 Alright, welcome everyone. I'm Jennifer Cook, Director of the Africa program here at CSIS. I think we'll have people trickling in. Unfortunately, it's the UN General Assembly and Rasha Shana today, but I think we'll have a good turnout at any rate, and we're also being webcast as we speak. This is the fourth session of the CS... I'm not sure why this echo is happening. Is that volume? Is that volume issue? You're getting a bit of echo. This is the fourth session of the CSIS Nigeria Election Forum, which the CSIS Africa program has been hosting since January of this year, running through next year, April of next year, through the election, which is scheduled for February 2015. We're sponsored by the Ford Foundation, and we're very grateful for that support. The purpose of the forum is really to look at different dimensions of Nigeria's forthcoming elections. Looking at these elections in the context of... I wish we could... Can we do anything about this noise? Sorry, I feel like I'm echoing. So we're trying to look at these elections in the context of a changing political situation and a changing security situation as well. To underscore for US policymakers and a US policy audience and really a more global audience how critically important these elections are. For all that's happening in Nigeria in the security realm, these elections really do need to go right. It's happening at a time of huge political fluidity in Nigeria with a coalition of opposition groups that for the first time in Nigeria's history has a genuine chance of really challenging the incumbent party, a lot of crossing of aisles happening before the election, a lot of social fermentation in the country, enormously young population with rising expectations, more connected to one another, rising expectations and I would say a deepening distrust of government, not necessarily this particular government, but kind of a cumulative frustration with their political leadership overall. It comes at a time of economic dynamism, some important economic reforms going on, exciting things in the commercial realm, but also at the same time deepening inequalities across the country. And then of course there is the security situation and a dire security situation in the northeast of the country and the predations of Boko Haram which have really hit those regions very hard economically, politically and socially as well in terms of delivery of services and a big question about how credible can elections in the northeast be or how can they even take place. Elections always tend to be moments that can drive flash points. The question is in this situation, do they deepen divides or begin to bridge them? I think good credible elections are not going to fix any of these problems, but bad elections will make these problems very much worse and will really make kind of national solutions to these problems much more elusive. So we began in this forum in January looking at different dimensions of the elections and really bringing Nigerian voices here to tell that story. The first session with I-NEC Chairman Atahira Jega, chair of the Electoral Commission, looked at the overarching framework and some of the big challenges in the year ahead. We brought the political party leadership here to talk about their strategies in reaching voters, in mitigating the potential of violence. And in the last, in July, we held a session on election security, looking at messaging to voters, messaging from party leaders, what this might mean in the northeast, what are the flash points in the rest of the country. One of the themes that has come out in all of these sessions, I think from the very beginning, is the fact that responsibility for successful elections very much as with security in Nigeria does not fall on one institution alone. Huge expectations of I-NEC, but this is not only I-NEC's job. The government has a role to play. The political party leadership has a role to play. The security forces do, yes, have a role to play. Civil society has a role to play. NGOs and then particularly voters obviously have a role to play, probably the most important but sometimes forgotten element of the election process. So today's session, we're really going to focus on the voter and efforts that are being made to educate voters, to get them out to vote, to keep them safe and secure, to help inform their choices and to ensure that their vote counts. Before I introduce Chris Fumonio, who's going to moderate the first panel, I just want to say it's very easy to get gloomy about Nigeria when you read the newspapers and the stories breaking out. But I think having been in Nigeria in 2003, 2007, 2011, there are things that are changing even if 2011 was not perfect. There are new technologies that are being used, new media. There's really an increasingly broad and sophisticated civil society since 1999, it's been growing exponentially. There are big new constituencies for change. There's institutional change and the leadership of INEC I think showed some of that. And there's a growing base of data and evidence and lessons learned from previous elections that can be applied to new elections, and we're going to hear some of that in this first panel. It's not a static picture in Nigeria, and there's a lot of good things happening even in the Democratic deepening. And there's a lot of people who are working very hard to make that happen, NGOs, the youth core INEC, and some of the people that we're going to hear from today in the trenches, let's say. So we're going to start today's session with a look back at 2011. Our first panel is going to look at some of the analysis from that election, what lessons does it hold for 2015. And we're going to also hear from our INEC representative, Oluwale Uzi, about INEC strategies going forward. And Chris Fumuno, who is Senior Associate and Regional Director for Central and West Africa at the National Democratic Institute, is going to lead. We owe a huge debt to Chris and his team here at CSIS for advising us on this and getting the right people here on tackling the right issues on Nigeria and other things. I think all of you know Chris Fumuno, anyone who looks at Nigeria or democracy in West Africa knows Chris for his tremendous depth of knowledge and his balance of analysis. And I think if you've ever been on an election observation mission with him, his sense of calm in the midst of what can be chaos. So Chris, I'm going to turn over to you and hear from our panel. So thanks very much for joining me. Thank you very much, Jennifer, for those very kind words. You know, you almost made me blush, but if I blush you wouldn't know. I really want to thank Jennifer and our team for the leadership that they've shown here at CSIS in keeping Nigeria on the forefront, on the front burner of everyone's interest here in Washington. You know, I have been around the city for quite a while and I really haven't quite seen this in the sense of an open platform for people to come in way in advance of national elections and to talk about the various issues pertaining to that country's elections. I think it says something to the importance and the significance that Nigeria represents for Nigerians, first of all, but also for the Africa continent. And this is really the first time that we have an open platform that's gone, would be a year that was set up a year in advance of the elections itself and that is really allowed not just the people in Washington that are interested in issues Nigerian and African, but Nigerians themselves, Nigerian stakeholders to come to Washington and be able to interact with people who are interested in being supportive of the electoral process in the country. So I really thank CSIS and Jennifer and your Africa team for your leadership on this and for this wonderful opportunity. As Jennifer said earlier, elections are really about people and voters. That's how it should be in every democracy in Nigeria. Definitely it's an emerging democracy and it's working hard to strengthen its democratic credentials and institutions. It's about voters and how they take advantage of the opportunities provided to them by the election administration body and in this case, INEC. It's about voters and what they hear from the political contestants, political parties and candidates and how that influences the way in which they make their choices. It's about voters in terms of citizen participation, which then allows us all to determine the credibility of the process and the legitimacy that ensures from that process for the winners of the day. And so we thought that with this panel on engaging voters, we would hear from two very distinguished panelists who have paid attention to the trends, the voting trends in Nigeria and the attitudes of Nigerian voters towards the electoral process. I think part of the objective, part of the goal in setting up this panel is so that all of us can begin to have a more critical analysis of voting patterns in Nigeria that we're not overwhelmed by this shared size of the country or the shared size of the electorate or the fact that it's over 120,000 polling sites. But then we can take the time to do some scientific analysis of voting patterns that could invariably influence Nigerian politicians and candidates and political parties in the ways in which they approach the Nigerian voter. And the intent is that ultimately, as civil society organizations go about their work, that the approach to politics in Nigeria could differ a lot from what we've seen in the past and that parties and candidates can be more focused in crafting for voters messages that will respond to issues of their immediate interest. And to do that, we have here with us Mr. Oluwole Uzi, who is the Director of Voter Education, Publicity, Gender and CSOs at INEG. Mr. Uzi is a practicing attorney. He was a practicing attorney for 15 years prior to joining INEG in 1998. So he was the special advisor to the very first pioneer chairman of INEG and has been with INEG ever since then. He holds a bachelor's degree in law from the University College of Wales in the UK and also an LLM from the University of Benin. He's an expert in constitutional law and taught law. And before Mr. Uzi's intervention, I will hear from my senior colleague at NDI, Richard Klein, who is the senior advisor for elections at the National Democratic Institute. Richard has been working on these issues for the past 18 years since joining NDI in 1996 and he's been very involved in helping citizen groups around the world enhance their capacity to monitor elections and more specifically working on introducing statistical principles and new information technologies into the election monitoring process. Richard has personally supervised close to 2,000 parallel vote tabulation exercises around the world. In fact, he's a world-renowned distinguished expert on PVTs and has taken particular interest in the Nigerian PVT. Richard holds a master's degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science and also a bachelor's degree from Michigan State University. And so we'll start with Richard and after Richard's presentation we'll take some questions pertaining to his presentation and then we'll have Mr. Uzi full of thereafter. So without much ado, Richard, you have the floor. So this is a little bit of an easier exercise than the last time I spoke a few years ago about elections data on Nigeria. Except for that time, Professor Michael Bratton, who many of you know, was in the audience who was my professor and so I have to say I was much more nervous speaking then than I am today, though I'm sorry that he is not here. He would have benefited from his contribution. Also, I'm very happy that we have my colleague Mr. Uzi from INEC. I'm just back from Nigeria where we did a similar presentation for Professor Jega and other commissioners from INEC about this website and the information that is available to all election stakeholders, including the election commission. There are a few people in the audience who know me. I'm a person who enjoys the sound of my own voice. Initially, Jennifer told me that I would have four hours. That has been somewhat shortened, which I am not happy about, but we will do what we can. The idea here is really to try to give people an introduction to the wealth of information that is available. This presentation should really be done by one of my Nigerian colleagues. Actually, today in Abuja, Lazarus appear from the transition monitoring group TMG was giving a similar presentation to civic activists in Abuja. Unfortunately, Lazarus was not able to join us here in Washington and so I will do a woeful attempt to replace him. Because the data that you're going to see here isn't NDI's data. We worked with a consortium of Nigerian organizations to conduct, as Chris said, a parallel vote tabulation or PBT. What that means is deploying carefully recruited trained observers to a representative random sample of polling stations in every geopolitical zone in every state and in every LGA of Nigeria. This provides the highest quality data possible on an electoral process. That in the past, observation information had one or two weaknesses. Either one, it was anecdotal, meaning that there was more information from some areas and less information from other areas. The sample was designed very carefully so that it would accurately represent every geopolitical zone, every state and every LGA of the country. Thus, if an LGA has more polling units and more voters, it would have more reports in the sample. The second challenge is that that information is not necessarily available immediately. All of this data was moved by coded text message using ordinary mobile phones so that this information was available. We were finished collecting information somewhere around six or seven in the morning the day after the election to be able to immediately provide the people of Nigeria, most importantly, but also INEC and political contestants with independent nonpartisan information about the election that was truly representative. It was neither anecdotal nor skewed in favor of a particular area of the country. What has been done here in Nigeria by TMG, one of the consortium partners and who will conduct a similar exercise for 2015, is to take all of that data for the first time ever, not the first time in Nigeria, not the first time in Sub-Saharan Africa where I work most of the time, and it is the first time in the world that any group has made this kind of information available, that reflecting the desire for greater openness and transparency, that we live in a world where we can share data as never before, right, and that we want to see ways of different people using data in different ways and bringing different data sets together, right? When we have information, when we have empirical evidence, we make better decisions, right? And so this information is being provided to all stakeholders, right, to try to help them as we move towards 2015 so that they can conduct better programs based not on what maybe elites think the election was conducted, but based on actual data on the election. Of course 2015 won't be the same as 2011. Jennifer pointed out some of the challenges that are new or exacerbated since then, but it still provides an important set of lessons for the 2015 elections. In addition, something that has always been important on Nigeria is understanding the trajectory of the country, right? One of the important questions in 2011 was each election had been worse than the one before, right? And I think there is certainly the consortium found that 2011 changed that trajectory. But to be honest, we had hard data on 2011, but to compare that to what? We compared that to anecdotal data about 2007, that the data that I'll be presenting also provides us with a very important baseline to in a much less subjective way assess the quality of the 2015 elections. The truth is there was a delegation from INEC that came earlier this year. We were discussing the voter registration process. I remember in 2010 being in Nigeria for voter registration, a very astute lawyer was on national television saying that if a single Nigerian, an eligible Nigerian is not registered, they should do the exercise over. That is often the bar in Nigeria that people are being held to. I would argue that that is an unfair bar, right? That instead, all elections have challenges. I come from the great state of Illinois. In the great state of Illinois, dead people vote in every election. In the great state of Illinois, we currently have four of our five previous governors in jail, and I fully expect that we will go to five for five when Governor Quinn is out of office, right? So the question here isn't about getting a perfect election. The question here is, are we doing better? Are we learning from the mistakes that we made from the past? Are we learning from things that happened in the past so that we can do a better job so that ultimately, right, that the vast, vast majority of Nigerians have a credible opportunity to express their political preference and that we can all have confidence that those who are elected into office are the actual choice of the Nigerian people, right? An important step forward was taken in 2011 to move Nigeria in that direction, but that goal that is clearly, that is an unfinished process, and as Jennifer said, there are new challenges. I may have already used my entire 15 minutes. So this website, the first thing that is broken up into a number of stories, there are lessons that TMG has that they think are the most salient for people looking at Nigeria, Nigeria watchers such as yourself. So the first story is that historically in Nigeria there has been a big question about can we trust the results? Are the results as announced by INEC, do they accurately reflect the ballots cast at polling stations? That was certainly a huge question in the 98-99 elections, right? And it has continued to plague Nigerian elections. When we did an assessment in 2010 over and over again, people said to us, right, that polling stations do not open and yet there are results for those polling units and that the results that are being announced in Abuja have no correlation with