Does INEC have enough funding for free and fair elections?

Nigerians will head to the polls in less than 170 days, barring unforeseen circumstances as witnessed in 2019 when the date shifted only six hours before the elections.

Elections were postponed in 2011 and 2015, too. Voters got notice days before the postponement in 2015. While in 2011, voting had started in some parts of the country when INEC announced that the election had been moved by two days!

As Nigerians vote, their decisions will culminate in the election of the next president for the world’s most populous black nation. Officials representing constituents at the national level, such as National Assembly members, are also scheduled to receive votes by February 25, 2023. And one agency—The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)—has the prestigious task of making these elections run smoothly.
 

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INEC’s mission provides a hint of how successful elections should look. According to the commission, the conduct of free, fair and credible elections for sustainable democracy in Nigeria is key, and most research agrees. 

With a successful election, most people should be satisfied that it was fair. There should also be a healthy voter participation rate, security, and resource conservation (money and time). But this success hinges on INEC activities ranging from party registration, voter registration, issuing voters cards, approving aspirants, fixing election dates, etc.

These activities take skill and high competence to control because they work with other factors such as a growing population, migration and security. Even factors like delays in amending the electoral act have often been seen to hinder the success of these INEC activities. For instance, proposed amendments by INEC for the extant 2010 Electoral Act were assented to and signed into law by the President only on March 26, 2015, just two days before the general elections scheduled to hold on March 28, 2015. In 2019, these amendments were not enacted at all. These amendments are proposed based on INEC’s observations during elections. And until they were passed into law, INEC couldn't carry out certain functions such as deregistering a political party or setting timelines for elections because these powers were not explicitly stated in the law.

But, one factor that equally threatens INEC’s core mission to serve as an independent and effective election management body committed to conducting free, fair and credible elections is the issue of funding.

Civic organisations, public officials and even INEC have often expressed the role that money plays in enabling INEC to provide security, distribute registration or ballot items, train staff and carry out other activities that would have made elections in Nigeria more successful.

This is because INEC activities require them to be active in polling units (over 170,000) in each of Nigeria's 774 LGAs, and such a task requires huge personnel and capital costs.

So with less than five months to Nigeria’s next elections, this is a good time to assess INEC’s financial readiness.  To make this assessment, we first need to see how INEC plans its expenses and how it gets its funding. 

What does INEC spend money on?

Categorising the several line items using departments within the commission and comparing them with previous election years provides a good picture of where the commission intends to spend money.

By next year, INEC expects to have received ₦305 billion from the federal government to run the 2023 elections.  In the above chart, items that involve the smooth registration of voters and election materials’ distribution, such as ICT, training, voter registry, estate works and transport, and electoral operations, are heavy line items nearing hundreds of billions of naira. 

However, missing fascinating items, such as an extra ₦3 billion for litigation and prosecution next year, is hard. It is particularly fascinating, considering that a decline in petitions and law cases after election results are announced is one sign that elections were genuinely free and fair.

However, this increase is because INEC is also expected to prosecute electoral offenders—so its budget is not solely for defending against suits. But the proposed Electoral Offences Commission Bill will change this if passed.

Meanwhile, unnamed miscellaneous items are expected to rise by 61% to ₦7 billion too.

The entire 2023 election budget is 61% or ₦115 billion higher than the ₦189 billion approved to run the elections four years ago. And this hike is due to line items such as electoral operations and ICT responsible for over 80% of the budget and costing ₦140 billion and ₦114 billion, respectively. 

These activities identified by INEC remind us that elections are planned way before the actual polling. Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) is only one example of the activities INEC needs to carry out in preparation for elections. Expansion of polling units and voting centres, staff training, voter education etc., are other activities that INEC needs funding to undertake.

INEC’s further breakdown of top items in the election budget shows that activities such as procurement of accreditation devices will take a huge chunk (over ₦100 billion or 35%) of the total budget.

So how does INEC expect to receive this money?

Well, INEC’s major funding source is the Federal Government of Nigeria. Part of the FG’s sovereign responsibility is to provide the required funding to INEC to cover the costs of elections, such as the printing of result sheets.

However, the Commission’s annual budget covers the fixed personnel costs such as salaries and routine expenditures for maintaining its electoral infrastructure like rent. 

To make funding appropriation easier for the 2023 general election, the Commission proposes that the election budget be spread over three years, from 2021 to 2023, as shown in the pie chart below.

 

INEC doesn’t expect to receive all the funding required to carry out these activities at once, as it has probably learned from the past when it couldn’t receive funding on time. 

After reviewing the 2019 general elections, INEC said it struggled to carry out continuous voter registration (CVR) and permanent voter card (PVC) collection exercises at the lowest level (polling unit) due to funding constraints.

