Nigerians will
continue to doubt the authenticity of the new voter register unless a
de-certification of the 73.5 million registered voters and the
Automated Fingerprint Identification System Analysis (AFIS) is effected
by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), This was an
observation made by a civil society group, International Society for
Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law (Intersociety). According to the
group’s chairman, Emeka Umeagbalasi, who spoke to NEXT in Awka, Anambra
State, the displayed figures represented unprocessed registration data
which has not undergone the compulsory process of aggregation and
vetting, also known as AFIS.
“The AFIS process
is meant to verify the data of voters downloaded from the Direct Data
Capture (DDC) machine. When AFIS audit is done as required by the
voters’ registration process, each Resident Electoral Commissioner is
supposed to come up with three sets of voters’ register,” Mr.
Umeagbalasi stated.
Inflated figures?
According to him,
the first one is a valid register which is a register of voters with
proper registration having all the correct biometrics in place. The
second one, he said, is AO-valid register which is a register of
purported voters whose fingerprints and other biometrics were not
captured during the registration exercise. He gave the third one as an
invalid register which is a register of those voters identified to have
done multiple registrations.
“INEC appears to
have presented to the Nigerian public the AO-valid register and the
invalid register and jettisoned the AFIS-processed valid register. The
main criticism trailing the release of the final figure is that INEC
released to the public a bogus, inflated, raw, unprocessed, unverified,
disputable and questionable as well as unscientific registration
figures in the form of a new national register of voters to be used in
the April 2011 general elections,” Mr. Umeagbalasi pointed out.
According to him,
AFIS is meant to identify and weed out those who fraudulently engaged
in multiple registrations and other fraudulent registration processes.
He said that when the AFIS process is successfully applied, the figures
usually go down after fraudulent figures are weeded or cleaned up as
was the case in Cross River State, where he said the exercise (AFIS)
was successfully carried out, courtesy of the Resident Electoral
Commissioner.
“The initial raw
and unprocessed figures were reportedly brought down from about 1.7
million to 1.148 million. Unfortunately, we reliably gathered that
other than Cross River State, figures from other states (including
Anambra State) and the FCT are raw, unverified, incorrect and
inflated,” Mr Umeagbalasi said.
‘Bonus figures’
The group believes
that while the provisional figure of 67.7 million may have contained
raw and unprocessed voters’ registration data originated from
registration centres from the registration units nationwide, the about
six million voters later added may have originated from sources other
than the former, reminiscent of situations that marked the post-2006
census exercise in Nigeria.
“Then some, if not
many state governing authorities reportedly went to the NPC for bonuses
for their state populations for purposes of increased revenues and
other collective social benefits. We may not be surprised if similar
bonuses have been asked for and granted in this respect, for political
reasons,” Mr. Umeagbalasi alleged, pointing out that the success of any
election depended on the credibility of the voters’ register.
The group urged
INEC to outrightly discard the final figure of 73.5 million and instead
work on the provisional figure of 67.7 million as total raw and
unprocessed figures, which should be subjected to the AFIS process.
