PART 9/12

He is wearing the same shirt he wore to his first ward meeting.

He is at the polling unit at six forty-five. Fifteen minutes before the INEC officials. He stands outside and watches the street wake up. A woman opens a provision shop. Two motorbikes pass. A boy sweeping a compound looks at him and goes back to sweeping.

He has agents at six of the eleven polling units in his ward. He has been carrying the five he doesn't have for two weeks. The gap between what preparation should look like and what he managed.

He thinks about calling Savage. He has not spoken to Savage since the primary. Savage called once, the morning after. He said: these things happen. He said: we go again. He said it with an ease that Ola had spent three days examining.

We go again means there is another cycle. Another cycle means another relationship. Another relationship means the current one is still intact. Ola is not certain it should be.

He has not called Savage back.

The INEC officials arrive. The presiding officer sets up the BVAS machine. Ola watches. The machine reads fingerprints. It matches against the voter register. It uploads to a server. It cannot be altered afterward.

He has explained BVAS to his agents. He has told them: this is what changes what is possible. The accreditation is on the server. The result sheet is in the system. The chain of evidence is intact.

He believes this. He has needed to believe something reliable.

The first voter steps up. The machine scans. The screen shows a face and a name and a green confirmation.

Ola exhales.

His phone rings. His agent at Polling Unit 7. His voice is low and careful.

He says: the machine is not working. He says: nobody has authenticated. He says: the queue is getting long. He says: people are leaving.

Ola is already walking to his car.

He drives to Polling Unit 7. The queue that was there is thinner. Some people voted manually. He can see the manual register on the table, the ink pad beside it. The BVAS machine sits to one side, screen dark.

His agent is outside. He says: the presiding officer switched to manual at nine fifteen. He says it was called a technical fault.

Ola looks at the manual register. Then at the BVAS machine. Then at the queue.

He thinks about something Bisi said to him six months ago. She said: the machine is not the problem and the machine is not the solution. He asked her what she meant. She said: you'll see.

He gets back in his car. He has five more units to check.

He drives.

The BVAS (Bimodal Voter Accreditation System) is genuinely good technology.

I want to say this clearly before I describe what I found. In the 2023 elections, for the first time in a Nigerian general election, a significant portion of accreditation data was uploaded to INEC's IReV server in close to real time. Polling unit results were photographed and uploaded. The audit trail existed. In several documented cases, discrepancies between polling unit originals and collation figures were identified using IReV data. The system worked.

The technology is not the problem.

Here is what I can establish about the gap between the technology and its deployment.

INEC's deployment guidelines give the presiding officer field discretion to trigger manual accreditation when the BVAS is not functioning adequately. There is a threshold defined in the guidelines. The definition is vague enough that two presiding officers reading it could reach different conclusions about the same set of facts. I am not asserting that this vagueness is deliberate. Operational guidelines for technology deployment in a country with unreliable power and variable network coverage are genuinely hard to write precisely.

What the vagueness produces is this: manual accreditation removes what BVAS was designed to provide. The voter's identity is confirmed by ink on a register rather than biometric match on a server. The real-time upload does not happen. The audit chain weakens. The presiding officer's discretion returns to the centre of the process.

I cannot establish that BVAS failures were induced deliberately in specific locations. Authentication failures have technically plausible causes. Battery issues, network coverage, firmware inconsistencies between machine batches. I do not have the granular data needed to distinguish deliberate failure from operational incompetence from genuine infrastructure weakness. That data is not publicly available at the polling unit level.

What I can say is that the gap between the technology's design and the conditions under which it operates is not a surprise to anyone who has thought carefully about Nigerian electoral administration. The gap was known before deployment. It was accepted. It was named, in INEC's own procurement documentation, operational variance. That is a very clean name for a very specific problem.

The presiding officer at Polling Unit 7 made a judgement call. His name is in the INEC deployment record. The guideline he applied is publicly available. What it allowed him to decide, in the field, alone, is not.

Ola drives back to his first polling unit. His agent is there. The BVAS machine is working. The queue is orderly. He stands outside and watches. The machine is scanning. The screen is showing green. The accreditation is uploading.

He checks his phone. Three messages from other agents. Two are updates. One is a question he does not know how to answer.

He answers the two updates. He reads the question again. He puts his phone in his pocket.

He stands in the morning outside the polling unit. The count is six of eleven. The five he doesn't have are still not there and the day is going on without stopping to let him fix them.

He stays until the queue clears. Then he gets back in his car.