Inability To Metamorphose Into Opposition, PDP’s Major Challenge –Chidoka

Chief Osita Chidoka is a former Minister of Aviation and one-time Director of Voter Intelligence and Strategy in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Presidential Campaign Council. In this interview, he speaks on why he left the party and review of the governorship election Edo by the Athena Centre for Policy and Leadership, among other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU reports

You have expressed shock that an institution like the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) would put its reputation at stake for an election. Could you tell us how you arrived at that conclusion?

I arrived at that conclusion by looking at the Edo State governorship election results. Before then, we had looked at Kogi, Bayelsa and Imo governorship elections.

And we said something fundamental about the last three states. We said the election is working because, with the INEC BVAS, we can see where people altered results.

The INEC BVAS showed the number of people accredited and then you could see that the votes did not match with the number of accreditation. So, we praised INEC that this is a step in the right direction.

What they need to do in the next election, we said, is upload the form EC8B, the Ward Collation form. So, there is transparency about what happened at the polling unit and what happened at the collation, which seems to be the place where some of the shenanigans occur.

We identified all the presiding officers and the coalition officers who we said tampered with the results because what they have in the BVAS is not what they have in their results sheets.

Now, what was strange to us was that in the Edo, Imo, Bayelsa and Kogi elections, if you are on the IREV, the IREV was uploading results and showing us the BVAS IREV figures.

So, you could see it on the IREV. And IREV is the result viewing portal. In Edo, INEC mysteriously removed that. So, we couldn’t see what the IREV was showing.

When INEC gave us in the other three states, the IREV and BVAS report, we matched it with the screenshots we took of the BVAS on the IREV.

So, in Edo, they removed that, a major infraction in my view, because what you want to show at every time is transparency INEC is an umpire but in Edo and now Ondo, the IREV was no more showing the numbers from the BVAS.

With that, we saw something very strange, that the number accredited by the BVAS given to us by INEC, a certified copy, now has 100,000 more votes than the one done by the officers at the point of accreditation. Even though we are questioning the point of accreditation, that it looks like there was inflation, the IREV now came more.

And we said, where did this happen? It turned out it happened in about 794 polling units; some of them with that wide variance, as much as 1,000 votes, and then down to 10, 20 votes. So, we figured out that this was a systemic effort to now defray the issue of overvoting.

What you now saw in Edo is under-voting. But what happens in an election is that you are accredited, and then you vote. There was no way people would have been accredited and they did not vote. So, this for me was a major damage to something Nigerians have begun to put their trust on.

We are working to see how we can strengthen them more by saying, and showing in real-time what the BVAS has done. In fact, after the election, reconcile with the back end and upload it to the web so everybody can go there and see what the BVAS are crediting.

PDP did well as a ruling party. From Olusegun Obasanjo to Umaru Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan… But in the metamorphosis to an opposition party, it has failed woefully

Specifically, you are alleging that there was lack of transparency in the election, discrepancies in voter accreditation, incidents of overvoting in some cases, manipulation at ward collation centres, and that the BVAS accreditation record was not transmitted to the result viewing portal or IREV. Who do you hold responsible for all these alleged infractions?

It is INEC because no other person has access to the BVAS or the viewing portal. So, this is INEC. The reason why they took those decisions is if INEC had decided to say we would not show the BVAS accreditation online, we would show it after the election to be sure it’s properly synchronised.

Nigerians are owed an explanation before you take that decision. After you’ve taken that decision, Nigerians still want to know, why did you wait for us to apply to give us?

You could have just simply said, all the BVAS records are here, uploaded to the web. If you go to page 13 of the slide, you will see the key data that we collected from INEC. And those key data tell you 687,427 was what INEC provided to us as the BVAS accreditation, the certified true copy.

Now, if you go to the same page 13, you will see that the EC8A accreditation, that is, the people that saw the voters, the people that did the accreditation said we accredited 580,000.

So, there was no way they could have written a wrong result because they accredited, they saw the voters. Now, when they went to the collation, several polling units were cancelled, and some were removed.

And the collation in the form EC8B, which excludes 363 polling units that INEC did not give us there, the form EC8B, totalling, that’s 11 wards, 12 wards with 363 polling units. So, we don’t know what they entered at the accreditation for those. But in that EC8B, the 580,000 dropped to 541,283, meaning that there were cancellations, there were removals.

Then when you go to the EC8D, the result declaration form, and the state form where the result was declared, the number of accreditations rose to 604,123. So, an additional 60,000 between the EC8B and EC8D emerged.

