In 1992, Tinubu won his election under an hostile military junta. In 2003, under the most notorious election rigging machinery in Nigeria’s history, presided over by Obasanjo, the South West was brazenly rigged.
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Not because the opposition mocked him, but because Obasanjo, the sitting president, was being mocked by his own party for lacking support in his own region.
The AD controlled the entire South West, while he was a PDP president, and even PDP governors were already plotting to dump him for Atiku to run for a second term.
So the rigging was aimed at reclaiming the region.
There were widespread reports of inflated figures and implausible turnout in the election Maurice Iwu led INEC conducted under Obasanjo.
In some states, where for example there were 10,000 registered voters, PDP won with 15,000 votes. Registered voter numbers were exceeded by votes cast.
The figures are illustrative, but the pattern was real. In effect, it was as if nobody died, nobody travelled, nobody relocated, nobody was sick, nobody stayed away.
Every single registered voter showed up, and then some more. Only Lagos stood firm and refused to bow.
Tinubu has never lost a single election under a government not run by his party because he understands one simple truth: power is built, not begged for. You stay. You organize. You mobilize. You build from the bottom up.
You do not whine about the system, you master it by winning the hearts of people from your base.
All these victories came under extremely hostile governments that controlled the full machinery of power and personally targeted him.
No technology. No electronic transmission. No biometrics. Everything was manual: accreditation, voting, recording, collation.
Yet the system, imperfect as it was, still produced outcomes.
There was no demand impossibilities.
There was no insistence on perfection before participation.
For years, every right thinking Nigerian has been calling for improvement in our electoral system. I am one of them.
President Tinubu, as an opposition figure who suffered the effects of massive rigging in the South West, consistently clamoured for reform too.
But he never demanded the weaponisation of technology over common sense.
Obasanjo presided over the 2007 election, adjudged the worst in Nigeria’s history.
Even his handpicked candidate, late President Umaru Yar’Adua, openly admitted that the election that brought him to power was massively flawed.
That was why he aligned with voices like Tinubu’s, who was in opposition at the time, in calling for electoral reform. To his credit, Yar’Adua initiated it.
Since then, Nigeria has been amending the Electoral Act with common sense, not by demanding technological impossibilities.
Today, however, a new standard is being proposed that ignores both Nigeria’s realities and global electoral practice.
The idea that results must be transmitted electronically, from over 170,000 polling units, in real time, to a central server, is not reform. It is technological overreach.
Nigeria does not have 100 percent telecommunications coverage.
There are entire communities where voice calls fail, data services collapse, and electricity is unreliable.
To insist that every polling unit must transmit results instantly, without exception, is to build failure into the system.
Even the most advanced nations do not transmit results from all polling booths simultaneously in real time.
No serious democracy sets that bar, because technology fails, networks go down, servers crash, and redundancy does not eliminate risk, it only reduces it.
For me, if these noise makers are demanding technological overreach, the National Assembly must put on its thinking cap.
My suggestion is simple: if the transmission clause must be included, it should only be with a clear condition that in the event of network failure or eventuality, INEC must revert to manual result sheets and physical collation.
After all, what is being uploaded in real time is just a screenshot of the results sheet. We cannot afford to be pushed into chaos.
Asking the National Assembly to amend the Electoral Act to mandate real-time electronic transmission from every polling unit to a dedicated server is not about transparency.
It is about creating conditions for inevitable breakdown, disputes, and paralysis.
Once transmission fails in some areas, what happens next.
Do we cancel results. Do we halt collation.
Do we suspend the election. Do we plunge the country into another avoidable crisis.
Reform must strengthen elections, not weaponize technology against them.
Technology should support the process, not become its weakest link.
A system that works only if everything goes perfectly, in a country where basic infrastructure still struggles, is not a system built for democracy.
It is a system built for stalemate.
The real work of democracy remains what it has always been: organizing, mobilizing, persuading, and building from the ground up.
Elections are won by people, not by servers.
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And no democracy survives by demanding miracles from technology instead of building institutions that can function in the real world.
Mariam Balogun is a contributor to Freelanews.com, covering news, business, and public affairs.
