April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

were among Nigerians who came out at the early stage of the registration
exercise with zeal. The zeal was, however, dampened. For hours, officials
battled to register Obasanjo and his wife in Abeokuta, Ogun State capital.
Several attempts made by the officials failed, as the machine could not
pick Obasanjo and his wife’s finger marks. Ogun State INEC Resident
Electoral Commissioner (REC), Martins Okufolami, and the administrative
secretary paced up and down in frustration as they tried to sort out the
problem. They brought in an expert before the machine eventually
captured the finger marks of the former president and his wife.
"Mark and his wife, Helen, had waited for three hours – from 10a.m till
1p.m – to get registered in Otukpo, Benue State. It was all in vain. The
machine had broken down. Obasanjo had blamed the challenges on initial
hitches associated with any new programme. "I want to say that whenever
you are starting a new programme like this, it’s likely to have hitches,
until everybody masters it. Today is only the second day. I believe that by
the middle of this week, both the people who are carrying out the
registration, the technicians and the INEC at the highest level will be able
to make this work smoothly. So, I don’t believe that we should now start
to castigate and to condemn. If, of course, by the middle of the week it’s
not working as it should be, we will all see and then those who designed it
would have to advise us how we’ll go about it. But for now, I believe we
should regard this as the hiccup of a new process".
There are a number of pertinent questions that working class elements
must pose and demand an immediate answer on the basis of the above
quotations. One, why did the machines specifically procured for this
exercise at huge cost suddenly turn out to be incapable of performing their
functions? On the basis of an estimated 140 million population, 80 million
Nigerians are targeted for registration in the ongoing exercise. However,
as being generally reported, by the time the exercise was supposed to end
on January 29, only about one quarter of this figure is said to have been
successfully registered. Due to the huge corruption of the ruling capitalist
elites and its newly entrenched "profit first" approach, those responsible
for the procurement of the equipment in issue, in order to make the
greatest amount of profit possible have in all probability ordered cheap,
inferior and or outdated machines, which are generally inefficient and too
slow for mass and fast registration exercise. We should therefore ask: how
many more eligible voters will be able to get registered in the one week
extension that will now end February 5, 2011? If the truth must be told,
there cannot be any radical difference from what has been happening in
the first two weeks of the exercise.
As if this is not a big headache in itself, the current exercise has also
equally been marred by the well-known corrupt antics of the bourgeois
politicians. At the moment, there are several reports, and allegations, by
prominent members of the ruling parties accusing one another of trying to
effect illegal registration of voters which they hope to subsequently use
during the forthcoming elections. Of course, anyone that is well familiar
with Nigeria’s electoral history will not quickly dismiss these allegations as
being unfounded. Here, the point should be stressed that Nigeria’s ruling
class age-long inability to organize free and fair elections must never be
attributed to any inherent biological defect in the black race as some
shallow bourgeois analysts sometimes often concluded. This inability must
be squarely placed where it properly belongs: the inherent weakness of
the capitalist elements from backward economies, who have largely found
their ways blocked by the capitalist elements from the advanced countries
from making profit through the conventional exploitation of industrial,
agricultural and financial ventures, and as such mostly indulge in treasury
lootings.