We think these are egregious acts of sabotage because there is no way these numbers will not tell a single story. We can’t have multiple stories from the same numbers. And if there is any change in numbers, there will be notes saying 25 wards have been removed.

So, the number of accreditations fell. How did the number of accreditations rise from 541 to 604 at the accreditation? Now, guess what? The ballot papers used, which means both the valid votes and the invalid votes, all the ballot papers used were 577,000. So, where did 687,000 people get accredited?

And where did 604 emerge in the EC8D, the final result declaration, which is why I say that the returning officer, who is a professor and works in a university, should have performed the duty of care by asking the right questions.

How are these numbers changing across the different collation points? But I guess it’s something we will need to find out at some point.

And those figures that you’re quoting and all the infractions that you’re talking about, ended up favouring one political party…

Yes, of course, the All Progressives Congress (APC) is a net beneficiary, because if those issues were dealt with, and if we go further down in the presentation, we came up with vote inflation.

So, BVAS inflation versus EC8A inflation and then we pointed out the party vote distribution. So, in overvoting, APC got a net overvoting score of 24,000 votes.

The PDP got 1,429 votes. If you go to transferred overvoting; that is the overvoting that went from EC8A to EC8B because at the EC8B point, the collation officer is supposed to have looked at the IREV, checked the number on the IREV and then enter only votes that tally with the numbers on the IREV.

In that case, they transferred 17,000 more accreditations, 25,000 EC8B accreditations arose and the total vote cast also rose. So, they transferred overvoting in 140 polling units. Seventy-five percent of the 186 PUs with overvoting were transferred.

if you go to the fourth insight we showed, we observed the addition of 32,284 votes over what was recorded from EC8A for APC. So, this is our audit. We could see the trends. We saw every party trying to do one thing or the other, but we saw the net beneficiaries of this.

Your conclusion, based on your review of that election is that it cannot be said to have been credible because it failed to meet the most basic standards of integrity and should therefore not be allowed to stand…

Yes, that’s our view that INEC should have either called for reruns or redo the elections at that point. You see, the role of INEC as an arbiter is now a strange thing in Nigeria. How they came up with this idea that we finish an action and they just say go to court.

It doesn’t make sense because the court is a different matter altogether rather than INEC itself reviewing the work that it has done and trying to make adjustments. We’re not talking about the court matter. It’s not the court issue. We’re talking about the election.

There needs to be a post-mortem. In the US, you know, barely after the election, a significant number of polling units are chosen, statistically significant, the votes are manually recounted and ensured that it is consistent with the general result.

In Mexico, after the election, they go back to a manual recount, cross-checking to ensure that the results comply. So, the final declaration is always pushed forward. These are the preliminary results coming and then we can do the final declaration once the numbers are in.

In India, they use electronic voting. After the electronic voting, they take all the voting machines and a third party subjects them to cross-check to check that what was recorded in the paper is the same thing as what was in the electronic voting machine.

I’ve never seen a situation where you just finish an election, you announce the result and say, go to court. No, that’s not the idea of INEC. No, it doesn’t make any sense. The idea is that INEC should be able to say, this doesn’t meet our standard.

People complain that the collation was moved away from the ward to the local government. INEC would say, go back to those ward and redo that or this is the reason why we moved it.

They must be explained at every point in the process. I always give the example of JAMB. When a young girl said she got 300 in JAMB, JAMB said, no, she didn’t.

And the girl said, no, that she went and searched and this is the result she got. JAMB said, no. They opened their server, printed out their server and said she attempted four times. This is the first one she attempted. The result that came back was genuine. She attempted a second time and she altered the one on her phone to deceive people.

And once that was done, it became clear to everybody that the girl was wrong. So, the girl eventually owned up that she altered the result. That is what a regulatory institution does. They don’t say go to court. They come out and defend themselves and said this is the process we use.

Since you’ve mentioned court, do you think the evidence that you’ve would stand in court?

I do not do my evidence for courts. At the Athena Centre, we are not interested in what people do with the data. Our major concern is to identify problems and suggest solutions.

So, we don’t care what PDP wants to file. We don’t care what APC is filing. It depends on what they do with the lawyers, how they present the evidence, where they got it from and how they’re able to convince the courts on the facts before the courts.

The court is going to face the facts before them. If these facts are not before them, they will take the decision based on the evidential requirements. There was a political motive when we did it in Kogi.

There was a political motive when we said it in Imo. In Imo, we said PDP was not a viable party. They would have still lost the election, even despite all the shenanigans that happened.