our experience in our local area. So because observers go to a representative random sample of polling units, you can simply add together the results from the sampled polling units and see do those match with the official results. So what you see here is there are a lot of parties in Nigeria. You are parties today, but there are a lot of parties in Nigeria. We're just highlighting four that received a significant number of votes. The green lines or the darker lines for the colored blind people here, of course, Doton is not here, so we're fine. The green lines or the darker lines, the lower lines, those are the official figures from INEC, right? The light gray lines are the PVT estimates. These are numbers that the consortium had by 7 a.m. the morning after the election. Long before INEC announced any results, right? They waited to see what INEC's numbers would be, right? That if those numbers had disagreed, they would be able to demonstrate that in fact the results had been manipulated, right? And not to say that because, oh, we didn't like the outcome of the election, but to actually have data to back this up, right? No one likes to lose, right? Liverpool supporters in this room are not happy about last season in the English premiership, right? Sorry, I spend more time outside of the U.S. so I'm sure there's some U.S. football equivalent that someone could come up with. I think Broncos. So anyway, that all the time one of the Banes in Africa writ large is that losers don't accept the outcomes of the election, not because they were cheated but because they lost, right? And so what the consortium was able to do was provide scientific data for people to be able to evaluate whether the results as announced by INEC were accurate. As you can see in each case, the official results fell within the margin of error because we only went to 1,500 polling units. We're not able to produce an exact number but we can produce a number with a margin of error that says that the official numbers must fall within that margin. If they don't then something has been manipulated. The PBT though is about much more than just results. It is also about the quality of the process. How on earth do we know if we trust that the results as announced at a polling unit are the product of a good process, right? In 2003, I certainly saw people standing outside of polling units giving out cards, voter cards to people to go and vote and then they would return the card and they would be given some Naira, right? That is not how we want people to be voted, right? So what was the quality of the process, right? What the consortium found is that the process in 2011 was much better than anecdotal evidence from 2007. Oops, I don't know what's going on. So however, it was not a perfect process, better than the state of Illinois but still not a perfect process. So one of the things that has been a topic of some discussion and TMG felt was very important is logistics, right? Can you simply open up polling units? Can you get the materials there? This had been a huge issue in 2007, right? When many polling units simply never opened. So what they found was in 2011 that at 99% of polling units, they did in fact open. There was some small number that did not and those people would have been disenfranchised, right? But in fact that was a market improvement from the anecdotal evidence from 2007. However, not all the polling stations, we want to give people an equal opportunity to participate in the process. When some polling stations opened earlier and other polling stations opened later, that in fact disadvantages some people, right? So what they found was by 9 a.m. which is not when they were supposed to be open. They were supposed to be open well before 9 a.m. But by 9 a.m., 76% were open. But that in fact pattern was not even across the entire country. And so INEC should not be working equally across the whole country to address that concern. What we see is opening times were much better across the North and in the Southwest but were a challenge in South-South and Southeast, right? And so the question for INEC should be how do they better most efficiently use their resources to try to address these issues, right? That when we met with Professor Jago several weeks ago, right? We had a discussion, to be honest, for TMG much easier to observe a state election just like much easier for INEC to conduct a state election. And so while Inombra at the end of last year had logistical challenges, both equity and ocean have gone much better. But as Professor Jago acknowledged, national elections are much more challenging, right? This, the second map, right, highlights the individual LGA's that had the greatest problems, right? And so the idea is to provide people, right, in this case INEC with information that helps them to improve the performance of 2015. Because I wasn't given my full four hours, I'm not going to go through every single image. This is a public website, and I hope people will visit it afterwards. Another issue that TMG felt was very important was Nigeria had adopted a new voting system, a unique system, a system that in fact civil society including TMG had advocated for quite forcefully, right? The question is when you adopt a new system, one, is that system really adopted? And two, are there unintended consequences? So in looking at the system, they had moved from an individual process, which the slide on the left tries to show, to essentially what is a group process. Before individuals came and they did the entire process and then left, now individuals come and they do part of the process, but they have to wait till everyone has done that part of the process before you can move on to the next part of the process. This is not, this is not the most, could you type in TMG towards 2015? Right, so while the site is coming up, yeah, there you go. Oh, yeah, if you just scroll down, or I can get this type now. This is not counting against my 15 minutes, that's all I'm saying. So did the new system, was it carried out the way that people thought that it would be carried out? Have we lost the internet now? So there were these two systems and what we found was that 29% of polling units, people left after being accredited. They aren't legally obligated to stay there, but the whole system was designed to prevent double voting. The way that that works best is if people don't leave, that this is not illegal, it doesn't mean they went and double voted, but it certainly causes suspicion. In addition, people did not leave, this is more anecdotal evidence, something I don't like to use, we'll try to get better data in 2015, but different groups were more likely to leave than other groups. So anecdotal evidence suggests that it is the elderly and women with children who are most likely to leave. We will come back to that point. At the same time, so that is a voter education issue, that is an issue for civil society about the importance of staying at the polling unit. We'll return to that. At the same time, at 16% of polling units, people were accredited after accreditation closed. So during the voting process, no one was supposed to be accredited to vote, no one was supposed to be allowed to vote because they had shown up in the morning. This is both an INEC and a civil society issue because before, you could show up at any time during the day and be allowed to vote. So some of the people who arrived in the afternoon to vote may have been perfectly eligible voters who had not voted anywhere else, but simply didn't realize that if you don't show up by noon, you're not going to be able to vote. At the same time, there was not complete compliance on INEC's part with the new procedures. Maybe people felt bad. Oh, these people have arrived. They don't appear to have voted anywhere else. They don't have any INEC on their fingers. But again, all of this leads to suspicion. And if there's anything Nigeria is in short supply of, it is trust. We want to eliminate as many things that give people a reason to complain about the elections. Finally, so the website provides some information. These, again, were not homogenous, right? We can look and see. So people leaving was most common in Lagos. The red line is polling unit, right? The percentage of polling units were most or all voters left. And that problem was most common in Lagos, also very frequent in ocean and places like that. At the same time, accreditation during voting, most common in Anambra, Nugu, Aboni and such states. Another unintended consequence, though, that we saw in Anambra was that, and this is everything else you're seeing in this website, is data from citizen observers, right? Carefully recruited, right? And trained observers carefully selected and deployed to random sample polling units. But this number, which was verified by the observers, but is actually an INEC statistic, is that there were 22,277 people who went to the polling stations in the morning in Anambra, were accredited to vote, then left for some reason and never came back. And hence never voted. 5% of people in Anambra, right? 5.2% of all the voters who went out left and never came back to cast their vote, right? That if we look then, it is not people, and Jennifer did a nice job of this in her introduction. We tend to put all of the blame and none of the credit on the election management body, in this case INEC, right? But elections have multiple stakeholders. The success of an election is based on lots of, the actions of lots of stakeholders. One of the most important is obviously the political parties. Political parties play many roles in the election, we looked at one narrow piece, which is their presence at polling units, right? They are there to defend the interests of their parties, right? But also critically, if parties are going to complain about the results through legal mechanisms, through the official channels, the only way they can do that is if they have information about what took place at the polling units. If they don't have that data, then the only mechanism they are left with is the streets and the kind of violence that we sadly saw after the presidential election. So in looking at the results, right, what we found was that 93% of polling units, the results were posted for everyone to see. At 87%, right, the numbers added up accurately. Beyond the scope of this is there is still some work on maths to be done in Nigeria, but this is much, much, much better than in Malawi. Malawi's recent election didn't make 50% of the results that added together properly. But, and at 96% of all polling at polling units, every party agent who was there agreed that the result was an accurate reflection of what transpired at that polling unit, right? So what is being said is when it left the polling unit, we trust that number. The PVT says, ah, but the number that was announced in Abuja matches. So we should trust the results. But there is a challenge because what this map is showing is polling units that had only one party present. The whole concept, the whole idea is that you are going to have different parties represented, each representing their own interest, none of whom presumably is noble, but that all of them cancel each other out. And to be honest, once you get to two parties, you're okay. What we find is, and that's why this is percentage of polling units with only one party agent present. And so what you see is across the north and southwest that essentially at all of the polling units multiple parties were represented. But in south, south, and southeast again, you had large numbers of polling units with only a single party present. That party being PDP, right? If we then look, so right, so if parties are going to cry foul, or if parties are going to use legal means to question the results of an election, they have to have representation at polling units. We saw a very similar pattern to be honest at the recent elections in Ekati. PDP had polling agents everywhere. APC, the governor may be a former governor, may be a good technocrat, but he was not a good organizer, right? There were lots of polling units. APC had polling agents at only about a third of polling units. A worrying trend from Ekati was a court party. A court party was beaten by spoiled ballots. They had no support. A court, though, somehow managed to have a party agent at every single polling station in the sample, right? That is extremely suspicious about how they were able to have the organization and the resources to be able to do that when APC could not. Lastly, the last story from TMG is about turnout. Nigeria, if we put 2011, the turnout figures are somewhat similar to past elections in Nigeria, except for I would say that all those other numbers are highly suspect, right? That this is the first time we've had numbers that in any way we could trust. But when we look at Nigeria compared to the African continent, it is clearly underperforming in terms of turnout, right? That parties are not engaging citizens. That they are not providing citizens, right, with an incentive to participate in the election. I think this also goes back to, to be honest, a very good initiative by INEC about increasing the number of polling units, right, to decrease the distance that people have to travel to get to polling stations. However, if we look at that turnout by geopolitical zone, we see different patterns. This is in fact unusual, right? Party support tends to be heterogeneous, meaning that one part of the country, one party does well, and another part of the country, a different party does well. That is very common. But turnout tends to be relatively homogenous. That's because each party does an equally good job of getting its supporters out, right? What you have here is you have a lesson for political parties. You also have some concern about the, the lack of polling agents and the way the election process was administered. So in Southwest, what you find is very low turnout, and I would argue that that is due to two related factors. One is that Legos did not have a competitive gubernatorial election. No one thought Fashiola would lose the Legos election. He didn't do very much to get people out. People didn't worry that much. It was a foregone conclusion, and Legos has a not insubstantial population. At the same time, right, to be honest, neither campaign, neither campaign did much to reach out to the Yoruba community, right? Nobody was trying to talk to the Amala Eaters, right? And so, right, they didn't run good campaigns. At the same time, in South, South and Southeast, we see a heightened turnout. A heightened turnout exactly where, right, only one party had representation at polling units, right? Making us concerned about the degree to which the procedures were followed, right, to prevent double voting. When we look at... This provides the percent of LGA's with turnout within a specified range. So right now, it's showing you that Southwest had a huge number of polling units where turnout was between 0 and 25 percent. Very low turnout. A turnout that we should be very concerned about. Across a little bit in South, South, but not very much anywhere else. But very alarmingly, these are polling units that had turnout between, right, 91 and 100 percent. A very suspiciously high turnout. And again, we see that being dominated in South, South and Southeast. Those are the lessons I'm sure I'm well over, but I'm coming to a close. Those are the lessons that TMG, those are the lessons that TMG has, but the website is really designed for anyone to use. Those are what TMG thought was most important. But all the data that TMG collected, right, from its observers are available for anyone to use on the website. So explore the data by issue allows anyone to come and look at... These are all the questions from the checklist, right, that observers provided data on. So information is provided about various parts of the voter accreditation process, the voting process, the counting process, and the results. So if we wanted to look at, say, CPC Vote Share by the nation, this shows you a not very interesting map by geopolitical zone. But becoming much more interesting is when we look at it by LGA. To be honest, if you are in the United States or any longer established democracy, the first thing that you do when you start a campaign is you look at a map like this. You look at a map like this to understand where your support is, where you are most likely to get your votes. Organizations like NDI, IRI, and others spend a lot of time trying to help political parties around the world build the skills to play by the rules of the democratic game. One of the challenges with that previously in Nigeria is they didn't actually have the information that you would need to be able to use those skills, right? That what would happen in the United States is if you lose an election, right, or you win an election, you are going to go out and get very drunk that night, right? One group very happy and the other group very sad. But either group is going to then take a few days off and relax and whether you won or lost, you are going to start immediately looking at these maps to try to figure out what is your strategy, right? Because over and over again, what African politicians try to do is win 100% of the vote, which is a complete waste of anyone's time, right? What you want to do is win 50% plus one. That means developing a strategy of how you get to that number, right? And without this kind of data, right, to be able to say and look at a particular place and understand what kind of vote you got in that area. Where should you be concentrating your efforts? It is true that all over Africa that opposition parties may have fewer resources than ruling parties. But the truth is the few resources they have, they don't use efficiently, right? What this website does is provides information to people so that they can use that information effectively. Finally, Nigeria is an enormous country, right? Most states in Nigeria have more polling units than most other countries in Africa, right? That it is sort of absurd the work that TMG and others do of conducting activities across all of Nigeria. My girlfriend works on clinical trials on antiretroviral