According to INEC, one of these constraints is the late release of funds. It takes about 30 weeks (six months) to procure even the most rudimentary election material. This time is even further extended when such procurement needs additional approval from agencies and departments outside INEC. So, when INEC received the ₦189 billion it requested to carry out the 2019 elections just a couple of months before the general elections were held, one could expect trouble. 

On November 22, 2018—barely three months before the 2019 general elections, INEC received ₦144 billion, about 76% of its proposal. Still, INEC didn’t receive the balance of ₦45 billion until one month later, when the year had almost ended with roughly 60 days left to plan for a general election.

The results were not too surprising.

INEC battled with logistical problems and administrative deficiencies that negatively impacted the quality of the elections. For example, one of the challenges INEC identified in carrying out the 2019 elections was the inability to procure election materials on time. This delay affected the disbursement of electoral items to parts of the country.

According to INEC, the procurement process for 2019 election materials commenced in 2017. But contracts could neither be awarded nor funds available to mobilise contractors, vendors, and suppliers.

As a result, one of the most memorable events during the 2019 general elections is one you might remember. INEC suddenly postponed the presidential election six hours before it commenced and blamed it on the poor weather. 

INEC hopes to avoid a similar disaster in the next election by spreading the proposed funds for the 2023 elections across three years—it's worth a try. 

However, several factors can also be responsible for untimely funding. Submitting budget proposals years ahead and breaking down funding into bits does not guarantee that these funds will be received timely enough to carry out electoral activities. 

One can argue that it is difficult to fund INEC because its budgets are too high. For instance, Nigeria’s elections have been proclaimed one of the world's most expensive. In other cases, the budgets have seen sporadic or unpredictable increases during presidential election (and also due to off-cycle contests, such as the annual governorship election) periods—a very controversial point in these parts.
 

The chart above shows that INEC’s budget has been pretty stable across most of Nigeria’s non-election years. In these years, the agency often requests ₦40 billion to ₦45 billion to meet its personnel costs. So understandably, huge capital and logistical costs will not be necessary for such years. 

However, in the year(s) of or leading up to general or by-elections, INEC’s funding usually changes.

The above line graph shows these interesting changes. For instance, the steepest increase in election funding proposals since 2011 happened in 2019. And based on the INEC’s proposal for the 2023 election, we see an equally big spike in the commission’s approved budget for this year.

The problem is that the cost increase from one election year to another can be difficult to predict even by INEC.

Remember the costliest line item—procuring accreditation devices?

Items like these are not made or bought in Nigeria. So, when you account for the exchange and inflation rates, the combination of these two factors has a direct and often unpredictable implication on the domestic and foreign cost of procuring goods and services.

But while the budget spikes may be partly responsible for untimely funding, they can also contribute to inadequate funding. You know, it is one thing to request funds and get them late, while it is another to request funds and not even get the amount requested.

Considering Nigeria’s revenue struggles, this scenario is not farfetched even for an activity as important as conducting elections. For example, INEC’s budget for 2015, an election year, was ₦62 billion. But, according to the budget implementation reports for that year, INEC received only  ₦52.2 billion. 

So, if INEC’s funding proposals are bloated and making it more difficult to release funding to them, the commission is only setting itself up for failure. 

But is INEC’s budget bloated?

One way to tell is to see how INEC is coping with its funding challenges by comparing funding in previous years and with similar regions, such as East Africa, where Kenya recently held its elections. 

A review of past election years shows that the commission has indeed increased its budget requests. Even when we leave the inflation and exchange rate factors aside, the Commission justifies these increased requests with several assumptions, such as the prevalence of insecurity, timeliness of budget approval and disbursement etc., that vary yearly. 

However, one fairly predictable assumption is voter registration.

INEC uses the changes in voter registration to justify its increasing funding request. As registered voters rise, INEC is betting that even more people will need to be served come election days. This will require more polling units, more trained staff, more devices to enable faster voting times etc.

Registered voters have risen 14% from 84 million registrants in 2019 to 96 million as of August 2022, roughly similar to the 100 million voters INEC hoped will be registered in time for the 2023 elections. 

Changes in the election budget also often mirror how voter registration rises or dips. In 2011, INEC recorded 73.5 million registered voters and budgeted for ₦139 billion to be spent on elections. By 2015, registered voters had dipped to 68.9 million citizens, and the budgeted funds also dipped to ₦116.3 billion. With 84 million registered voters in 2019, elections expectedly cost the country ₦189.2 billion—₦72 billion more than it cost four years before.
 

In defence of INEC, recent Electoral Acts have allowed for more innovations requiring costs. The biometric card readers in 2015, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines and even election IT architecture for transmitting results—INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) have all come before successive elections, so that is another added cost item.

And interestingly, INEC’s budgeted funds over the years have consistently reduced with the number of registered voters, which means that it costs less per registered voter to carry out elections.

In 2011, it cost ₦1,893 or $9 per registered voter; in 2015, it cost ₦1,691 or $9.62. And even though the naira equivalent rose to ₦2,249 in 2019, the real cost captured in dollars showed the cost of elections further dropped or $7.38.