We said in Bayelsa, the PDP won despite that the rigging came mainly from APC. In Kogi, we said, well, the election would have been inconclusive because the second person didn’t make 25 per cent in two-thirds of the local governments based on our analysis. And we’re hoping that Nigerians are going to get used to evidence-based policy.

You mentioned the fact that some people are suggesting that there’s a political motive because you were a member of the PDP but you’re no longer in the PDP, tell us why...

First is, like I said in my letter, and it seems nobody wants to know. I want to focus on saying I’m a Nigerian optimist. I believe this country can work. Recently, I was at an event and I said,

I’ve never seen a situation where you just finish an election, you announce the result and say, go to court. No, that’s not the idea of INEC. No, it doesn’t make any sense

look, Nigeria is one country where you go study Medicine. You pay N200,000 in Nsukka a year for school fees. So, six years you spend N1.2 million. Then you go to the US and take the board exam and become a certified doctor.

Nigerians every day are being called to the UK to make them nurses and doctors, because whatever we say of our educational institutions, we are producing people who pass board exams across the world.

Studying Medicine in the US is about $250,000 to $700,000 for the four years. So, I’m saying to Nigerians, this country can work.

The problem I see is that if we don’t solve these institutional problems, if we don’t reform the electoral process, what is the aim of being in a party and going for an election to come back and go to court and then arguing about what you got right or wrong. I don’t think that is the basis of democracy. So, I’m not joining any party for now.

I believe I will come back to the democratic space in due course. But that will be because we’ve made the effort. I want to make this effort as saying to the government, you are right on this. You are wrong on that. But this is an alternative viewpoint.

This is how you can go about it. People told me, why haven’t you talked about the tax bill? And I said we are still analyzing it. When we look at it, we will come out with a position.

One of your points is that you want to get away from partisan politics to focus on political reform. A good place is the electoral commission and the political parties, let’s start with your former party…

For PDP, I think the challenge of the PDP is the inability to metamorphose into an opposition party. I think the party did well as a ruling party. From Olusegun Obasanjo to Umaru Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan, consistently good outputs with some challenges.

But in the metamorphosis to an opposition party, the party has failed woefully. The reasons for me, I think, are too prong and it’s likely going to happen to the APC if they lose office. The reason is that Nigerians haven’t learned the concept of equal ownership of stakeholder politics.

So, when the president says, go right, everybody goes right. This is the Senate President, everybody elects him. This is the speaker, everybody elects him. So, when there is no such figure, when there is no such precedent or power, what then happens is that the combination of governors or senators is not able to have a big picture of the party.

Everybody is now bringing something to keep himself secure in his state. So, every governor of PDP, when you say, let’s elect the National Working Committee, they are bringing people that will make sure they secure their party in the state.

They do not see the big picture of the people who are capable of leading the party, opening up the party, bringing in the young generation in the party, thinking about who are the stakeholders of the party and who are the supporters of the party.

So, if you look at the PDP now, you can’t identify the segments of society that are said to be aligned to the party neither can you do the same for APC, because it’s just a case of the leader determining what everybody is doing. So, I’m looking forward to not only our electoral system.

I used to tell the INEC chairman that INEC made far more advances than the political party. When INEC started with BVAS, the political parties didn’t make that advance. They didn’t start thinking in the technology sense. They were still thinking in the analogue sense. That’s why even the rigging, you see that they will use the army.

They will block out the polling units and all of that because they haven’t been able to think of the electoral process and dimension of their voters, where they are likely going to get votes from and how to maximise it. Also, voter turnout is still very low in Nigeria because of the lack of activity of the political parties.

I have recommended to INEC that when anybody declares I want to be a candidate, the Corporate Affairs Commission should allow the person to register a company, open an account and be forced to provide monthly audited accounts to INEC about inflows and outflows. Now, everybody says, who would regulate? I say, don’t worry about regulation.

Let’s just start the process first. Let people know that the campaign requires you for inflows and outflows. Let’s know where the money is coming from. Donald Trump funded his campaign with his money. Mrs. Clinton at some point funded her campaign with her money. But Obama did not bring a dime to his campaign.

So, we need to see where the money came from and where it is going to. Now, if we do not do that, then the parties will not be interested in bringing popular candidates. They will be interested in bringing rich candidates because you are the one who is going to fund your election.

And because individuals fund elections, even if they take a 40 per cent return on their investment, it is a big tax on Nigerians. So, while we are thinking of tax reforms, the major reforms we need to reform is the amount of money people take out of public office to take back what they have invested in politics. So, campaign financing is critical for democracy to thrive in Nigeria.

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