Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Voter registration in Nigeria

SolomonSydelle, in the Nigerian Curiosity blog, writes about the voter registration process.

...64 MN NIGERIANS REGISTERED

After almost three weeks of fits and starts, Nigeria's election commission, INEC completed a voter registration exercise. The commission sought to register 70 million citizens and managed to register almost 64 million…

INEC and all other contributing parties must be commended for getting so many Nigerians to register. The reality is that conditions for the exercise were far from ideal in several parts of the country…

INEC has announced that citizens will have between February 14th and the 18th to verify their information on the register. That gives only four days for this to be accomplished. That is a short amount of time for even half of the 64 million voters to check the register.

If the register can be verified using the Internet, that will make it easy for those with Internet access to check that their information on the register is correct. For the majority of Nigerians who do not have access to the Internet, they will be forced to endure lines and possibly ineffective procedures. Still, for those truly committed to participating in the upcoming polls, that will be but a small price to pay. Yet it would be foolhardy for election officials to not make the process as smooth as possible…

This leaves INEC very little time to ensure free and fair elections. One can only hope that the commission will achieve it's mandate. After the hiccups of the last few weeks and given the realities of the country, anything can happen. Still, all hands must be on deck to help create a good ending. Hopefully, it will not include any extension or postponement of the elections.

See also: Official: More than 63M Nigerians register to vote

Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed.

The Fourth Edition of What You Need to Know is available at Amazon.com or from the publisher (where shipping is always free).

Labels: elections, Nigeria, participation