Nigeria’s voter registration is world’s most expensive
Monday, 02 August 2010 01:21 Godwin Nnanna & Max Amuche
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•Price tag of N1,292 per voter is ten times more than sim card registration cost
The proposed cost of N84 billion for the planned voter registration exercise, recently announced by Attahiru Jega, Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), makes the Nigerian project the most expensive by the global average for such an exercise, a BusinessDay analysis has revealed. The Presidency has already received a funding request from INEC which, itself, is fast-tracking the release of the N84 billion by sending an advance copy of the request to the Federal Ministry of Finance, thereby setting off a frenzy in Abuja ahead of the release of the bogus budget.
While N74 billion will be spent on the voters’ register, an additional N10 billion has been earmarked as hazard and sundry allowances for INEC staff who will be involved in the exercise. For a nation with an estimated voting population of 65 million, Jega’s budget, which is expected to be approved by the National Assembly in August, translates to a cost of N1, 292.3 ($8.6) per registered voter, the highest per capita cost for registering a voter anywhere in the world. Now, experts are drawing a parallel between INEC’s budget and the plan by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to register the country’s 70 million GSM phones at the cost of N120 per phone user.
According to a publication by Krishna Murthy, Chief Election Commissioner of India, the country’s cost per registered voter stands at $0.62. India, like Nigeria, is a federal country, with 28 provinces of varying sizes and seven union territories. In India, a country of 1.18 billion people with similar logistics challenges to Nigeria’s, and which also ranks as the world’s most populous democracy, the number of voters grows by two per cent each year on average, reflecting the rate of population growth in the country.
A sample of per registered voter costs in some democratic countries across the world, including the world’s five largest democracies, namely: India, United States, Brazil, Pakistan and Indonesia, reveals a global average of $4 per registered voter, a figure which makes the Nigerian average of N1,292.3 ($8.6), as per the INEC budget, the most costly.
With the exception of the United States and Brazil, most of the countries in the sample have similar infrastructural challenges to Nigeria’s. A December 2009 study by the Pew Centre, an American think tank, puts the voter registration cost per registered voter in Oregon, a state in the United States, at $4.5. The US, with a population of 309.8 million, is the world’s second largest democracy after India. In Pakistan, a country that has seen a lot of political and economic upheaval in recent times, the average cost per registered voter, according to information available to BusinessDay, is $4.8.
For a nation so starved of credible elections, whatever it takes to achieve that should ordinarily pose no problem. That seems the disposition of most political leaders to the disclosure by Jega, but no one is asking whether we can, in fact, register our voting population for less. BusisnessDay investigation shows that the N84 billion figure was prepared during the Iwu-led INEC, and some people who were involved in the preparation confided that they had reservations about the cost, especially INEC’s choice of aiming to procure computer based machines and other items.
“It is like asking airlines for a quote to fly a delegation to a venue and also including in the budget the cost of acquiring your own aircraft,” one source told BusinessDay. “Take out the cost of the equipment and the entire budget will fall flat on its face, especially given that the cost for the equipment was over-inflated.”
INEC, according to Jega, plans to spend N55 billion of the budget on procurement of a litany of equipment that would be “laptop-based plus the accessories for finger printing and a high resolution camera that will take voters’ pictures and complete the entire exercise within a minimum of 15 to 20 minutes.” INEC recently began taking an inventory of the machines used in the 2006 elections, bought by the Maurice Iwu administration at about N20 billion. Explaining why some of the machines are already in bad shape, Jega noted that “as soon as the contract was signed with credible partners in 2006, they were abandoned and fake equipment was purchased, some with expired licenses and that was what affected the voter registration exercise in 2006”.
Some observers have questioned the sincerity of the civil servants who prepared the N84 billion costing. “Are you sure it is not the handiwork of some civil servants keen to leverage on the widespread acceptance of Jega and the national hunger for a free and fair elections, to milk the state dry again?”, questioned an analyst working for a multilateral agency in Abuja in a chat with BusinessDay.
A voters’ register is meant for the exclusive purpose of recording the enfranchisement of voters and facilitating the voting operation by which the citizens who are eligible to vote exercise their right to suffrage on a periodic basis. In most western countries, the voter lists are automatically updated with civil registry information, and data from bodies such as the national bureau of statistics.
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