THE ANAMBRA GOVERNORSHIP POLL
May the best candidate win
Come Saturday, the people of Anambra State will go to the polls to elect their governor for the next four years. While it is a contest between incumbent Chukwuma Soludo of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) and a plethora of candidates from 15 other political parties, what adds significance to this election is that it is the first to be conducted by the new Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, Joash Amupitan. Expectations are therefore high that the commission will use the Anambra poll to test its preparedness for the 2027 general elections.
Already, the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) has announced the deployment of 50,000 policemen to the state for the election. No one knows how many soldiers and other security assets that will be deployed. We must caution against a situation in which security and other personnel swamp and frighten away voters as that could lead to an unintended low turnout, as we have seen with some recent elections. On a positive note, Amupitan, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), has rejected a situation in which the tardiness of the electoral body has shifted election verdicts to the courts.
However, what Amupitan must understand is the logistical nightmares that are now associated with off-season gubernatorial elections. For now, eight states conduct such gubernatorial elections. Incidentally, they all started in Anambra State after Peter Obi, then of APGA, successfully challenged the election of Chris Ngige, then of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) through a court process that lasted for three years. Since the constitution says a governor is entitled to four years, Obi was sworn in for a fresh period of four years from the day of his court victory in 2006. Most of the other off-cycle elections followed the same trajectory.
Anambra presents a peculiar problem. Recourse to violent to settle scores, including political differences, is rampant in the state. We therefore hope that the security agencies will be alive to their responsibilities during the election in which candidates from 16 out of 19 registered political parties in the country will participate. But one fact about the Anambra gubernatorial election, which also is true with all Nigerian elections, is that it is not going to be fought on ideological platforms. None of these 16 parties whose candidates are jostling for power can be described as ideology-driven by any stretch of the imagination. It is therefore important that politicians in the state allow the people to decide their destiny for the next four years without any form of coercion or violence.
This election would be a test of how far democracy can overwhelm existing insecurity. But the real burden is still with INEC. There were some glitches during the recent mock accreditation exercise in the state, as part of the measures to test the efficacy of the Bimodal Voter Authentication System (BVAS). The technology, introduced during the 2023 general election, is designed to authenticate voters biometrics and transmit results electronically in real time via the IReV portal. Although Amupitan assured stakeholders at the Inter-Agency Consultative Committee on Election (ICCES) last week that the commission is ready for the poll, public attention will be on IReV portal. In its post-election report, INEC confirmed that “the glitch experienced in uploading the scanned images of polling unit presidential election result sheets on 25th February 2023 was due to the inherent complexity within the system, which was difficult to anticipate and mitigate.”
While we hope that these issues have been addressed, the new INEC leadership has a huge burden to defend the integrity of our electoral system and reassure the world that democracy indeed has a future in Nigeria. That is why the spotlight is now on the Anambra State gubernatorial poll. May the best candidate win.
