A Bill to amend the constitution and provide for diaspora voting has scaled 2nd reading in the House of Representatives on Wednesday.
The bill, co-sponsored by the Speaker, Abbas Tajudeen and Sodeeq Abdullahi, seeks to amend the 2022 Electoral Act and provide opportunities for Nigerians in Diaspora to vote.
The bill was passed for a second reading in July, and had been referred to the Committee on Electoral Matters for further legislative action.
However Nigerians are not vetoing it as it will not reflect true democracy as some reasoned it’s another means to rig elections. Most voters doubted the credibility and transparency of the 2023 election despite the introduction of Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) and Result Viewing Portal (iREV) which was supposed to be the game changer.
Recall that Smart Card Reader (SCR) was heavily invested on by the government in 2015 and 2019 elections by the Independent National electoral Commission (INEC) for voter accreditation but it failed to eliminate voting by proxy.
Thus, the introduction Of BVAS which was supposed to be a revolutionary technology that combines voter registration, accreditation, and results transmission in one device.
The BVAS accredits voters on Election Day while the same device uploads election results to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) Portal.
The devices increased the previous election participation, as voters hope that their vote will really count for something unfortunately, there were high records of places that it stopped functioning and voters could not vote due to either power outage or network failure to upload results on the portal.
Technology is yet to be the answer to electoral fraud in the country, reasons why a lot of Nigerians are speaking out against the diaspora bill scaling the second reading especially those in diaspora who knows what the home front look like.
Some of the reaction includes:
@OurFavOnlineDoc: “You assume that “diaspora voting” means elite people in uk, usa, Canada and europe. Wait until you realise that diaspora voting also means Niger, Chad, Sudan, Libya and Egypt can now vote to decide who is the nigerian president.
“You are afraid of votes from the KKK states in northern Nigeria yeah? Wait till votes from Northern Africa and central Africa is allowed in the name of “diaspora voting”.
“You haven’t been able to succeed to check the voter rigging within Nigeria, is it the electronic voting system open to “diaspora” that you now want to check?
“BVAS and iRev could not work within Nigeria alone last year. Is that what you want to use to count magical votes from around the world in the name of diaspora voting?
“Most people supporting this bill have clearly not thought it through to see how dangerous and destructive this will be to our democracy.
“This is a terrible idea. We are not mature or advanced enough for this. And anybody supporting this is completely shortsighted or deliberately cooking mischief to totally undermine our democracy and destroy whatever credibility is left of our elections.”
@PIDOMNIGERIA: “You might be winning the election comfortably in the morning, only to see 30 million votes coming from Niger, chad, Benin Republic and Cameroon before daybreak. Niger Republic alone can produce more diaspora vote than US, Canada, UK, Germany, Italy and France put together.”
@TimiBlaze: “After 2023 elections, I no longer support diaspora voting! Let Nigerians in Nigeria decide their future!”
@ComradeAI: “So, they want Nigerian diaspora now. Will their votes count? How about the vote buying and changing of election results at the collation centers?”
@MrDiepriye: “Very terrible bill. Wait until 1 billion diaspora vote comes in to decide the winner of the election, and those vote will come from Egypt, Chad, Niger. Country wey BVAS and iREV never fit work. Yeye dey smell.”
@OGBENI_BAMBAM: “This is a Plan to start Using Machineries from Neighboring Countries to Manipulate Vote Result In Nigeria in the Name of diaspora Votes. These People are always planning how to stay on-top of their Manipulative game to forever remain in Political Powers.”
By: Adeoye Olorunseun Elizabeth
adeoye.o@thesubstancenews.com
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