll used in the three deeply flawed general elections held since the 1999 beginning of civilian rule in Africa’s most populous nation.
An army of young Nigerians armed with laptops, fingerprint scanners, and digital cameras has for three weeks been logging the personal data of about 60m voters in an ambitious, high-tech effort to draw up a credible register.

The $585m effort – thought to be the most expensive per capita voter registration ever undertaken – has not come without problems. One former official involved in blocking similar proposals before the 2007 polls describes the price tag alone as “an outrage”, especially as worries mount over the country’s heavy drawing down of its oil savings.

Opposition and pro-democracy groups have noted hitches, many of which stem from the difficulty of using sophisticated technology in a country with a crumbling infrastructure where 35 people share the same amount of electricity as the average German. Laptop batteries have run out owing to power shortages, indelible ink meant to make sure voters do not register twice has run out, voter cards have not been laminated or taken days to issue.

Activists have generally welcomed the electoral commission’s efforts to overcome the logistical difficulties.

Reclaim Naija, a coalition that includes everything from vulcanisers’ unions to motorcycle taxi drivers, has logged hundreds of incidents of missing materials or attempted foul play at registration booths submitted via text message, e-mail and “tweet”. But the fact that attention is paid to the process “shows that there’s a consciousness that’s building”, says Francis Onahor, a Reclaim Naija organiser. “It will go a long way to making sure that people can ensure that their votes count this time.”

In a patronage system run on oil revenues, the need to assuage many Nigerians’ sense that they are disenfranchised has been sharpened by the uprisings across the Sahara in Tunisia and Egypt. As political violence grows, the US and Europe, big buyers of Nigerian crude and gas, are watching closely.

There are those who believe that the voter registration exercise will make little difference unless the respected new head of the electoral commission, Attahiru Jega, is able to clamp down on polling day abuses, including intimidation and fraud at collation centres.

In Maroko, a Lagos slum of cratered roads buried in rubbish where the drive stopped recently, there are also those who question whether clean voter rolls will do much to address their real problems.

From their crumbling tenements, tens of thousands of residents can see the mall and hotels served by well-paved highways that stand on their former settlement. They were brutally evicted by the then military government in 1990.
But even getting their own candidates into office has not helped the 21-year fight for compensation that Maroko’s people have waged, says Samuel Aiyeyemi, the 74-year-old leader of the residents. “As soon as they get into government they forget, they cannot resist the temptation of money,” Mr Aiyeyemi says, sitting near a ditch full of stagnant greenish water. “They betray the community; we don’t even see them.”

Few expect anything other than victory in April’s election for Mr Jonathan, incumbent since his predecessor’s death in May saw him elevated from the vice-presidency. But the ruling People’s Democratic party, dominant for a decade, is braced for losses at state and local government level.

But for Jibrin Ibrahim, a political commentator writing in Next newspaper, a rush to register that forced a one-week extension of the process is an indication that long-suffering Nigerians are determined to exert more control over their rulers.
“The registration process is agonising but we have hope for a greater political future,” he writes. “Political parties should take note; their success depends on citizens and not money, violence and electoral fraud.”