drugs in Nigeria, right? They are funded by USAID. And USAID says your organization has the capacity to work in two states, not 36 states plus the FCT, because Nigeria is enormous, right? Most of the organizations that make up TMG, but lots of civic organizations, are not working across all of Nigeria. They're working in a particular one or two states, or maybe even just in a particular LGA. And so what the site also does is it provides people with a snapshot to be able to see what did the election look like in my particular area. So if you wanted to, I'm an Inugu man because that's where Beth does most of her work, and so I always find myself in Inugu, right? And so I can then look at, right, the coal capital, and I can look at this is the profile of Inugu. It's all the data from Inugu. It is also broken down by LGA, the various LGAs of Inugu, so that people can write design programs and interventions that are specifically targeted to that particular area. I am sure I am well over, and I really want to hear from my colleague from INEC, and so with that I will close and take some questions. Yeah, thank you very much, Richard. And if you don't mind, I'll ask you to stand right there because I anticipate that there may be some questions that would prop you to go to specific slides. I appreciate how you used your time and didn't go through the entire exercise. We thought that because Richard's presentation is very specific and has a lot of new data, and we know that for the past three years there's been a lot of interest both in Nigeria and here on having access to data on the 2011 elections, we thought we'll take specific questions for Richard before we go to our next panelist. So I'd like to take two or three questions with regards to Richard's presentation, and please stand up, introduce yourself, and then pose your question, make it brief and direct so we can get a direct response as well. Yep, the lady at the back. Yes, thank you. Hi, my name is Amaka, and I'm currently a lawyer in town. I'm just curious about this is fascinating and awesome. Thank you for doing it. I'm curious about how you intend to go about collecting similar data for 2015, given the insecurity in the Northeast. Are you planning to deploy citizen observers as well in as many places? Thank you. Thank you, Amaka. Any other question? Okay, Richard, why don't you take that? Sure. So no, as I said, TMG plans on replicating this exercise for 2015 that certainly for international observers, there are going to be real challenges in deploying across Nigeria. To be honest already, for the 2011 and previous elections, to be honest, there were huge swaths of the country that international observers simply did not go to because of security concerns. On the other hand, citizen observers face different challenges, right? And so TMG is made up of a collection of more than 300 civic organizations drawn from all the states of Nigeria. They recently had their National Quick Count Meeting to launch the exercise for 2015 that brought people from all, 148 people, from all 36 states plus the FCT, right, to discuss the project, refine the plans and to send people out the process of recruitment because you have to recruit people who are truly independent, who we have time to sufficiently train and critically that are right from that community. Because people are from that community in country after country, because this methodology was first used to be honest in the Philippines in 1986, that when people are recruited directly from that community, they have the best understanding of the security concerns there, right? And are able to operate. What is a challenge is when you try to have observers come from one LGA into another LGA, right? Indigens are a very important concept in Nigeria. And so the strategy for 2015, as was the case in 2011, is to be recruiting people through local NGO networks in all 37 states and the FCT, recognizing the security challenges, not just to be honest in the north, there remain security challenges in the Niger Delta, right? It doesn't seem to get a lot of attention these days, but it remains a very challenging part of the world to operate and Chris doesn't publicly let people know that I go to that part of the world, that those are real challenges. That is why, right, they started that process now, as soon as possible, right? So that you are able to recruit people, right? That from a methodological standpoint, that if there is no election held in those states, that is a huge political issue. That is a potato I will leave for my colleague from INEC. But certainly, right, from a PVT perspective, TMG has a strategy for deploying local people, right, wherever the elections are conducted. And I think that they will be successful. Okay, thank you very much, Richard. I think you've provided us a very good segue into the second part of our panel, which would allow us to hear from Mr. Uzi, who is the director of voter education at INEC. Thank you very much. My work really has cut out for me, but I've been assisted in so many ways by Jennifer's opening remarks and also by the presentation of Richard. There isn't much really for me to add, but I've been called here to speak for a few minutes, so I think I'll just quickly run through some of the things we've been trying to do with INEC to ensure that there's an all-inclusive participation in the process and to identify a couple of challenges which have hampered our work in that regard. I listened very carefully. I was privileged to have seen, just shortly before now, parts of the presentation. And yes, accreditation is a major issue. It's a new issue. I think that's the second time, actually, we're doing it in Nigeria. I think in 1993, we did experiment with that. But a lot of people did not think it would work, whereas everybody was determined to ensure that it's a better process and to ensure multiple voting, which was a serious challenge in the past, did not reoccur. Many thought that this issue of getting people accredited, letting them wait there for three, four, five hours, would just not work. I think it worked much better than we actually expected because a lot of people predicted that it would cause confusion. But fortunately, in 2011, there wasn't all that much confusion. Admittedly, quite a number of people who got accredited left the station because they felt they were, quote, unquote, probably too busy. But if you look at it, and I think Richard mentioned it, a lot of the elderly people left, and you don't really expect them to. A lot of voting points are in public places, open places. There are no sitting arrangements. You cannot do anything much about that. Even where you do in enclosed places like schools, like maternities and public health institutions, they are not exactly ideal for somebody waiting for two, three, four hours. So many people felt, is it wrong for me to go back and attend to all the issues and then come back here? And certainly you cannot stop people from doing that. If you did, participation would not be as high. If you even complained, why can't I just get accredited and vote straight away and go about my business? A lot of people complained about that, but fortunately, the vast majority of people accepted that. A lot of women, especially, did not want to wait. Look, we have household chores. We have lots of things to attend to. The farmers, people, and Nigerians, are largely a Nigerian society. They felt that, look, this is election. The man I'm voting for has his job, and this will not affect him. But this will impact negatively on the work that I do. So why should I wait? And there's this disconnect that, yes, they need my votes now, but they may get there. There's no accountability. He's going to do what he wants to do anyway. So let me still not sacrifice too much. By coming out to vote, I feel I'm making a lot of sacrifices already. I don't see why I should go out and stay there for several hours and let other things suffer. The logistics issues are there. They're still there, but I think we're going in the right direction because the successes attained in both Aikiti and Oshun, admittedly, as you quite rightly observed, the challenges of a national election are much, much more than a state election. But at least we have a pro-formal. We have something to look up to. And it's a determination to ensure that we get as high as we did in Oshun, a nationwide election. Oshun, I think, was 97% actually of the polling opened before 8 o'clock or by 8 o'clock. There were one or two issues, one specifically near if there was an issue of problems between the electoral officer and the security agencies. The electoral officer had agreed with the parties and other CSOs that look, rather than distribute the materials, we have non-sensitive and sensitive materials. I think that is almost peculiar to Nigeria. The sensitive materials are the palatin instruments and results sheets. Whereas most places, all materials go at the same time in Nigeria. We ensure that they don't. The non-sensitive to address the logistic challenges goes much earlier than the security or the secure ones that come on the eve of the election. But because of the miscommunication between the electoral officer and the security agents, one or two stations within a particular ward did not start on time in Oshun. But we are addressing that admittedly with a complex country, as you said, like Nigeria and the challenges, the logistic challenges of the roads, accessibility. Again, another phrase that is common in Nigeria that is not so common areas is the issue of what we call the areas that are so inaccessible. Admittedly, places like India also have inaccessible areas, but they still manage as and when expected. But the difficult terrain, and this is not peculiar to any particular area. It's more pronounced in the south-south area where they have riverine communities. And with your speedboat, it takes sometimes three, sometimes four hours to get from the local government headquarters to other communities within the same locality and from where results will be tabulated. It can take three to four hours by speedboat, all else being equal. And in the far north, you do have the certification and widely-dispatched communities. Admittedly, pulling in it can take up to three to four hours, not necessarily because of the geographical distance per se, but because of the difficulty, the difficult terrain in the north-east, and you have the mountain range near the Cameroonian border. And there are some communities there that take better part of three, four hours and use all means of communication to go to get up there, use cars, use motorbikes, and use animals to actually transport materials and personnel up to these settlements, because they need to be serviced. We'll certainly look into that. Adamoa Gov. election will present its own unique challenges, and if we can do as well, as we did in Noshun with Adamoa, I think there's a great hope, something to look forward to for the general elections. We have challenges as well as you observed with party agents. The law says that the party agents should submit a list of the party agents seven days to the election, but in most cases, they just don't do this. The idea is that in a has enough time to print specific identity cards for these agents. In the past, we allowed them to use their party cards, but we discovered that very often the parties exchange cards. So you have a PDP man who will be carrying an APC card or vice versa, and he says, but I am this agent, look at my card. So we saw this as a chance, how do we address this? Let us authenticate these cards, let us print our own cards for these agents. Let them be in a card, let them not be a party logo, all they have to do is print a list of the party and the name of the person who is accredited for that polling unit. But invariably, they don't bring these names on time, and when they don't do that, you cannot customize cards for them, for particular units as well or collision centers. You tell them it is for their own benefits or sometimes they also come and they give you a list. Two days later, they chain that list. What happened? We think some names on that list have been very serious challenge. We already printed these cards, what do we do? And there is not enough time for us to print new cards for these people. I will check that. I will quickly go to the office and write a letter. The list previously submitted is no longer valid. Please do not use that list, that list does not no longer emanate from us. They are not our agents. And you have trained the young youth corpus who act as election personnel to ensure that only those with genuine inner cards are accredited to act as party agents in those particular units. So these are some of the practical challenges that we have. Even though they know that it is for their own good, you still have such challenges. A lot has changed since 2011 because there are several reforms, I think in January when I was here, outlined a lot of the reforms that I have been taking. Part of it is that it affects the public. And previously, in 2011, you had a department for voter education, separate and distinct from department for publicity. And you had a CSO desk that dealt with CSO issues. So they are disparate groups within the commission, and of course we have internal communication issues within the commission, but all doing overlapping or basically the same thing. That is why these were fused into publicity, CSO liaison and gender. And it is also part of the desire to ensure all these historically disadvantaged groups partake, not just as voters. We have done a lot with the help of civil society in terms of getting them to come out to register. But we are engaging the political parties as well. It's not enough that they should be just voters. Representations of disadvantaged groups, especially people living with disabilities with women are declining. Participation in terms of elective and appointive, elective I think the government hasn't done too badly with appointive offices, at least in the federal level. But with elective positions, it's a totally different ballgame. For whatever reasons, those historical, those cultural, those boundaries are still there. And we realize that they must come down. How soon this is done is a different thing entirely. But we've tried to continue to engage the political parties and to be fair, they all pay lip service to that. In each and every constitution that they have registered with INEC, they tell you how important it is to them to ensure women, especially, and the youth are engaged. They guarantee rights, their policies, their manifestos, their objectives are all inclusive. But in practice there's a disconnect there. And there actually isn't much legally that we can do but continue to engage them. And I think a lot of civil society are working in this direction and we've recorded some levels of success in terms of listening, in terms of extracting commitments. In another couple of months the primaries and the congresses will see how successful we have been in this regard. But not too many people are optimistic. They still believe that there's a lot of lip service to this. Now we have there's a communication policy that's just been adopted by the commission and that is the fulcrum of our engagement with the owners of the process. We very much realize and appreciate that the electorate, the voters, are actually the owners of the process. We are caretakers at best. We're not the owners. And other stakeholders are equally important but the voters must be fully and still informed and engaged in the whole process. But in getting to them we realize that INEC alone cannot do this. Very often when we engage our other stakeholders they say but that is your responsibility. Coincidentally, until 2006 with the reforms of 2006 voter education was not part of the primary responsibilities of INEC. It never was that. It was 2006 reform and again it's entrenched in 2010 that voter education and promoting sound democratic practices are part of the responsibilities and functions of the commission. Most of the functions of the commission are spelled out in the constitution. Well, voter education is not there. It's the act of National Assembly, the electoral act that actually introduced voter education. So we tell them, yes it is our responsibility but it's also the responsibility of other agencies is the responsibility of all other stakeholders. The political parties find it strange. It's almost an alien concept to them that they have to do voter education. But you must do so. You must mobilize your supporters. You must get them to eschew all those vices like malpractices and violins. Over and above that, you must ensure they vote and they vote correctly. But what they are not too happy and what they don't do is in terms of getting policy dialogues with their supporters. What do you stand for? What does your manifesto stand for? Very often when we go for public campaigns, what you do see is that they bring some popular artists. They come and play music. That attracts a large crowd. And then if it's a party that the umbrella is a symbol, you see everybody carrying an umbrella. If it's a party where the broom is a symbol, everybody is with the broom. It's not so much what they talk about, what they stand for that matters so much to them. It's the fact that they've brought a very popular and they go for the most popular and in tune anything that is free is attractive for us. So it's not very often to go and watch most of these musicians cost your monthly salary just to go and work them for two hours. But there you are seeing them for free, them coming to you. It happened in Australia, it happened in the Kiti. That's by the success of pulling their issues in their campaigns left very much to be desired. And we try to tell them, what you're trying to tell them, oh look, as two violins don't take money from these people. I'm trying to engage some groups who say look at this way. When the coming out certain, I have some young couples in their 20s conducting the election. I have an security man there. There's somebody in clear vicinity of everybody dishing out money. Just go and vote, come