Nigeria battles to clean up electoral roll

FT

10 February 2011

Nigeria battles to clean up electoral roll

By Tom Burgis in Lagos

If Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s president, is to keep his pledge to end a tradition of rigged elections, one test will be whether Nelson Mandela has been successfully stripped of the right to vote come April’s polls.

The name of the former South African president – along with those of former boxing heavyweight champions Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali – appeared on the discredited voters’ roll used in the three deeply flawed general elections held since the 1999 beginning of civilian rule in Africa’s most populous nation.

An army of young Nigerians armed with laptops, fingerprint scanners, and digital cameras has for three weeks been logging the personal data of about 60m voters in an ambitious, high-tech effort to draw up a credible register.

The $585m effort – thought to be the most expensive per capita voter registration ever undertaken – has not come without problems. One former official involved in blocking similar proposals before the 2007 polls describes the price tag alone as “an outrage”, especially as worries mount over the country’s heavy drawing down of its oil savings.

Opposition and pro-democracy groups have noted hitches, many of which stem from the difficulty of using sophisticated technology in a country with a crumbling infrastructure where 35 people share the same amount of electricity as the average German. Laptop batteries have run out owing to power shortages, indelible ink meant to make sure voters do not register twice has run out, voter cards have not been laminated or taken days to issue.

Activists have generally welcomed the electoral commission’s efforts to overcome the logistical difficulties.