A PUBLIC STATEMENT BY COMRADE IBRAHIM M. ZIKIRULLAHI, CHAIRMAN, TRANSITION MONITORING GROUP (TMG) ON THE OCCASION OF THE OFFICAL LAUNCH OF THE NATIONAL QUICK COUNT FOR THE 2015 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN NIGERIA Delivered at Kanem Suites, Utako, Abuja on 26th August, 2014 Distinguished guests, respected partners and stakeholders, the Quick Count state coordinating committee members, ladies and gentlemen of the media; on behalf of the Coordinating Committee (CC) of the Transition Monitoring Group (TMG), I am delighted to welcome you on the occasion of TMG’s official launch of the Quick Count for the 2015 National Election in Nigeria. TMG is poised to maintain its reputation as the premier election observation group in Nigeria. To uphold this standard, TMG’s leadership recognized that it had to further professionalize to meet organizational as well as electoral observation standards. To credibly observe, observers must be credible. At the start of my tenure as Chair, I set out together with my EXCO an Agenda for Reform, a five-year strategic plan for the period 2013-2018 entitled: Redefining Relevance, Regaining Leadership. The strategic plan seeks to address the relevance, institutionalization and sustainability of TMG. Hence, I am pleased to report that during its Biannual General Meeting yesterday TMG elected a new leadership to the helm of the organization, and amended the TMG constitution in the following the areas: 1. Ensures regular democratic change of state leadership of TMG across the states and FCT; 2. Provides term limitations for elected officials within TMG; 3. Strengthens the disciplinary measures against errant members and officials; and 4. Raises the qualifications of candidates running for election to the board of TMG Moreover, TMG has worked tirelessly over the past year to strengthen its financial policies and procedures and to ensure that its leaders and election observers adhere to high ethical standards. This is in recognition that we must be accountable and transparent ourselves if we wish to hold such others to account as political leaders or INEC officials. Only when election observers are recognized as impartial, credible and reputable are they able to play a key role in shaping perceptions about the quality and legitimacy of electoral processes. Let me outline a few of the results and impacts from TMG’s work. • TMG monitored 4 national and over a dozen staggered gubernatorial elections in 36 States plus the FCT since 1998, contributing through its recommendations to an improvement of Nigeria’s electoral procedures; • TMG provided an impartial assessment of the electoral process and, where relevant, recommended ways to improve the process in future elections; • TMG created a comprehensive online database of observer data collected during the 2011 presidential elections that can be used by INEC officials, political scientists, journalists and political parties to assess the elections. This data also provides a foundation for better understanding the quality of Nigeria’s democratic elections. • TMG uses an innovative Quick Count database, which enables faster collection, review, and analysis of data gathered by quick count election observers. • The TMG Quick Count data is referenced in courts by litigators (politicians) in electoral disputes. • It has also become a resource for scholars and civil society practitioners. With the February 2015 elections on the horizon, TMG has already started preparations to support an essential component of a functioning democracy: the elections! Typically, all election observer groups strive to deter fraud and build confidence that election results will reflect the will of the people. However, TMG goes a step further than any other observer group in Nigeria to determine whether election processes are genuinely democratic. How do we do this? TMG has adopted the parallel vote tabulation methodology, which we term Quick Count. What is a Quick Count and how does it work? Through the TMG Quick Count, non-partisan citizen observers will deploy to a random, representative sample of polling units across the country to report on the opening, accreditation, voting and counting processes during Election Day, as well as collect voting results and voter turnout figures. The heart of the Quick Count rests on establishing a representative, random sample of polling units. This means that observers will deploy to LGAs in the same proportion as there are polling units located in each LGA. TMG will thus deploy observers to all 774 LGAs - whether this means traveling to the most inaccessible riverine areas or to the most remote desert villages - to maximize geographic coverage to analyze the election. During the Quick Count, observers watch the accreditation, voting and counting processes as well as the conduct of electoral stakeholders such as INEC officials, political party agents and the security forces. The observers record this information on standardized forms and report their findings to evaluate the overall quality of election-day processes. The observers send in the reports via coded text messages at various intervals during the day, which allows TMG to rapidly collate and analyze in real time the quality of the election as it unfolds. At the heart of the Quick Count is a sophisticated database and text messaging communication system supported by a highly trained team of data managers and data clerks to ensure that complete and accurate data is received from all observers and analysed within hours of the close of polls. When all observers’ reports are collected, they are aggregated and analyzed to form highly accurate estimates of party vote counts, voter turnout and the overall conduct of the election. It is important to note that the TMG Quick Count is the only citizen initiative in Nigeria that independently verifies the official election result announced by INEC. More specifically, how does the Quick Count enable us to go further than any other observer group in Nigeria? • TMG will be able to provide near real time truly representative and statistically valid information on the conduct of the process throughout the country; • Quick Count assesses the integrity of the voting and counting processes; • Quick Count exposes fraud or identifies shortcomings in the process; • Quick Count removes uncertainty by independently verifying the official election result announced by INEC; • Quick Count can increase public confidence in well-run elections and reduce potentials for political violence; • Quick Count provides an objective basis for making improvements and seeking peaceful redress Conducting a Quick Count is an incredibly complicated and challenging process. It is only because of months of preparation before Election Day, the development of a sophisticated database, and the meticulous training of citizens to become highly skilled Quick Count observers that TMG is able to do this. This is why we are launching the National Quick Count today almost 6 months before the elections. Testifying to TMG’s desire to raise the bar on citizen election observation, the organization has developed an interactive website that provides systematic nationwide data on the conduct of Election Day processes from the 2011 presidential elections. This website serves as a baseline for assessing improvement in Nigeria’s electoral process over time. Moreover it can be and should be used as a voter education tool for citizens, civil society organizations, and political parties. The website, tmgtowards2015.org, is truly unique in that it is not only the only website in Nigeria, or the African continent but the only website in the world that provides such in-depth data collected and presented by citizen observers. The website is divided into three sections: story pages that highlight lessons from the 2011 elections; an issue page with an interactive map where users can explore the observer data for themselves; and geography pages that provide profiles of the conduct of the 2011 elections in each geopolitical zone, each state and each local government area (LGA). Today in this hall we have committed civil society activists that have come from every corner of Nigeria to commit themselves for the next six months to successfully implement TMG’s Quick Count Project. The 148 of you gather here today from every state and every one of the 111 senatorial districts will serve as TMG’s Quick Count State Coordinating Committees members. From this meeting you will go out and recruit from TMG’s membership the 774 Quick Count LGA Supervisors. Let me on behalf of the EXCO thank you in advance for your hard work and commitment. In conclusion, we are delighted to inform the Nigerian public that TMG will deploy the Quick Count observation methodology for the 2015 national election and will independently verify the official presidential election result announced by INEC. TMG is thankful to the United State Agency for International Development (USAID), and United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) for providing funding to support the Quick Count. We also thank the National Democratic Institute (NDI) for its technical support to TMG both in programmatic and financial areas of the project.
Posted on: Wed, 27 Aug 2014 10:48:57 +0000
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