collect your money. Before you could do that and on trust they will give you money. But very often some people now found out they collected money but their parties lost in some of those polling stations. So what did you do? You go to some places and everybody votes. Voting is secrecy. But it's my ballot. I can choose what I want to be. Secret or I want it not to be. It's my option. The option is mine. Yes, the law guarantees secret ballot and secret voter. But I have decided to wave that right and it shows it to everybody. The next person comes and does exactly the same thing. So by the time the third, fourth person, even if I now want to come and vote secretly, there's a challenge for me. It happened in one or two places. There's now a serious challenge to me. Then why are you hiding your vote? It's supposed to be an open thing and this communal thing is also very strong in some areas. The community comes and decides, look this is our son. We are going to vote for this particular person or that person. There isn't much we can do about that. Even if you try to say, look, please arrest that man distributing money. This man is hungry. There's poverty or pervasive in the land. They were not taking money and that's why we have this discussion on use of cell phones. Take a photograph of your vote. Yes, you take your photograph. Very often we think that the person wants to go back. They go to the corner and show them that truly I voted for X party or Y party and collect some money. That's why we were not too enthused about the whole idea. But I'm told my time is up, so pardon me. One or two other things to talk about. But let me just say that we have tried to engage all the government agencies. We've set up an interagency commission on publicity which will harness all government resources. We have agencies like the Ministry of Information, we have agencies like the National Orientation Agency. Whose jobs are these to mobilise people to orient people and stuff like that. So we're trying to work in close partnership with them. The development partners have been very helpful. They've been bankrolling a lot of our activities. And also the Nigerian Guild of Editors and Nigerian Union of Journalists are very useful. They've come in very, very useful and I think it's a pointer to how good we can work together. And of course there are continuous, continued CSO engagements. But I haven't said that there are two things I take from this particular trip. Richard did say that I think Illinois, four out of the last five governors have gone to jail. Interesting anecdote. In Nigeria, only one has gone to jail. Out of modern 70 since 1998. He didn't go to jail in Nigeria. He was convicted in England. So that's something. Now I read an article, I think it's Judge Wills in the syndicated writer in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution of Sunday. And there's an interesting proposition coming out of California. And I never did think about it, but I'm taking that home with me. And he said that look, there's this crazy thing. He thought it was crazy anyway, but there's this idea coming out of California, Los Angeles. I think the last election there was 23% voted turnout. And he says, this is ridiculous. How do we get voters out? So I thought that was only a challenge particular to Nigeria. But he said, no, maybe they should start a balloting system. Kind of pools, a kind of system where there should be some financial incentives to get voters coming out. So they will do a luxury. And this has seriously been discussed. I don't know how it's correct. I read it there in the Constitution Journal of Atlanta that we are thinking seriously about it in Los Angeles of giving good incentives. We already have incentives of giving money, but not state money, not official money. But also maybe this luxury system, if you come out and vote and prove that you have voted, maybe you have set a chance of winning some money or some peccinary thing. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Mr. Uzzi. And we really running out of time, but I think if one or two people have burning questions from Mr. Uzzi, both questions at once and then give him an opportunity to respond. Mr. right here. I'm sorry. My name is Emmanuel Iqbo, resident here. Question to you, Mr. Uzzi, two things. One is about to talk about people voting without the politicians are demanding and manifesto of the politicians. And I'm wondering isn't that something that was actually discussed back in 2000 or 2001 that voters, the politicians have to show or demonstrate the manifesto or even engage some kind of a debate amongst each other so that give the voters an opportunity to understand what exactly they plan to do what the background is actually their interests and how they solve some of the problems within the local. That isn't happening within the government. It's not happening in the presidential level. So I don't understand how INEC allowed this to go on all these years. The second question is when you talk about people vote and come out and indicate who they voted for. Now I vote here. There's no way of putting anything in my pocket to show who I voted for, a republican, a democrat. So what mechanism do you have in your system where people can vote this supposed to be secret and they have some way of showing somebody outside that they actually voted for their party to collect money because if you can reduce that, then you reduce the ability of some trade to have a better structure in the sense. Thank you. Thank you, Emmanuel, for those two questions. Okay, gentlemen right here we'll have the last opportunity. My name is Onka Okwa and I'm a member of board of directors of ABGA, one of the political parties. It was just a coincidence that I was visiting and I decided to take the opportunity to attend this. First of all, let me say this I can say that INEC has done very very well. I'm not saying it because you are here. I have watched I've been in politics in Nigeria for over 40 something years. I went to American University and went back. I'm one of the founding fathers of ABGA. So I am quite involved in politics in Nigeria and I've watched the progression of how the politics has been developing and I was also the one that forced the party to become involved in a deep association with NDI IRI I even arranged we came here and visited the headquarters here and in fact few months ago I insisted also as a member of the board of directors and a member of the constitution review committee of the party we went to IRI held a meeting with them to engage them in assisting us in review of our party constitution we also looked at oh sorry we also looked at our manifesto so why I decided to say this we are beginning to try to become closely aligned in other words to develop our manifesto to be how we are going to practice our own politics our own party so what I've seen here is very good I didn't even know even though I'm a member of the party I've not seen we don't have this kind of graph I came very late the things I saw here this is really very good and it is very important if you can make this available to a lot of parties it will be very very important for us in planning of this thing so Richard I think you are the one that talking when I came in it will be very important for you people to make this available to political parties thank you very much Mr Awkwa that's a lady on the other side and please I beg your indulgence to give her the opportunity to pose a question oh sorry that's a bad guy I didn't see when you raised your hand thank you my name is Ernest I'm a doctoral student at the University my question is to Uzi please can you talk about how we are mobilizing voters in not East Nigeria does your message also include safety for the voters thank you for that very direct question I'll just use the prerogative that Uzi because the beauty of the PVT that was done in 2011 that Richard talked about was the collaboration between INEG and the citizen observers especially on the issue of accreditation of voters because when you do a quick count in a country as big as Nigeria you need a lot of flexibility to be able to recruit, train and deploy citizen observers we now understand that there are regulations in place that require the citizen groups to submit the names of the observers six weeks in advance to be able to get accreditation and if they are on a timeline to be able to train and deploy these observers it's going to be practically impossible to have names six weeks in advance is this something that INEG is willing to consider on behalf of the citizen groups especially given that these groups are well known have a lot of credibility and have proven over the years the ability to conduct citizen observation without which an exercise that happened very well in 2011 would definitely not happen in 2015 thank you very much Chris let me start with your question I'm surprised that it was actually six weeks I didn't realize it was that long yes we are required to send a comprehensive list in advance and there's good reason for this a lot of the CSOs have actually been infiltrated by the politicians we've taken a close look at the composition of some CSOs and you find out that those credible ones we've always dealt with and will continue to engage but I think a lot of the politicians have seen this synergy and collaboration between INEG and the CSOs and they as usual want to hijack, want to take advantage of that as I speak there's a prosecution that's bogged down by certain technical issues now of some fake observers for example in the Nambra Gov. election they crossed over from somewhere in the south west did not go through the direct route but went through a secitious journey went through a state where they had similar parties in government and tried to enter into Nambra from the east, they were coming from the west but tried to enter Nambra from the east somehow they were apprehended that case is being prosecuted now that's just one example the instance of that they had forged observer cards so we want the process to be transparent right we also want such that the activities of such unscrupulous people do not take anything out of that association that we have with the credible groups and the NB and SWIFT count would work closely with them in previous elections and the estimations also tell you very much with what Richard's groups were doing I think less than 2% margin of difference between the elections in Echiti and in Ondo before there so that validates our position and we're quite pleased about that we certainly will continue to work but I think the only challenge we've had with our engagements I think in the situation with the other day we're talking about larger groups who want to turn out a lot more trained observers than the CAP allows them to and we've promised that those JDPC for example, TMG, a few of those groups that have that network and we know they have networks and they cover the whole country concessions would definitely be given to them to deploy as many as they can train and as many as the capacity can absorb so that is that Emmanuel talked about non-issue campaigns what is INEC doing about it but it's ideal in fact the National Conference just submitted this report part of this report was that the debate issues should be institutionalized I don't know what process that will take I don't know whether it will actually see the light of day because I understand the report has been sent to the National Assembly for debates and the electoral act is in the process of being amended through the plaque and the situational room we actually went for a public hearing about a month or two ago a month ago the National Assembly, House of Reps the Senate has passed its own bit of the bill the House of Representatives is in the process of passing its own this is more comprehensive, this is much broader I think while the Senate one had its clauses to be amended that's the House of Reps 23 or 26 I can't remember exactly now but the issue of debates making a structural requirement also came in but I don't think that had been accepted by the time both houses meet, when they pass the respective versions and they meet to harmonize I don't think sadly that will be part of it personally I don't know whether INEC should be too directly involved in the debates, it's desirable and will assist and promote it as much as possible but already people accuse INEC of having too much to do there's the talk of unbundling the phrase that is often used unbundling INEC that let it concentrate on its core mandate of conducting elections we are, for example the creation of the election of Fences Tribe and commission so that it takes away that responsibility so that the core responsibility still remains intact but we encourage all groups where we do support in Nigerian election debate group one or two other groups that are promoting such debates so that issue-based campaigns now become the order of the day so what mechanism to indicate what they do is take their camera phones or some of the politicians it's a so prominent notion some of the politicians ask their supporters to take their cameras to the polling booth and snap their ballot paper when they take we encourage people to bring their cameras to film the process from a reasonable distance to show as part of the transparency initiatives that they can film the whole process but not this idea of taking a photograph of your ballot paper as I said when I was presenting because they'll go around the corner and probably go and use it for other things and collect money corrupting the process can I do anything to stop that I'm afraid not I can't stop you from bringing the cameras in fact to show transparency we wouldn't encourage people to take their camera phones to the station but to question what use do you put a camera phone to they didn't say that it's for them to take it so that they can say no I want to know how I voted of course you are there, you sat down there you know how you voted so what other use do you want to know if my ballot was counted but you're not supposed to mark your ballot you're not supposed to even know much about your ballot it's part of the legal requirements that you cannot mark your ballot or make any distinguishing symbol so you can recognize it it should just blend with every other ballot after the time of sorting out and counting but they insisted and said it's their right it's still an ongoing debate and I guess come the general elections there might be an issue subject to discussion but we are opposed to it for this particular reason because we don't say any additional benefit you get from photographing even though it's your vote you know how you voted so it doesn't matter and you will not know whether you voted counted this way or that way because it blends with all the others okay I don't think you have a question thank you for the commendations ABCA is one of the parties that does have representation the number of governors from ABCA and they've been very cooperative in the Interparty Advisory Council ABCA is one of the bigger parties that have been very very active in that regard and they have their code of conduct but my only worry is that a lot of the parties who have subscribed to that code of conduct have not always lived up to it but will still nudge them on to ensure it's a voluntary code but a lot of the things in the code are in the electoral act an amount to offences with consequences of penalties but if you can develop a code and you abide by it you subscribe to it so I think that ought to be sufficient without us bringing in issues of the breaches of electoral act how do you mobilize voters in the north east tough one we've been doing that my colleagues are in Adama is one of the states under emergency rule unfortunately there are one or two communities we've not been able to go too near to I tell people that there's a hierarchy of rights and the right to life is of course the most important you don't start to enjoy all the rights unless you have that right to life and we will not do anything that will in any way jeopardize the rights of our personnel of the voters of anybody but in most parts of the state we've been doing a bit of work unfortunately and understandably so a lot of our international partners who have been supporting us who support us tremendously in Echiti and Oshun have drawn back a little bit and understandably so as I said in the Adama state we still think that in most places a relative degree of normalcy is attainable and will be attained not only at the time of the Adamao election but at the time of the general election but we use our other means unfortunately for example I mentioned the Citizens' Contact Center in most of Borno and many parts of Yobi and Adamao you can't even get social media the internet is not just the gateway it's not just there we've had to resort to VISA rather than the standard service providers so there's a big challenge there but we use other means and we're trying our best to use our other tools of engagement thank you well thank you very much thank you very much Mr. Uzi I see that the conversation could be extended most exponentially because there's so much to discuss in our general elections our two panelists will be available even during the second panel and beyond so please feel free to come up to them and engage them in any conversations that you may want let me just repeat for you the reference to the website where you can find all the data and all the information that Richard provided it's www.tmgtowards2015.org and we encourage you to really access this information including the political party leaders from Nigeria so please join me in thanking our two panelists for a wonderful informative session thank you very much to this panel I think in the interest of time we're going to skip the break unless there's protest from the crowd there is coffee out there but just in the interest of time I think we'll go straight to the next panel this was an excellent panel and I do want to remind you to stay with us and join us after the session for some wine and hors d'oeuvres as well why don't we have our second panel come straight up here as they're doing that I did want to