The average cost per voter for the 2023 general election is $5.39.

So, INEC believes this is an improvement over the actual cost of $9.62 and $7.38 per voter for the 2015 and 2019 general elections, respectively. It is also less than the $7.70 per voter for the 2020 Ghanaian general election.

Still, this doesn’t fall within the internationally acceptable Average Cost per Registered Voter Index (ACRVI), which ranges from $1 to $3, in established and stable democracies.

Rather, Nigeria’s election cost per registered voter is within the $4 to $8 range accepted for nations in transitional democracies and $9 in post-conflict and transitional democracies. Still, Nigeria is known to have an unstable democracy, so voter innovation and education costs can be high here and not be factored in less stable democracies.

According to the Global Economy Index, Nigeria’s political stability score of -1.86 indicates a strong presence of violence/terrorism, which measures the likelihood of the government being destabilised or overthrown by unconstitutional or violent means. The index is an average of several other indexes from the Economist Intelligence Unit, the World Economic Forum, and the Political Risk Services, among others.

But remember that this cost for election is based on registered voters. In reality, the number of people voting has fallen over the years. 

This low voter performance has suggested that INEC only needed a fraction of the funding it received to carry out elections. Poor voter turnout (a story for another day) is a huge challenge to the electoral institution itself, considering that a success metric for INEC is the reduction in election apathy. 

Using low voter turnout as evidence to show that INEC has been budgeting for more funds than needed is a complex point, and this is because we can’t make it without proof that INEC did nothing to boost voter turnout. 

But even when INEC does all it can, there's no way it can achieve 100% voter turnout. And while it's not INEC's fault that people don't turn up to vote, INEC still accounts for 100% voter turnout, which can be an avenue to inflate its budget.

With the past trends of low voter turnout and Nigeria’s funding constraints, legislators can use these statistics to argue that INEC works around its means/limits and not just simply expands budgets with each expected increment in eligible voters. Or even finding smarter ways of accommodating such increase, using other registered datasets like driver's licenses etc., for automatic voter registration.

So far, we’ve seen that INEC faces a challenge in incorporating balanced and more cost-effective methods to reduce the duplicity of Nigeria's financial investment in sustaining democracy. But with respect to other countries, how does Nigeria’s election budget fare?

INEC’s funding dynamics

Finally, comparing how much INEC asks for with other countries provides further justification for how much the Commission should be spending on elections.  

Earlier, we saw that the $7.38 per voter for the 2019 general elections was less than the $7.70 per voter for the 2020 Ghanaian general election. When we look to Kenya, another African country that has recently concluded elections also with a stronger political stability index (-1) and higher rank (37th out of 53 countries) than Nigeria with 49th position, the cost of Nigeria’s elections is relatively cheap.

The table below shows that the recently held elections in Kenya cost almost three times more than what INEC has proposed for Nigeria’s 2023 elections.
 

But Kenya has also been accused of bloating its election budget by having over seven commissioners and introducing expensive ballot papers with security features. Essentially, INEC's commendation on achieving a lower cost per voter compared to other African countries that have held elections recently is unimpressive—its cost could be cheaper.  

As I said earlier, the numbers that make up this cost are also problematic because not every registered voter will vote.

Changing the calculation of these costs by using an acceptable range of voter turnout will reflect the true funding needs for electoral commissions in Ghana, Kenya and especially Nigeria.

Election spending and budgeting need to be more efficient if we are concerned about getting funding fully and on time.

However, to mitigate some of its funding challenges, INEC has circled around the real issues, presenting a three-year proposal for the first time and submitting it years before the actual elections.

If INEC’s plan worked, it should have received an additional ₦16 billion (part of the ₦305 billion for 2023 elections) last year and ₦279 billion this year.

But only ₦41.4 billion was released last year, according to budget implementation reports, which covers INEC’s personnel costs alone. 2022’s approved budget for INEC also showed the FG had slashed ₦279 billion down to ₦140 billion.

INEC hasn’t revealed how much has been released for 2022 yet but says it has substantial funds to prepare for the elections. So while it might appear as though INEC has numerous and multidimensional funding challenges, the root of inadequate funding starts from the budget, which accounts for 100% voter turnout and influences other funding challenges from late receipt to funding shortfalls.

So, even when it receives the amount it needs and when needed, INEC, the agency tasked with sustaining Nigeria’s democracy by holding free and fair elections, still needs to justify better how it accounts for its budget. 

It might be a great idea to work the best case scenario and attribute increases in budget to delivering on a necessary public good in a democracy. However, the focus should be on what the country must do when our revenue sources mean we can't conduct elections. Have we considered alternatives like postal voting (with its structures) or even incorporating other more cost-effective methods? 

INEC gets support because it needs to, but if not well cared for, it could become a spoilt baby that is too far gone to correct.