THE bedlam at the headquarters of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, should be a concern to all who expect INEC to conduct the April elections with a measure of seriousness.

Political parties were to submit list of candidates for the polls. Ordinarily, it should be a simple process with the parties knowing who to hand over the forms to and where to procure the evidence that they met INEC’s deadline.
Nothing of the sort happened. There was so much confusion. Some parties could not hand in lists, according to them, because INEC refused to accept them. INEC said such parties missed the deadline.

What shines through is the unpreparedness of INEC for challenges of the elections. How did INEC intend to implement the January 31 deadline? INEC did not tell anyone. It also lacks enough public confidence to discipline erring parties.

INEC secretariat did not show any benefits of its 12 years experience in organising elections. We saw an over-whelmed INEC that did not anticipate the volume of documents from 63 political parties, an INEC that was waiting to react to the situation.

The fallouts of the mismanagement of that process could cost INEC more of the little time it has left and further endanger elections that are already running low on time, human capacity and often money.

Could INEC not have collected the documents from the offices of the parties since all of them are headquartered in Abuja ? Did it have to ask thousands of people to jam its office as if it never imagined the outcome? How would it resolve issues its tardiness has created at this stage of the process without credibility challenges for the elections?

Two major issues emerged from the submission of the list of candidates and they are both dangerous for the elections.
One is that internal democracy of the political parties remains an academic concept. The parties consider its implementation optional.

Many aspirants in the elections are contesting their parties’ rejection of their candidacy in preference to other candidates. These processes did not follow discernable primaries. INEC will be distracted by these protests through the courts.

The other is that INEC is not multi-tasked. It was so bogged down with the registration of voters that handling lists of parties’ candidate proved a major challenge. INEC, for example, could not draw up an implementable guideline on the submission of the lists. While Section 31 (1) of the Electoral Act states, “INEC shall not reject or disqualify candidates submitted to it by a political party for any reason whatsoever,” some INEC officials obeyed their own law. It is a major source of the confusion.

In the midst of the confusion about legitimate party officials, INEC, in the case of Anambra State, accepted a list from the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, State chapter instead of the PDP headquarters, going beyond INEC supervisory role in the primaries.

A quick resolution of these otherwise minor issues is critical to INEC returning to weightier matters of conducting the April polls.