The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that while results of all other general elections are available, those of 1999 and 2003 are not.
The commission’s National Commissioner and Chairman, Elections and Party Monitoring Committee, Prof. Antonia Okoosi-Simbine, said this in Abuja.
Okoosi-Simbine, a former member of Nigeria Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER), was speaking at a one-day workshop on the compendium on the 2007, 2011 and 2015 general elections results organised by The Electoral Institute (TEI) of INEC and NISER.
Director General of The Electoral Institute (TEI) Dr. Sa’ad Umar Idris, while speaking, said the event was a critique workshop and technical discussion with NISER on the compendium of the 2015 elections results for further input before final submission to INEC.
Daily Trust reports that Chief Olusegun Obasanjo of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was the nation’s president when the country returned to democratic rule in 1999.
Prof Okoosi-Simbine said NISER, which is a federal government research institute, is focused on preparing a compendium of the 2007, 2011 and 2015 general election results because data of the 1999 and 2003 general election results were not available.
She said the researchers did not find it difficult to trace the 2019 general elections results which were already online, but that the draft compendium recommended that the results of elections should be released in a more organised manner that will aid documentation.
She said there were no particular findings from the 2007, 2011 and 2015 general elections results but added that the difficulty they encountered in the research process before she was appointed INEC National Commissioner was that the 2007, 2011 and 2015 general elections results were collected individually without proper organisation.
She said the data they got was not properly organised in a form for researchers to use.
“You need to organise them from the polling units, constituencies and local governments. We want people to get the statistics of the voters. The women, the men, artisans and the rural dwellers. If political parties follow the demographics, they will be able to know their targets during political campaigns. It will also help government in the provision of essential things. It will help INEC too.
“Much of the data were not made available because they was scattered in various offices but the 2019 data was not like that because we had a better way of storing them and it is online.
“The recommendation is that the results of elections should be released in a more organised manner. The data of the 1999 and 2003 general elections results were not available during the compendium’s work. It was difficult to get that of 1999 and 2003,” Simbine said.
But the Board of Electoral Institute (BEI) chairman who is also a National Commissioner, Prince Solomon Soyebi, said they have interrogated the result of the elections and were trying their best to ensure the results of all elections from 1999 are available online.
“No data (of 1999 and 2003 elections results) is lost. We will bring them. There were not many parties in those elections. We will get the data and try to analyse them. Once that is done, many stakeholders, even traditional rulers, can learn lessons from it,” he said.