say on this question of ballot secrecy I was in Sokoto in the last election and literally was less subtle than taking a snapshot of the ballot it was going through phalanx party agents and showing the ballot all around and getting high fives and so there's a big process there to voter education process listen that was really a fabulous first panel and I think a lot of the data there and a lot of the themes we're going to explore a little more in depth in this one a couple being the question that was raised on issue based voting and how do you get to that that's a huge challenge in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa and beyond and some of our panelists have done some excellent work on that the other question that came up too at the very end was the modes of communication in different parts of the country have a lot of excitement about social media and platforms and so forth but they're not equally accessible across the country and so there's variations that require different strategies for mobilization in the far north to rural women versus young urban youth there has to be a whole collective of communication strategies to do that on our original invitation we had to face Idibia who was supposed to join us yesterday he let us know that his travel plans had changed he's very interested in getting into voter mobilization and lending his name and hopefully drawing other celebrities within Nigeria to use their social capital to kind of get some of these votes out here so we're disappointed that he didn't come but let me say that we we really have some rock stars here at the table in terms of civil society leadership some of the new uses of technology and social media to get to reach voters so we really do have an all star panel here and we're delighted to have you all we have with us and we'll speak we're not quite sitting in the order that we'll speak but I'm going to start with Tunji Lardner who is founder and executive director of the West African NGO Network Wanganet is really one of the early cutting edge kind of technology based organizations that's using data very much like I think there's a lot of synergies between them and the TMG work that we've just seen and really presenting, collecting and presenting real hard data in ways that people can use and in ways that people can use to make their choices when they get to the vote and I'm just going to tell us a little bit more about that as well we also have Aisha Asori CEO of Nigerian woman trust fund Aisha was with us in January at our first session and we liked her so much we've asked her back she's doing some phenomenal work in terms of women mobilization but also how do we get women more engaged in the political process issue based but also as candidates and so she'll talk a little bit about that. Idiat Hassan is executive director of CDD they've been doing work on voter education but also kind of examining why voters vote the way they do, what are effective messages how effective have been some of the anti-violence messaging again in the last election technically it was a very good one 800 people died in the aftermath of that election, 800 Nigerian citizens and you know was that preventable it was kind of a crisis of expectations and I was in Sokoto at the time again and you saw the jubilation in the streets over the results that they saw at their local polling station and then at the LGA and the state level two days later those jubilating crowds turned angry when they learned of the national results and so we'll hear a bit from our panelists kind of how to effectively communicate and engage young people listen to and the leaders at the local level as well and then finally Yemi Adam Alaykum executive director for Enough is Enough which is doing some great work on voter mobilization but also on the role of the voter in protecting the vote and how do you engage them in that process so Tunji I'm going to start with you you're welcome to come up here to speak or you can stay at the panel whichever you're more comfortable well you're welcome to do a little song for us but okay good thank you this is my proverbial 15 seconds of fame so I'm going to develop and enjoy it thanks for a very generous introduction but basically we had to talk about the working title here obviously is building an informed and active electorate I think the larger framing of the issue is really building excuse me an informed and active citizenry and that's at the core of some of the challenges that we have the reason why I think it's important to have this as a backdrop conversation because it provides some context as to why what seems to be blitheringly obvious does not happen in Nigeria there's always the implicit assumption that everything here that happens in Nigeria that there's a legal and rational basis for it that's not always the case I said earlier on this morning at a previous meeting that as they say in relationships it's complicated but Nigeria is even more so it's at once complex and complicated so in a sense with regard to Nigeria it is complicated and it's interesting trying to figure out what part of it is complex as a system which is what some of the work that we've just seen before is doing it's exposing it being numbers to life and providing some kind of empirical contextual understanding of how the elections went in 2011 however that is just on the empirical side the scientific rational basis for trying to understand complex systems on the complicated side is where we weigh in because that is where the challenges about how do you get informed enlightened participatory electorate and we're going to run through the gamut of perhaps cases case studies as to how those challenges are the Nigerians who live in Nigeria understand what I'm saying so it's very difficult just listening in from the view from the outside in but that view from the outside is equally important because it provides us some kind of should I say empirical context right we are in the trenches we are too close to the picture so we tend not to be able to see the big thing we see the complications and not fully appreciate the complexities the view from the outside sees the complexities but do not fully appreciate the complications so I'm hoping that before this sessions are over we'll be able to extract a middle ground in trying to explain it so how do you get enlightened voters how do you get engaged voters even when we looked at the last presentation it was clear I think Robert mentioned something to the effect that politicians and political parties have no incentive to engage the electorate with regard to voter education and a sense of participatory engagement with elections proper and the reason why that is so is because really really I mean this is a fledgling democracy what maybe 15 years old from 1999 we've never had issues based elections there's no incentive for politicians more or less to articulate a position and defend it because that is not the basis for victory at the ballot box and there's a mentality about that pervaded Nigerians there are two things that happen as we look towards 2015 and trying to engage younger voters who are coming on stream there are two psychological tendencies one is a mindset that says why am I voting my votes don't count anyway there's that pervasive sense that there's a disengagement between the political process and potentially the benefits of a democratic process that leverage political goods and services but the tendency is just I don't know whether it's just a generational alienation from politics basically but that's a deeper psychological investigation but that is the baseline of Nigeria Robert said ever so politely mentioned the issue of trust trust is an integral element of participatory politics people have to trust the system and trust the leaders and that is something that is in extremely short supply in Nigeria so the question now is how do you create a new constituency around participatory engagement with the hope and promise that at the end of that engagement that A whoever you choose to vote for will actually be your candidate and B that candidate will now deliver the social goods and services you directly need in terms of democracy in Nigeria the language in 2000 I think was well 1999 at the outset of this whole democratic experiment called the democracy dividend and it was supposed to be something that we got out of years of militarization out of the coups and counter coups that it was going to usher in an epoch of political stability and unbridled growth today it has happened it's not entirely gloom I mean the fact that Nigeria still remains together itself is a miracle a miracle of perception perhaps but it's a miracle nonetheless but these are dire times early on today we're doing the analysis of where Nigeria was and you know there are two narratives one is the old narrative about Nigeria getting to the edge of disaster every time and so again Nigeria is yet again at the crossroads and you roll your eyes and say okay so what's new now well what's new now is that there are other dimensions that have been added to it one is of course the issue of insurgency up north which really at the heart of it is fueled by poverty ignorance all the things that democracy should effectively be challenging if the political platforms and the process of political engagement were based on the needs of the citizens so it is clear that the political class I sent a tweet a little while ago that to win elections in Nigeria voters are optional and that is so true what we have to do is really change that narrative and we're being perforce charged with looking at the narrative all over again there's the prevalent narrative of Nigeria but there's still some good news in the actual electoral practice it was very strange to hear the chairperson of a political party openly praise AINEC but they do deserve some congratulatory words we participated in the last three gubernatorial elections, Zanambra, Oshun and Ikitis there's imaginary improvement but the challenge with AINEC is really the economics of scale it's not enough to have elections in three states but what happens when you're dealing with a much larger constituency and those are the challenges we're having beneath that again is this issue of not so much as voter education as much as it is civic education some people already say in the elections politicians have said that publicly they've retracted and this is all because there's a cynical game of power going on and power acquisition without any regard to what the consequences are. In the old modelling the political elite had always managed to come together on the basis of some expedient process at the last time it was I think the doctrine of necessity when the incumbent president died and there were all kinds of political adjusting and the constitution was clear your president is in capacity for a particular period of time your vice president steps in but that was not the case of Nigeria so we had a dying president somewhere in Saudi Arabia somewhere and then this whole masquerade and you know palace theatrics about keeping him alive and all kinds of stuff in spite of the fact that it was clear and then nobody would step up to defend the constitution and then finally when it became clear that it wasn't going to happen the way they wanted to the senate had what they called the doctrine of necessity it's always this recourse to expedient solutions to exigent crisis that has marked Nigeria's challenges and its failures the inability to formalize the process the ability to have a platform that is indeed legal, rational means that people do not trust the system so there's a whole bunch of things that are evolving now that we think would make this somewhat different as to how far I'm not certain but two things have happened that were not part of the initial equation one is the insurgency up in the north eastern part of Nigeria and that has put the fear of disintegration in the hearts of everybody because it is clear that there's something there that the state itself cannot fully respond to the other thing that is somewhat neglected but has also for the very first time generated some kind of consensus of citizenship and civic engagement is the Chibok incident I mean yes for a while it was trending social medias, famous you know flavor of the month it was perhaps but beneath that has been for the first time you see a regrouping of a certain kind of civic engagement a new kind of citizenship emerging around an issue that was not political that was not economic but an issue that touched the hearts of everybody it was I mean you cannot be more concerned than be concerned about your daughters and your children by extension and the response of the government itself was if you ever wanted proof about just how dislocated and disjointed and totally disconnected the ruling elites were from the so-called citizens the Chibok incident was it way beyond anybody's expectations it was very clear that if indeed there was a social contract and that is up for question that social contract had been broken and elsewhere you know in a more legal rational space the very idea of an incumbent president running on his record such as it is now would be absurd but that is not the case in Nigeria and the fact that also we have another should I say I'm not exactly how to I'm trying to be very polite here now but a poke in the eye of the citizens by the Jonathan campaign theme in appropriating the bring back girls hashtag to bring back Goodluck Jonathan in 2015 I mean there's just something about it that is just so real for me and so I can't even frame a response around it but it's a very symbolic thing for us to understand because what it says essentially is that you the people do not really matter in this I said it earlier on in little tweets that to win elections the voters are incidental on the flip side of that argument is actually the attitude of the voters themselves right and all kinds of reasons that can be reduced as to why there's general apathy yes we can make the excuse of militarization the fact that we've been on the military we haven't had the experience of actually unfurling democratic practices and principles but there's something really tell me wrong with the Nigerian voter so it's not enough for us to blame the ruling elites there's a sense that somehow and I don't want to go into any deep social anthropological explanation why this can be but there's something about the Nigerian voter that just makes him think that somehow this process that is before you is really not important enough for you to invest your time and commitment to it we seem to have a very short attention span because they think the whole democratic experience is basically showing off elections and you vote and that's it that's why I was saying earlier on that it's complexicated the complicated part of it is the very Nigerian phenomenon I don't think it plays out elsewhere but there's some parts of it that are just very ordinary garden variety African states and citizenship issues but in this particular instance where again the precipice and we're not certain the political elite consensus that has kept Nigeria from tipping totally over will hold but somehow we're optimistic that it will because that's how Nigeria has always been so there are two things I want to leave you with before I think we have to look at it differently and I'm hoping that as much input from the view outside in as much as it is that we can provide the view from the inside out will provide some kind of a balance the issue of the emergency is important because it's a threat to the existential existential life of Nigeria but there's something that has also happened with the Chibok episode that has started a different kind of civic engagement because it is not directly political per se we might not be able to put a some kind of a mental value as to it but there's something that is happening and perhaps we're being to see the emergence of a new type that's going on in Nigeria and cities and thank you I do want to say one of the positive things to his credit president Jonathan did speak out against that campaign slogan as soon as it came out and that politics is ugly but I mean that's going to happen again and again I'm sure in the election process one of the things and we tried to get our vote here it's incumbent on the political leadership to speak out when members of their party engage in that kind of rhetoric and you know this actually was an instance where they did so just but here on the side it was only when the Washington Post wrote an editorial about it it was only when the Washington Post wrote an editorial about it that prompted the response from the executive okay well I don't know the cause and effect or was it a correlation and so I mean but that is an instance where you can speak out let's see who is I going to go to next you know Aisha was next to speak about engagement of women in the political process and in the electoral process good evening everyone I'm here to speak about women and their involvement in elections my points are just going to cover three main areas first of all I'll talk about what some of the challenges and opportunities are in terms of women as voters and women as candidates and then I'll talk about some of the work that we've done at the Nigerian Women's Trust Fund to address some of the opportunities and challenges that we've seen and that we can do something about and then I'll just end with my thoughts on how we can move forward and what the opportunities are also for collaborative efforts across civil society and some of the other key stakeholders now I'm not even sure to start as voters or candidates let me start with myself because I'm a voter first I've never been a candidate now some of the challenges that we've seen that women face as voters I think some of them Uzi mentioned in the beginning now women are the primary caretakers elections are in Nigeria an event they don't happen easily like they do in some other countries where you can sort of decide I want to vote now and stroll down to your polling unit and vote and go home this is an event your whole entire day or Saturday in fact for three weeks