The police inspector general Suleiman Abba was speaking last week and he said voters should go home once they do their vote. He doesn’t want people sticking around to witness the vote count.
‘Cast your vote and go and cool down,’ Abba said. ‘If you remain there, there’s a likelihood that you’ll commit an offence. Asking voters to wait and protect their votes implies taking the law into their hands. It’s unacceptable.‘
But what exactly is ‘unacceptable’ about waiting at your voting booth after you’ve voted?
Naij.com commentator on political issues, Adedayo Ademuwagun, expresses his views on this matter.
The rules don’t state that voters shouldn’t or can’t wait to watch what’s happening. The rules simply say that they have to maintain a safe distance from the officials when the voting is finished. They can watch from a distance.
The APC has reacted of course. They told voters to ignore the order by the police chief and stay on after they vote so they can observe the process and see that things are going well.
“The IGP has no constitutional right or powers under the constitution or Police Act to rewrite the electoral law. The role of the police is to maintain law and order or such other assistance as may be sought from the police by INEC.”
The way it works on election day is that people like to hang in there at their voting booth till the end of the whole thing in the evening in order to see for themselves what’s going to happen. That’s how it worked in the last election in Osun state for example.
People waited to vote. After voting many people stayed back to watch the rest of the process. The youth corpers tidied up the voting and while that was going on, people who had voted hung around having a snack and having a chat about how things were coming along.
These people already made up their mind that they’d spend the whole day at the voting booth. They prepared for this eventuality. Many came from far and got there in the morning even before the officers. So most people weren’t in a hurry. They wanted to wait to hear the vote count in order to personally confirm on the ground that their favourite candidate won.
By evening the voting was done and the corpers explained to the people who were watching from about 100 feet that now they were going to count the votes.
As they counted one by one, the people counted along with a cheer for their man and a boo for the other contenders — and if something looked suspicious, they hollered at the corpers quickly.
By the end of the day the corpers announced who won at that booth and the people jubilated when they found it’s their guy. It was fun for these people. They didn’t take this as a chore. They wanted to do this. They were happy to do this.
The people didn’t just want to vote and go home. They wanted to make sure their votes count. They wanted to be sure that the process was free and fair. They wanted to be part of the process beyond just standing in line and dropping a paper in a box. To them this was a big deal. It was a serious matter and they couldn’t risk taking it lightly. They just wanted to vote and make sure that the rightful candidate won.
Trying to bar people from watching at a distance is a ludicrous idea. These people aren’t going to carry any weapons. They’re no threats to officials. They don’t want to commit an offence. Conversely, they want to make sure nobody commits an offence by tampering with their votes.
Most of them struggled to get the voter card and on election day some have to trek from far. It would be such a shame to let all that go to waste. The police chief’s directive clearly lacks discretion.
Abubakar says, ‘Abba can say whatever he likes. On election day we’re not going anywhere. We’ll stay at the booth until the votes are counted and the winner is announced. The police can threaten all they want. But this weekend, we’ll see about that.’
