Mr. Bode Olufemi, the Executive Director of Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA), shared his perspective on the 2023 general elections, how trust deficit perception was created by the electoral umpire, the role of Civil Society Organisations in deepening democracy and the electoral process in Nigeria. He also commented on the general call for electoral reform.

What will be your general assessment of the 2023 general and off-cycle elections about INEC performance, conduct, and meeting Nigerian expectations, among other things

Well, I am one of those who didn’t see anything more substantive about the 2023 election than other elections we have had in Nigeria. The only different thing was that by 2023, the power of information sharing was now in Nigerians’ hands and then there was the issue of the role of IT in the electoral process, which caused a lot of noise, and violence, depending on which sides of divides Nigerians find themselves. So, if you have been studying the Nigerian elections, you will know that it was characterised by violence, there was a lot of violence. And if you go down the statistics, you might even be shocked that the 2023 election was not the most violent in Nigeria. But what happened was that this time around, Nigerians were able to share information. Before, it took like three days for you to know that things are happening but now with the power of the internet, people on social media can easily know what is going on everywhere.

INEC raised Nigerians’ hopes, and there was a lot of miscommunication, misrepresentation, and misinterpretation, and a lot of people thought their hopes were dashed. In election management, it is not what you did but the perception people can get about it. There is a considerable level of perception that the election was not credible. Those are the issues that people will look at. You look at the preparedness of INEC itself; you look at the numbers of Nigerians that registered to vote, the number of people that eventually cast their votes vis a vis the percentage and the entire population. For me, the whole exercise itself was not satisfactory enough, from participation to election management to information management, it was not satisfactory enough. However, we must abide by the legal processes which I think produced a president. There is a president; the best we can do is to reflect on what are the lessons learned, and how we can improve as Nigerians. For me, my assessment is neither here nor there. I will rate the election 5, which is average.

To what level would you agree that there is a trust deficit in INEC to conduct credible elections in the country?

There is an extreme trust deficit, which I personally, speaking as a Nigerian, believe was caused by INEC’s mismanagement of information. See, this is the problem, INEC has IReV and BVAS and Nigerians have different ideas from what INEC has. INEC couldn’t communicate clearly to Nigerians the role of technology in the electoral process, so this in itself created that trust deficit because what is substantial as everyone in Nigeria thought the elections viewing portal was for was live transmission of results. Those were the kinds of things that I believe the electoral body should work on their communication, don’t promise what you don’t have and say exactly what you have. Some of us took time to read the Electoral Act and even the Constitution, and then you look at the landscape and whether it’s possible for real-time transmission of results, it is practically, as of today, with the technology we still have, this country looks like a very tall promise.

This was what I would say, INEC did not communicate to Nigerians properly because a lot of people believe that once they vote, their results would pop somewhere, which is not true.

What are the roles expected of CSOs in changing the narrative of deepening democracy in Nigeria?

I think I see the role of CSOs as a watchdog of society. We exist to mount pressure on the government and the government system, we exist again to help to galvanize the voices of the people, and even mobilise people for social change and you don’t have the social change we are talking about if you don’t put the right people in the position of power, which is what electoral process itself stands for.

So, we will continue to provide political education to the people, and we will continue to mobilise them in terms of their civic roles, that is, you need to register and you need to vote. It is not enough to go and register, you must also cast your vote and you must also conduct yourself in a peaceful and orderly manner that the election is not war, which was the cause of our engagement at the last campaign. We also mount pressure on the electoral body to be able to improve on what they have, the need to look at what is obtainable, best practices globally what we can adapt in the system, and practically what is workable to make our elections free, fair, credible, and to be seen as credible which is the information management we are talking about.

You know you have to manage perception, from day one, that is the key component of the electoral body because today, that is the biggest problem Nigerians have and it is trust. People don’t think their votes count anymore, and you might not even scientifically be able to say that there were frauds during the elections, but because of that perception management, that was, for me, one of the biggest deficits of the 2023 elections

What are the limitations hampering CSOs in operating to promote good governance and credible democratic practices?

The biggest problem is still that sometimes agents of government CSOs as opposition because they want them to be accountable. Whereas, we are trying to help them achieve positive outcomes from their efforts. Take for instance even during the elections, the police the military, and the rest of them, when they see you wearing the observer’s badge, they see you as those people, rather than people who are there to help. I think that is one of those things we need to work on, in terms of building trust between the security agents and systems of government that are saddled with the task of managing elections so that they will know you are working for one goal.