successive Saturdays will be taking from you because you want to vote it takes a lot out of women especially if they're the only caretakers they don't have nannies and they have children and they have to drag these children to what is potentially dangerous areas and we find that although lots of women in there some states from the 2011 register sort of all your ocean where women are actually the majority of registered voters we're not sure yet because we don't have that data from INEC whether that actually translates into women being the predominant voters so while we know they register we don't know if they actually vote and we do know also from the 2011 elections when we compare the number of people who are accredited to the number of people who voted there's usually a discrepancy there's usually fewer numbers of people who actually voted so maybe this is where some of the women and the men are falling apart by the wayside the second issue in terms of women and voting is from our experience and this is on the field talking to women predominantly women in the lower class I will confess as somebody middle class that I never voted until 2011 which is way above the age of 18 if anybody could guess that the elite usually don't vote and that's the truth we don't vote, we don't get involved in politics in any way we think that that's better left for those people who have nothing better to do and then we complain because things don't work but we've deliberately left that sector for them to manipulate so back to women as voters so you find that the women that we've been interviewing and talking to the lower class women who actually do register and usually line up and vote, they don't see the link between their vote and the state of their lives so you speak to a woman and you ask her about what are her worries, what are her issues whether it's the fact that there's no possible water whether it's the fact that her children who she struggles to put through school don't have jobs, she doesn't see the link between her going out to vote and somebody in office being able to solve that problem so it's really, there's not enough data and information to show why do people vote there's some who argue that the voter's registration card or the PVC the permanent voters card as we're going to start seeing in 2011 has some political economic value that people buy these cards and so maybe this is why some people feel the need to register and go through that process not necessarily because they plan to vote or they think their votes will count but because they know that somebody will offer them money for that card the same way somebody will offer them money for their votes so it's again part of the stomach infrastructure they don't see the vote as a way of changing their lives so bringing some sort of meaning into how they decide who to vote for but just a process where they can gain something in the short term so those first are the key challenges now as candidates there are lots of issues with the Nigerian political process I'm not going to delve into all of them but one of the key things is that not enough women are running that's the bottom line for various reasons whether it's the fact that it's expensive, it's violent it's not particularly welcoming there's lots of patriarchal and social and cultural pushback to women as leaders so many women just abdicate so for example although we have a 2015 goal to have 30% women in the national assembly by 2015 right now we're at 7 which is one of the lowest in Africa where the average is actually 22.2% and Nigeria is at 7% so some sort of affirmative action quota in our constitution is quite unlikely that in 2015 we will make that number from the data that we have from INEC from 2011 elections out of 10,000 plus candidates or aspirants who wanted to contest less than a thousand were women that shows that less than 10% so where is the 30% coming from if we don't even have up to 30-40% of women running where do we expect to get 30% representation in the national assembly so one of the biggest challenges for women as candidates is actually getting women to want to contest we're just not seeing enough women so now back to what the Nigeria women's trust fund has been doing is doing apart from trying to change the narrative now one of the big things we think we see an opportunity and it's changing the narrative around women in politics changing the narrative around women in leadership why would a woman want to run why would she be a good leader why would she be invested in her community and why should other people support her as well because that's also something that's missing in terms of the support for women in politics there is no natural constituency for women as voters not from the women themselves and not from the men there's also no support from the parties because we see that even though some of the major parties have within their constitution some sort of acknowledgement that they want and will support more women so we don't put that into practice so what we did was come up with a video earlier this year first half of the year it's called the new dawn it's very short and everybody knows that Nigeria is famous for gnollywood amongst other things so we thought how can we blend our love for stories and visuals instead of just creating another dry documentary with women and men talking about the importance of women in politics how do we create a story and a narrative that would appeal to people and so we had this short 20 minute film called the new dawn and we had some of the gnollywood heavyweight sort of joker silver and Kate Hensch a feature in it very briefly and we're very happy to say that it was really well received we launched it to lots of applause the federal ministry of women affairs and social development is actually using it as their primary tool as they go around the six geopolitical zones talking to women about participating and taking part in elections engaging INEC on their continuous voter registration and making sure that they pick up their PVCs we also understand from Kate Hensch who is on Twitter for those who are on Twitter as well who's declared recently that she's going to run for to represent her people of cross river in the national assembly and we're very proud and she says this all stemmed from being part of the process of producing this video and launching the video so what we're finding is that what we've learned works in other parts of the world which is that women need the affirmation of being asked they like to be told you can do that they want somebody to tell them you should run, you can do this we are beginning to use that narrative at home as well and saying who are the women who are doing great things publicly and unknown and how can we encourage them to run so that's part of what we're working on we've also started talking to young girls in groups targeting specifically women who are just young girls finishing secondary school who in another year or two would be eligible to vote and talking to them about why they should vote and why their dreams and aspirations for themselves are tied to the political process and what we're finding in the two states we've been in already which is cross river and FCT is that these girls were extremely happy to be talked to about this object it was something that they'd never heard about even the ones who had been to formal school nobody ever talked to them about the political process and explained to them why as citizens they need to be involved and why their votes should count it was also the opportunity to start making the link to them that look voting is your way of contributing and having a say in what is going on so we have this tag called vote now my power which is paging for my vote is my power a vote is my voice and so we have stickers and t-shirts and we engage these girls and what we're trying to do is we put them through this program where we're saying if you register you're 18 and above you register if you can get 10 more people to register it qualifies you to come to another program in another six weeks where we'll teach you how to make beads where we'll teach you how so we're also selling them a skill so it's not enough to just say go because there's high unemployment in Nigeria so what's the hook for us to get these people engaged so that's how we've been running these workshops and they seem really quite successful and we're hoping to replicate them in another six, seven states with the support of INEC so those are the kind of things that we're doing now in terms of the opportunities for collaboration we're looking at the numbers from the continuous voter registration process and the collection of PVCs now I'm not sure how many people know but we've been doing this in Nigeria in three phases so we've done phase one and phase two and now we're getting ready for phase three some of the states where we're working in have already had their own this process and we're finding that the numbers are a bit disturbing to be honest if people cannot register if people cannot vote without their PVCs then the numbers that we're looking at in terms of people's collections so for example the FCT where I live the collection rate was only 44% yet that process for collecting PVCs has closed even though technically it's still open if they can find INEC offices so we're finding that where we need collaboration is for civil societies in different parts of the country similar projects sharing what their information is so that we can sort of double up and have visibility on what's going on we can make sure that our messages are on target also another worrying thing is about the CVR continuous voter registration the numbers are very very low so for example while FCT while we're worrying about the fact that in the federal capital territory we only have 44% collection rate from PVCs we're finding that in terms of new registrants it's like 4.4% which is basically a percentage of the 2011 register database very very low and it's the same thing everywhere a place like Jigawa that had 87% collection rate of PVCs you still see only 18% so we're wondering what's causing this discrepancy particularly because people seemed excited about wanting to register so is this a function of INEC's processes not being able to meet the demands and how will this play out in 2015 when the results come out and as I think a previous speaker had pointed out they don't see the results they want and suddenly the people who couldn't get their PVCs and who couldn't vote suddenly feel cheated and decide that maybe their vote would have made a difference then so for me this is where we have enough time in the next four or five months to work hard to make sure that every Nigerian who wants to vote and is eligible to vote gets a chance to register and to collect their PVCs so for me that's one of the opportunities where we can work together also in terms of narratives and what voters need to know I don't think we focus too much on well we focus predominantly not too much there's still a lot of work to do but we seem to focus predominantly on the technical issues of voter education so for example you know it's time to pick up your PVC this is where to go have you picked it up, you have XY days to go but some of the technical stuff for example like do you know that if they've declared results in your polling unit and one ex-candidate wins doesn't mean that he or she is going to win everywhere else are you aware that to be president of the country it takes two thirds of the so teaching them this fundamental things that will help us stem the violence that comes as a reaction of disappointment when the candidate that they want doesn't win so for me those are again other opportunities for us to partner together across civil society and with INEC and the political parties who all have a stake to make sure the elections are peaceful so I think those are some of the things that we're doing obviously mentoring is a very big issue especially for young girls how can we get into universities and work with student union government to say look let's start encouraging young girls to run for office while they're in school let them start learning the ropes building their confidence, these are all gaps that we have in our system that we can do something about thank you Misha let's turn to Idea Hassan from Center for Democracy and Development talking about anti-violence messaging okay alright the kind of voter education programming that we've always run in Nigeria has focused more on procedures for elections then the right of citizens during elections as of course exemplified in the laws guiding elections then of course strategies for protecting mandate and this has has got tremendous effect positive on the outcomes of election particularly when you look at the 2011 January elections which for the first time was not just an improvement by INEC but it's said to have reflected the will of the people and this trend is actually it's been replicated in all the staggered elections we've had in the recent past in terms of AKT and Oshun election, the will of the people is actually reflected but there is still lots to be desired in particular when we start questioning the issue that what informs voters choice, why do people vote the way they do, what factors influence citizens' choice and has this led to the consolidation of democracy itself then is the current civil society approach to voter education sufficient to engender inclusive governance and a developmental state after might free and fair credible elections of course there are lots of explanations by academics and practitioners on what informs our voter choice or why do citizens vote the way they do in our own context is of course driven by ethnic ties, religious ties now the new evolving the North-South divide and of course clientism as exemplified in vote buying but this clientism of vote buying has taken another dimension entirely which is actually worrisome with the AKT and the Oshun election where we saw the doctrine or the a new sociology evolved in terms of stomach infrastructure and the stomach infrastructure concept is basically inducement with either cooked rice uncooked rice, vegetable oil and it took another dimension in Oshun election where kerosene was added to it kerosene is a foil so you have the foil you don't just have rice but you have the foil with which to actually cook this rice then when you look at this critically then you ask what is, why have voters voting? Are they voting in terms of people oriented programs or they are voting in terms of financial inducement then this brings a critical question into context what is the democratic what of voters and what is the quality of their ballot of votes particularly in our own context where the way through which you participate in the governance process the only way known to Nigeria is cast your ballot every 4 years that is our concept of participation in this whole governance process but this participation in itself has led to the delivery of public goods and services by a petty trader trading with $20 who has stood under the scorching sun for 8 hours to exercise our own mandate if this is so and of course no political party is blameless of this stomach infrastructure doctrine and it's not that it's a new thing in our own context it's just because it's taking an overhead dimension from what was actually previously obtainable that is why it calls for caution then how do we shift this? How do we make the ballot much more worthwhile? Particularly from the basis that I started what our voter education programming which CDD does and most of the civil society organization has been doing for years now and this election offers us an opportunity to move towards issue based politics beyond issue based politics issue based politics alongside promoting democratic accountability because what we have in context is transactional electioneering versus issue based politics. So how do we make the shift? And lots of discussion has evolved today the issue of our political party is not supposed to have manifestos as come up. Of course the electioneering process itself and even for you to register as a political party you have to draw your objectives from chapter 2 of a constitution which is all about social democracy. And Nigeria is not one of issues to discuss upon at this moment in time. We have the issue of accountability up there. We have the issue of security as an important factor. So how do we shift this election towards this as against transactional politics and of course it's electioneering and of course it has its advantage if we are able to shift. One is the fact that it will be able to, it will assist in time in violent conflict because the kind of the kind of discourse that is ongoing is much more confrontational amongst the gladiators amongst the political gladiators. Then again it gives us an opportunity to order our elected officials accountable post-election period. But how do we make this shift and that is why the issue of voter education comes in. The issue of groups coming to disaggregate these messages in terms of what do this political party A stands for, what do political party B stands for and beyond voting on this I'm not saying it's going to be very easy coming from a recent past but it's something that should actually be started. And how do you hold them accountable post-election period which calls for a broadened civic education beyond what we have of course. And Jennifer made a very big issue on the issue of what did they call it our violence free programming. This is also a very big issue but Aisha has already touched on it. And it's something that we have noticed that remains a very huge challenge in our voter education project. When we preach about voter education and violence we talk more in terms of shun violence. We do not go to the basis. We do not go to the laws. We do not go to the privilege or context specific factors in our environment to tell people that you need to third majority or to third of the state to win the presidential election. You need to also percentage of your of your state to win. The popularity of a candidate in a particular community or a state does