Electoral Malfeasance: Much Ado About Federal Govts’s N-Alert

An app was designed to give real-time feedback on electoral irregularities during the recently held  general elections. But was it helpful? CHIBUZO UKAIBE, writes. In the build up to the recent general election, the Ministry of Interior set up the Ministry Inter-Agency Situation Room (MISR) and Command and Control Centres, where Nigerians can send situational reports in real-time as well as enable authorities to respond promptly to any issues that may arise during the process.

But it is yet to be seen whether or not  the initiative had the projected impact in the electoral process.

For context, the situation room, comprising representatives from the Ministry of Interior, Nigeria Police Force, Nigeria Civil Defence Corps, Nigeria Immigration Service, Federal Fire Service, Civil Society organizations, and of course members of the fourth estate of the realm, was set up to help citizens in reaching out to security agencies across the country for swift intervention concerning crime, homicide or other security-related incidents.

But with the elections in view, the mobile app, called “N-Alert,” was deployed for the exercise. Developed by tech experts from the Interior Ministry, it would allow voters, across the country, to report incidents of violence, intimidation, or electoral fraud in real time.

N-Alert utilizes a combination of audio-visual and geospatial location identification of the caller and scenes of incidents MISR and Command and Control Centres, Dashboards of the four Agencies under the Ministry of Interior Services and the Nigeria Police Force for joint inter-agency operations.

Ahead of the polls, a sensitisation campaign was embarked upon on the need for Nigerians to download the mobile app on their smartphones and report any incidents they witnessed at their polling unit in real time.

On February 24, the Minister of Interior, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, charged Nigerians to download and use the app to report any situation or incident in and around their Polling Unit to the MISR for a prompt response.

Officers were also directed to be prompt in response to incidents reported by Nigerians using the app.

The reviews on the deployment of the app are expectedly varied considering the magnitude of electoral violence and malfeasances that trailed the election.

While some Nigerians applauded the deployment of the app as it is generally judged to have significantly helped to increase transparency and accountability in the election process.

Nevertheless, it would seem like the app did little to deter electoral offenders despite its potential to identify them in real-time. If anything, desperate political actors carried on with illegal acts as witnessed during the elections, with least regard for the authorities, much less an app that could expose them.

But for pundits, the outcome was not strange considering the level of violence that had heralded the election. A pro-democracy think-tank, CDD, revealed a total of 109 election-related deaths were recorded across Nigeria in the build-up to the election.

On election day, it was learnt that the situation room received reports of vote-buying and ballot box snatching  from several polling units across the country and the response team was promptly deployed where necessary.

In one instance, the situation room received a report of violence in a polling unit in a hotly contested constituency in Sokoto State. The situation room promptly dispatched a team of security personnel to the area, and the situation was brought under control.

But a voter who doubled as a citizen reporter on the platform from Benin City, Joseph Ernest, was quoted as saying   the deployment of the app was a significant step towards ensuring free and fair elections in the country.

His claim was corroborated by Fatima Abdullahi, who was quoted as saying N-Alert in conjunction with the situation room played a vital role in ensuring a peaceful, free, and fair election in Nigeria.

However, analyst who spoke with LEADERSHIP, Maxwell Obiekwe, said it would be helpful to know “how widely the app was embraced and used by Nigerians during the polls,” that way it would be easy to determine whether or not it was really impactful.

For legal practitioner Tejiro Ayomanor, the potential of such innovation isn’t lost on most Nigerians, the challenge however is whether they trust the system enough to keep to the use.

“The last election raised a lot of trust issues, not with the essence of the  technology that was introduced, but with the human elements in the equation. So, good as the innovation is, unless there is concrete evidence to show that it won’t be compromised, the initiative will remain a merely good idea.”

With off-season elections already in the works and with the experience of the last general election, whether the app will be put to better use in addressing some of the fundamental issues in the voting system remains to be seen.