Of course, funding is an issue; when you want to observe elections across a nation like Nigeria, it is not that easy. The kind of political education we want to do, the kind of training that we want to do, the kind of campaign that we would love to do even to the grassroots, we do not have the kind of resources to be able to do that. So, those are for me, some of the limitations that CSOs working in Nigeria on elections face.

In the next couple of months, off-cycle elections will be held in Edo and Ondo States; What do you think INEC can do to restore Nigerians’ trust in our electoral process, and how can CSOs play active roles in achieving this?

Sometimes some of us are a little bit optimistic about off-cycle elections because it allows INEC to put in place enough resources. After all, that is not like when you are thinking of the entire Nigeria landscape, which is a completely different ball game. Number two is that I think by now, INEC must have learned a lot of lessons from past mistakes in terms of their technological deployments. I think also they need to look at their logistics to be able to ensure that electoral materials get to their location because these are things that easily create tension on election day, people are in queues and they can’t see electoral officers.

They need to work on those logistics and ensure that electoral materials get to the place. People need to clearly understand the process their expectations, and what INEC itself can deliver so that there won’t be misunderstandings when INEC is saying A, Nigerians will not be expecting A, B, and C; so INEC should come out plainly to say that this is what we can deliver today. I mean, they have tried to develop BVAS, and BVAS is not the same as IReV.

I think they need to do more of that, maybe to do leafletting and the rest. And I think a greater bulk of this goes to Nigerian citizens, and as we say in the advocacy we did with the EU, that election is not war, election is a process, and we should vote with our thumb and not guns and cutlasses. Nigeria should know that this is just a process to elect a leader, if somebody you don’t like gets there today, please do wait and then again use your thumb to get the person out. I think that is just the message we work on.

Again, back to the EUSDGN, we work critically with the media because we think that media interfaces with the general public. I believe the media reports of even, actually douse or escalate tension, and we have always been talking to them about violence-sensitive reporting. Unfortunately, it is the era of clickbait, the era of what we call citizen journalism and to say that journalists need to be cautious and be able to report with a sense of responsibility and not continue to blow things out of proportion. In some places, two individuals are fighting, and then you mention their tribes, in fact, in that reporting, you are already introducing tribal sentiment. The role of fact-checking before writing your report, crosscheck, to double-check and check again your facts before you put things out. Today, we begin to see that the majority of what you see on social media is not correct. So, it is the role of the media to take a pause and see all those things are properly cross-checked before they put them out.

There has been a general call for electoral reform ahead of the 2027 general elections, where do you stand on this? Do you think the current electoral Act should be allowed to take form or an amendment is the solution?

Everywhere in the world, people continue to learn and improve. I think we shy away from difficult decisions in this country. I think there should be electoral reform, there should be continuous reform until we get it right. Let me give you one that I have always thought about, I don’t believe the presidential election should happen in one day in this country. It is very tall to say we want to conduct a credible, sane election in close to eight hundred local governments, how many polling units in one day and then you overlay that on the existing telecommunication infrastructure, you and I will still make calls that day, then there is a problem. We need to look at the infrastructure, where all of us will sit down in Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt, and we think that is Nigeria, No.

You have to think of the riverine areas, southern Ijaw, Nembe, and all those areas where you spend four to seven hours on a boat before you get there. People think about technology, but they still don’t know that there are areas that are still on 3G, they have not even got to 4G and we are talking about real-time transmission of results. And the shared logistics itself, the number of vehicles that will be on the road. How many soldiers do we have in Nigeria? How many policemen do we have that can effectively police a presidential election we all wanted to happen in one day? Some of us might think that part of the reform would be to look at how to stagger this election. Yes, we might do elections without sending the results, because some would say if they saw the trend in one place, that would affect the outcome. We just must find a way. Several countries do so; for example, in India, some would do three days, and some would even do four weeks before they would begin to announce the results.

That’s one of them, or we then need to boost our infrastructure. Either we have to go and overlay INEC technology on a different satellite from a telecommunications system that we have here, and as of that day, it will be completely independent, so there will not be fatigue or stress on those infrastructures.

There are some critical issues that we need to look at. Or again we go back to technology, with the internet now, people can even sit at home and vote. Everything we have to look at holistically, but there is room for improvement.