not necessarily translate into elections. And this is why we are coming into context specific voter programming education programming for some states that are already identified as hotspots and also getting people to sign on to non-violence messaging as well as voter education taking into consideration what the election or electoral laws is all about in terms of stemming violence conflicts. But beyond that also the issue of community consensus or community conspiracy is a very big issue in Nigeria. You have the election is a process but most of the time the election becomes challenge from the voter registration point where you have communities coming together to conspire to either favor a candidate or somebody. It's a politics of election. This is our son this is our daughter and this is part of the challenge that INEC faces most of the time. How do we move community conspiracy or community I don't like to use community conspiracy. It's not a nice word to use but in the real sense that is community consensus to proactively engage so that it plays positive roles in promoting democracy in this election. Who's responsibility is it to do voter education? These are critical points because the issue of voter education has always been left at the doorstep of civil society organizations and INEC. But what has become obvious is that when you promote issue based politics, you also be driving the political parties to campaign based on what their party programs and manifest those. And because the businesses has also got to be involved in this because we have seen best practice from all over the world where the businesses have been actively involved in electioneering particularly voter education. And the concept of participation of course is something that we really have to redefine beyond voting on election day to actually holding accountable our elected officials. Particularly if we want the dividend of democracy, that democratic consolidation in the sense of delivery of public goods and services. Now what will define our democracy is of course a very big issue. There are several issues that is going to define our democracy post election. First and foremost it is going to be the quality of citizenship that has been coming up since we started this discussion today. Then of course the quality of the ballot itself. What can this ballot get you? And of course the quality of participation which might still be the quality of citizenship will be all inclusive in determining the quality of governance we get after might are a free, fair and credible 2015 elections. Thank you very much. Thanks very much Idiat. And Yemi, you have the wrap up role of protecting the vote. Good evening everyone. It's been a long day so hopefully this will be short and sweet. Next slide. So a bit of context. I think it's a perfect segue from where Idiat left off and really very simply that the quality of our elections are a function of the quality of the participants in the process both as citizens and as institutions. And this slide, yeah, basically just showing power of the people to determine. Next one. And our own engagement as an organization around elections is framed around a campaign that we've tagged RSVP. And RSVP is taken from the popular acronym in terms of responding to an invitation but has a colloquial adaptation in IJ also for responding to an invitation and it's our rice and stew very plenty. Basically at a party that there's a lot of food. But for us it's just very simply that these are the four main groups of activities that citizens need to engage in to participate effectively in elections especially focused on young people. Register to participate in the process select credible candidates haven't scrutinized the options before you vote on election day and then protect your vote. Not only on election day but the four year cycle in between which is just so that it moves from being an event to a process. Next slide. Some context the numbers. So these are from 2011. 73.5 million people on the voters register. It's now being pruned down sort of cleaned up duplicate voters and things of that nature. But 2011 these were the numbers. 18 to 35 year old, supposedly 62.4% Presidential elections across parties. 38 million people participated and voted. Using project Niger hasn't had a census since 2006 so using sort of growth figures and counting for a variety of things. It is estimated that over 10 million people turned 18 since 2011. Numbers are a bit dubious but even if we say it's 5 million the idea is the numbers of those who became new voters in 2011 compared to those who actually participated in voting for the presidential elections speaks a lot. And in a real sense nobody's really talking to that demographic. Next slide. For EIE as an organization we've leveraged a lot on celebrity power. Unfortunately one of our is VP ambassadors. Two faces couldn't make it but he's one of the people we've leveraged on really trying to use influences to use their voice around the campaign and encourage especially young people to participate in the process. Next. Amatollah is one of them. It was time 100 I think last year. And these are snapshots from her social media social media platform. So on Facebook she has about 1.7 million likes on Twitter. She has about half a million followers. And the idea simply is this. We leverage on influences and their voice. So Nollywood is extremely important. Music is extremely important to this demographic. How can we how can they use their voice to sort of make participating in this process interesting, funky I'm very similar to the sort of MTV rock the vote kind of campaign. It's worked I think relatively well and we've had some issues with some artists declaring openly for a candidate which can throw out the non-partisan side of it. But for the most part I think it sends the message. And this is an example of what we've done with that. If you play the video. Next slide and then the video. Next slide. So basically a 30 second PSA that we've tried to use quite a bit in 2011 just trying to get it started now for the 2015 elections. And some of the issues I think just I think a lot of the issues have been raised. I wouldn't bore you with repeating that. But I think this for me is extremely important in terms of trying to get people engage and excited about this process. So in 2011 registration was done across the country at the same time. So you had the benefit of national buzz, national attention. Everybody was talking about it no matter where you are. But this year INEC in its infinite wisdom has divided it into three phases. So the first phase happened in May. And basically what that means is so now we're talking about elections, people are getting into the process. You suddenly wake up today in Kelby state or Benway state and you decide you want to vote next year. You can't. And there's nothing you can do about that. Phase 2 happened August 22nd to 25th. A lot of report back about inadequate processes, inadequate machines. People were disenfranchised, people were frustrated. INEC has extended it. So it's happening again this week though in fewer locations. So you have to get there. And in phase 3 which has I think three of the largest states with the largest number of voters dates for that have still not been announced. Next. And I think another part tied to that also is INEC's language of engagement. Even though there are some PSAs and flies who are done in sort of major languages. INEC's primarily I think from our perspective language of engagement is English. In a country with over 250 languages dialects grossly inadequate. And I think a classic, a good example of that is INEC's voter citizen contact centre which operates solely in English. We're trying to work with four foundations actually add an IVR system where people can call in and engage in other languages. But that for me for us is a major issue in terms of engagement. Next slide. Now finally, so RSVP I think all the others have touched really on S and V and just focusing last on sort of protection. I think we started the panel with looking at what was done with PVT and citizen observer, trained citizen observers. As an organisation we really want to encourage citizen observation because at the end of the day I think the PVT does that in terms of choosing people in the local community which is fantastic. But if you are, it is your polling unit and your ability to really I mean so if you're an accredited observer what you can do is observe. You note down what happened, you note down the irregularity or whatever it might be and you report it but you can't get involved. You can't see anything because you're there to observe. But as a citizen observer if it's my polling unit I can actually more or less sort of step in because it's in my collective interest if things in my polling unit happen as it should be. And a classic example was from a DOE elections I believe two years ago and in a number of polling units where there were discrepancies with the voter register actually citizens just refused to vote until they had been corrected and they could do that because it was their polling unit. So really changing the narrative, I mean maybe amplifying the narrative that yes it's not just about having accredited observers they have their role and they have their place but really encouraging citizens to take it upon themselves to be the observers and not only observe from a position of documenting what happened to the point about being an anecdotal or post-factor but being engaged enough to be willing to take a step or being active enough to do something to actually ensure that the elections go according as they should. So a month before the 2011 elections EA actually developed a mobile application to turn any citizen into an election observer next slide. So from your mobile phone basically you told them what type of election it was, if voting and accreditation was done on time, votes were collated, it was their violence, that they announced results and what the results were next slide. Showed up sort of in an Excel sheet dumped data like that and then showed up next slide as a map like that and the idea really we're trying to upgrade it for the 2015 election since it was done very crudely but really just provided a tool that's easy to use user interface very simply this definitely was not, people found it a bit complicated to use also just they didn't have time to do that. But really something that's fun and engaging that people really would want to report what it is that they're seeing, the information is made public in a sense you can do parallel vote counting in real time. Some of the feedback we've gotten, oh what if people lied and put in information because they're not well trained, you can't know who they are. As we found out with social media over the years, social media tends to self-correct itself. For people at a polling unit to collude, I would have to have a meeting with three people or everybody and say okay if we're using this app all of us are going to lie. But if it's open to anybody and anybody can use it the chances that people will be honest are quite high. I'm not quite sure what my next slide is but next slide. Oh yeah and just a reminder that 100 and what 64 days now our girls are still not back. Thank you. Thank you all very much for those presentations and that kind of wealth of issues as well that's come up in that. I think we'll take about 15 minutes of questions and answers. You know I have a question on the whole civic engagement generally. I mean I every American kid knows kind of the three branches of government the separation of the state George Washington and the cherry tree and all of that. Is civic education at all a part of the common curriculum in states and is there an effort to work through the school system and through the educational system on some of those issues? That would be maybe one question because you've all touched on this notion of the fundamentals you know that you kind of need to imbue and that takes a very long time to do that. Should we open up for a few questions and we'll take three or four at a time and then come back to the panel. We're going to start with Tony Carroll over here who's an associate of the program. Tony Carroll I'm a senior associate here in the AFRA program and you know one thing that really wasn't mentioned was the nomination and primary process. You know it seems to me that women are perhaps crowded out in that process it seems to me that it's the greatest arena for power politics to hold and I'm wondering if there's been any more sort of transparency or is it still this opaque process because you know it's the old adage of garbage in garbage out and if the process is credible as your organizations are clearly the fact is if you're working with a very imperfect selection process then you're really you know not having optimal impact not withstanding your great efforts to do so. Let's work our way over so yes. My question or comment really goes to Aisha. My name is Grace Ioma. You talked about women challenges in becoming candidates. Well I have often said whether you you know the fundamental thing of it's also connected to indiginship women generally move from their own locality to become wives and we've had issues for instance with federal character and where they should belong and a Supreme Court justice candidate was almost denied the position I can go on and on about all of those kinds of issues but it's so fundamental. I wonder if I don't know what the electoral law says about that because I haven't looked at it but if a woman cannot even be sure where she can contest I mean it's so fundamental you've lived in a place you have your children you're virtually a citizen of or a resident of that place and you've tried that fundamental right to contest from that locality they'll use it against you even if the law permitted it so I think it's a fundamental thing and then there is a brain I don't know if it's something about women generally not liking women contesting you must look into that because the shared numbers should permit more women and how active they are in politics should permit more women and I know what my friend Florence Itagawa suffers just for being out there and acting as if she was a man so it is something you have your work cut out but I think these issues are so fundamental I don't know where to begin with them you take it from indigenship you take it from where do you belong regardless whatever anyway it is a problem Britt Mitchell Renaissance Institute first of all for Mr. Lardner I would like to say that don't be too crossed with your people we in the United States had one four term president and we tried to get our first president to be a king that we got just rid of so that's human behavior I'm afraid but for Mrs. oh sorry you mentioned the the fact of touching on losing and I think you guys are doing a stellar job to set these elections up and with all of that there should be a lot of expectations of persons going to the poll and getting their way so I would like to hear an emphasis on on teaching people how to lose because half of the candidates lose we do it in America I don't know how we do it but we don't manage to do it and thank you very much my name I I was startled about what you said about voters frankly I thought you were blaming them a little too much and so it seems to me the engagement question the persuading voters to vote within that surprise me was I actually think that in Ghana voters are very much awake and they would tell you thumb power they can't wait for elections to come to punish you if you are not performing and I'm surprised that that is not the case in Nigeria but it seems to me that the responsibility is not just civil society and the political parties it seems to me you've left out the media the media are businesses but they have the politicians and tell the people and Aisha about women as candidates versus voters I was wondering you know I lived in Nigeria and started the Soros Foundation and a number of women came to me and said give us money and train people to run women to run and I thought we should start with training women voters and they would choose the right candidates even if those candidates are men and they got mad at me and said I wasn't supportive of them so I want your opinion I want your support actually thank you kind of goes back to the primary issue a little bit as well why don't we take that set Tunji do you want to start with a civic education or anyone wants to take that on okay everyone has a minute question you ask how to do a civic education perhaps embedded in the school curriculum I think that's what you're alluding to the challenge there because over the last 10 years it's been excised there's no civic, there used to be actually a subject called civics that dealt with each issue of citizenship and all but even more dangerous is the excision of history so you do not have even at the old levels the obligation to study history of Nigeria so these are the huge gaps in the in the educational system and that is really some of the challenges we're facing 10 years down the road when 8 year olds become voters they have no contextual understanding of their own country and I'm not sure if it was a deliberate oversight or it was an oversight or it was deliberate but those are some of the challenges we have to address, address the curriculum itself the issue of nomination in the primary is very very important the Nigerian expression is internal democracy that's the way it's framed within political parties itself but again there's the irony of political parties and politicians I wager that you can't have democracy without Democrats so it is very clear that's a challenge, INEC itself unfortunately is also burdened with the responsibility of enforcing the rules but in a society where there's great impunity and there's no respect for the rule of law we keep going back to the fundamental building blocks of building a legal rational process for running a democratic country and those are some of the underlining challenges you can't answer one without the other the issue of participation of women I'll leave to my sister here but I think it was a very important point you made about teaching politicians how to lose elections unfortunately again it's a zero-sum game for everybody because there's so much tied into the acquisition of political power especially at the center and until there are all kinds of reasons why that has happened one of the more clear-eyed explanation has to do with the fiscal regime of the country if you don't pay taxes you don't have skin in the game and so there are all kinds of very interesting economic reasons why people feel disengaged from the political process one way of getting their attention is to reform the tax infrastructure and make sure people pay taxes then the voter education thing is not left for civil society media but again we keep going back to that the media itself I used to be a journalist I don't know if you can ever be a former journalist but maybe a lapsed journalist I felt of the wagon there's just a sense of how that whole thing has lost its relevance as I think it was Burke that talked about the fourth estate of the realm you don't have that anymore you don't have that engagement you don't have the agenda setting responsibilities right now there are all kinds of within the Nigeria Twitter space I made a recording of pastor offering bribes to journalists to school these things are part of it the larger thing and perhaps as a nod to my friend there about my concerns about Nigeria you know what they say the larger thing here is when a country has lost its moral compass and I'm not saying these things lightly these are the unaligning issues that I keep coming back to right and it is basically us as Nigerians who are held responsible I think we are all responsible in varying degrees for what has happened Ayesha do you want to talk about the indigeneity and the other question I definitely want to touch on the issue of primaries and women without a doubt going past the primaries is actually one of the hardest things that women do and as a fund we've actually discussed where our support for women come more strategically should it be the bottom line is there's no easy answer the truth is it is still very opaque and women don't start early it's all tied to women's position within the parties many women are part of parties in a very fluid way so they're there to wear the uniform to dance to serve to just make the whole event colorful but very rarely do they actually hold membership cards so even when they want to run it's like they're starting from scratch they might have been affiliated with the party for years but they're not members in the sense that they can take decisions influence decisions the same thing when you look at the party hierarchy the national walking committee the BOT where the decisions are taken there are no women the token position for women is a women leader which has no budget has no position even at meetings she has to drag her own chair and put it down there because they usually forget about her so all that is tied to how women go past the primaries they don't understand the delegate system because in most of the parties it's not direct primaries where every member can vote because the parties don't know who their members are no party can tell you Nigeria I have XYZ numbers XYZ are women and XYZ are men so it's the whole system is rigged for opacity so you don't know what is going on delegates are supposedly hired on the day of conventions deliberately so all these things make it very hard for women to compete and even when they do succeed God help us, we hear that sometimes the list changes before it gets to INEC so a woman has actually struggled beating the system, won the primaries by the time the list gets to INEC her name has been taken off and somebody else's name is there despite the harassment, despite the beatings and their stories documented so it is extremely hard and you have to even question the sanity of people who want to run but God bless them and we continue to encourage them not easy, if we had independent candidacy which is something some of us at the civil society have been pressing for then we might actually see a more level playing field because women and men, good men and women who don't want to have to deal with the internal the lack of internal party democracy within the parties now have an option and can say I'll run as an independent candidate but we don't even have that so it's actually critical I want to answer the question about presidents, yeah right there's nothing in the electoral act that prevents any man or woman who lives anywhere so a man from Oshogbo who's lived in Sokoto for 20 years ideally can run, nothing in the law prevents him or her from doing so but the people and the culture prevent them and yeah right, yes that's one of the reasons why women don't run or they don't make the decision to run on time because they're wondering, am I from Sokoto am I running from Katsuna, should I be where do I, I mean God help you I don't have a place, live in another place so you could technically claim three places but which one would you choose so again, yes you're right it is a big issue but until we change our constitution which is some of the things we've been fighting for for the last three, four years again there's no progress so you begin to see as Tunji said it's a zero sum game, it's almost like where it's a chicken and egg it's circular everything is rigged to make it hard for good people to run how do we get good people into the national assembly what are the changes that we want how do we get voters to vote in the right people who will make the changes that we want everything is tied together so you made a valid point but the truth is there's no answer until people like me and you get into the national assembly and change the constitution or vote for people regardless of where they're from or stop asking people where are you from it's one thing I extremely dislike can Nigeria stop asking people where are you from you just ask me where do I live no it's true why do you want to know where I'm from it's all part of trying to exclude me from a place I live here this is where I'm from let me choose where I'm from don't ask me where is your father from where is your mother from here and now this is who I am and this is where I live and this is where I want to be from but we also perpetrate this injustice by constantly asking each other where are you from women voting for women the truth is you know I don't believe women are their own worst enemies and most of the pain that I've suffered in life is from men not that women most of the most supportive people in my life have been women so I don't buy into women as their own worst enemy and I never say it on the other hand I don't believe that women will naturally vote for women just the same way I don't think men will naturally vote for men maybe it seems that they do but they're the ones who run and you also can exclude our socialization if all our lives have been told to suspect women and the truth is I've done some research on this I looked at fairy tales from Ibo Yoruba and Hausa which are the main languages and I'm telling you each of the fairy tales keep putting women in a bad light you can't trust women you can't give women your secrets you can't do this you can't do that why would anybody want to vote for a woman if you've lived all your life hearing this type of thing even women don't want to vote for women so until you change the narrative around women in leadership you change the narrative around women's role in society we're not going to automatically assume that women will just wake up and vote for women they will need to see that the women are different from the men you just pointed to your friend Itagawa who acts like a man that's not a good thing in Nigeria we want women to act like women to act different from the men who are responsible largely for the problems that we have in Nigeria so the truth is I too wouldn't vote for a woman who's acting like a man I would want to vote for a woman who's acting like a woman so I think that's another thing that we need to be talking about losing I won't talk about losing but yes we need to learn to be good losers I'm very bad at losing so I never play any games I don't want to play Scrabble I don't want to play Monopoly because I hate losing so maybe it's a Nigerian thing but we definitely need to learn how to to lose gracefully but I think that comes from educating the electorate about how it works so they just know that I voted they just know that they counted the votes like I was deeply disappointed as well when I voted in 2011 for the very first time in my life and I went home with the polling result units and I started from the TV waiting in my own ideal world to hear the results released polling unit by polling unit because I wanted to be able to clarify that my vote hadn't changed or the results in my polling unit hadn't changed between the time it was announced and the time it got to INEC but INEC didn't give me that satisfaction and so technically I could feel cheated as well so what we've been trying to encourage INEC to do is put a lot more transparency on the correlation of results so that people know even if it's months after let us have this sort of verification exercise we keep explaining to them that the lack of trust that Richard mentioned is deep and as transparent as possible if we can make that process it helps everybody and then finally training female voters before training female candidates I totally agree I also think that we can do more in our civic education to speed up this process we've tried to engage with the Board of Education they're not interested, it's very bureaucratic they don't want to get involved they don't know if you're bringing an agenda that's different from the ruling party's agenda civil servants, they say they have no party but basically they need to tow the line of the ruling party so all those things add up to but I agree with you we need to train proper citizens the quality of citizens that I have mentioned and it should start in school I'm not American but I know about the cherry tree why can't we use, it's not true I know about I Can't Tell a Lie and I've known that for ages from watching Sesame Street I've known that as a child that in America George Washington said I cannot tell a lie but I don't know that kind of rhetoric about anybody in Nigeria, why are we not using our movies and Hollywood why is enough is not using the stars more productively other than just making sexy ads, can they make some information, some educative material for our children as well so that they to know about their political history I think those are all the things and that's what makes me actually excited to be in Nigeria because there's so much we haven't tried there's so much we haven't done and maybe when we start doing those things we'll start seeing the change that we want just a comment about just a comment about female participation in politics, for instance I've taken part in the process of selection when was just some months ago and my observation I was just thinking about it now we're having this discussion you really don't have many women coming forward for instance I took part in the selection of the Gobernatorial Candidates in Anambra only one female came forward they hired us a few years ago virtually no female now as I was just thinking is it then possible that one way to really solve this problem will be to go into the national assembly and maybe pass a law that yes that there must be a number of women and so on because first of all for people to come forward you have to have money to run for an election and I think men control the money so women are not in a position first of all when they come you have to assess there are certain things you have to look at the ability to I think your point is well taken gentlemen here will make it very quick and I think that was more in the way of a comment my question is to I think to Aisha and also Mr. San there seem to be a general theme here that is this an election or a selection process and you've all articulated that the public infrastructure the kerosene and the cook food and so on and people don't understand why they vote for and when they lose they don't know why they lose now isn't it possible then that if you can transfer all this activity you're doing into the media to push the need to have a debate so that when somebody loses an election they know why because they he supports a gun law or he is anti immigration those are some of the key factors why somebody will lose and they'll say well I guess I didn't have enough people to support my cause but in the election in Nigeria it's not about the cause because people don't know why they vote for they give me some money and so on so isn't there a way to give the media from what you guys are doing to help educate voters and say so we know when we go there to vote we know why we're voting for and what we're voting for Mr. A or Mr. B I thought that will help so when somebody loses they say well they don't go to fight in Supreme Court for another 18 months they just go home and say well I guess I'll try again next time I don't know if you idiot do you want to say one last word on that just to just an FYI our next session will be kind of on the role of the media in this and we'll okay idiot and then I'll give Yemi the last quickly put that's the intervention of the Center for Democracy and Development for these 2015 elections is to promote issue based politics by bringing the political actors and the candidates to actually hold elections around topical issues like security, accountability and of course social democracy in Nigeria and the media in that and of course we are doing this alongside the media because of course our first part of it is also to break down their manifesto as part of and programs as part of voter education program then to work with media so that they can put most of this discussion in limelight both as opinion editorial both as report newspaper reports and also it reform what we will use to measure the performance of any incoming government so we are building a democratic accountability platform which will be named after anybody that wins the presidential elections or and in some select states and their programs maybe there are seven point agenda ten point agenda eight point agenda they shall be measured against states openly by citizens media and there will be continuous feedback mechanism where the reports on this will actually be placed in limelight so it's no longer about a position being against us but it's about them seeing their performance as are judged by the citizenry last word just about the debate I think it's all connected so Mr. Uzi mentioned earlier the platform exists enough has hosted five debates over the last four years the major candidates don't show up because at the end of the day they realize it has nothing to do with who votes for them so the fact that the platform exists I mean I think two weeks ago King's College one of the oldest secondary schools high schools in the country their old boys very influential people hosted a debate as the two leading political parties to come and talk about their education policies none of the chairman showed up somebody sent some director another one sent an assistant so until there is a direct result from people voting then they will sit up it's not the debate that will make them sit up it's sort of back it all connected I guess back just back to that point it's all connected so the platform does exist but until I realize that my result has something to do with what I say and what I plan to do it's irrelevant we're at time and the stomach infrastructure awaits us there I want to say thanks so much to our panelists I mean this is really being a great two panels in fact a couple of the things that strike me is one the importance of data and kind of hard fact and the stuff that TMG has done the stuff that some of these organizations have done there are other groups out there one of the big challenges is pulling that all together into a structure and a framework that can mesh with each other so that you kind of have the master pool of information that you can use for some of these things the other thing is this question of a change narrative or I think Tungi was hinting that kind of a renewed social compact and that's a very very big challenge and we have to think about what is the first step to do that you can say well politicians need to do this and politicians need to do that what is it that we need to do to make the politicians do that what is the incentive that gets them thinking that way and related to that and this is very striking to me the fact that civics and history have been struck from the Nigerian curriculum I mean if you want to talk about building a social compact building a sense of common purpose you know the educational system is one of the first places to do that you know you don't have to pledge allegiance or that kind of thing but you do need to know the basics of where you're coming from why you relate to one another as Nigerians and have that sense of common history and then common purpose as well so you know I know that you are trying to do that in your different ways but it strikes me that it needs to be more systematically embedded into the national fabric and the challenges of today in Nigeria well and in much of Africa make that that's you know that embedding of civic education from the very get go strike me is all the more important going forward anyway our next session as I said is going to be probably sometime in early November late October probably early November on this issue of the media media independence but also get some media folks here analyzing some of the political dynamics going on I want to thank you all for staying with us and really thanks our excellent panel we're going to be spending some time at the State Department at AID with the one campaign tomorrow for kind of smaller round table groups and we hope that you found this productive and I know we have and I hope also that we'll be able to stay in touch with all of you through the election process and beyond so please join me in thanking our panelists here today