A REAPPRAISAL OF HITHERTO EXPERT APPRAISALS OF THE 2023 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN NIGERIA Written by KEMKA S. IBEJI

The political analysts, bookmakers and pundits who have put down their checks and outcome of their ideas on the 2023 Presidential Election have gone one way. It has therefore become unavoidably necessary to reexamine their minds, factors, facts hypotheses and premises and thereby making sure to find either corroboration or falsification of their pontifications. Let us tell ourselves some particular realities about their deposits to wit;

1. They all have done their analysis based on very wrong hypotheses. They are all wrong.

2. Their various experiments ran on sentiments and are therefore illogical and non sequitur. They held their heads up on what seems to be popular sentiments since they hinged their minds on the views by majority of partisan folks. These predictors willingly went on committing the fallacy of argumentum ad populum. 

3. All their predictions so far have remained premature as many factors that will impact the election are yet to be activated. They excluded middles and clothed themselves with bad reasoning. They have assumed things that will never be in place because they have put away the functions of change and have spoken in prevarication. 

4. While trying to sound scientific, they moved on physical and natural scientific methodologies and formats and maintained an unexperienced degree of abandonment to sufficiency in the science of humanity or the modus of human sciences. Their conjectures are in harsh disparity with orderliness and play hard romance with misplacement of important determinants. 

5. In social sciences, just as the one they went on their analysis for, the conditionalities placed on the results were lacking hence we did not read them saying "all things being equal". This is an unforgivable fallacy. 

6. All the analysis adopted archaic premises thereby arriving at old results. They may have been right, after all, if this 2023 Presidential Election is to run like those of 1999 - 2019. The new developments have denied the said experts their venerated licences which are now in dire need of renewal pending refreshers and retuning to fit in the new vibes. This makes their arguments drink from the filthy waters of the fallacy of argimentum ad verecundiam. Wrong authorities have taught us please! 

7. The analysts ignored the effects of the BVAS and the Electronic Transmission of election results.

8. When the INEC spokesperson said that the election will collated manually, I understood him clearly. For sure, he was right because the voting will be done manually and the counting at the polling units will also be done manually. But the accreditation and transmission of the election results will be done electronically. The analysts may have also ignored the import of this.

Now look at the realities they glossed over which will greatly measure the outcome of the 2023 Presidential Election;

1. With BVAS, Nigerians will already know how many people that were accredited to vote in each polling unit.

2. With BVAS, animals, the underaged and the dead won't be able to pass through accreditation and won't therefore vote.

3. With BVAS, the thumbing of unused ballots will no longer be tenable because nobody can be accredited twice and no one will be accredited in lieu of another.

4. Though we cannot rule out malpractices 100%, but it will be greatly diminished. The only thing that riggers can now do is to import foreigners to come in and register with INEC to vote. This will not get the huge number that has always been.

5. With the electronic transmission of election results, rewriting of results will not be reasonable anymore. Those thuggery and criminal acts that usually happened at LGA headquarters where minority Party agents are pushed out while the ruling party writes results won't be operational anymore.

6. With electronic transmission of election results, all political parties and election monitors can easily compute results and compare across board. When information is held by many, distorting it becomes harder, if not impossible.

7. Electoral truth, owing to BVAS, electronic transmission of election results and the impact, role and effect of the manual participation and admixture in the total process, will be around 80% where in the past we were between 20% and 30% maximum.

The consequences of all the above;

Fellow Compatriots, it would have been easier for INEC or anyone else to rig the election if the manual voting is not used. A minor code can toss the votes cast from one person to the other without anyone noticing it. But with manual voting, those who will want to alter the input to give exchanged output will be sorely disappointed. Whatever is on INEC website will be in the hands of all the agents of all the political parties. Any difference will lead to cancellation of the result.

It is usually easier to count 20, 40 to 90 immediately after counting 10 just as it is always easy to run from 100, 200, 300 to 900 after counting 99. The brain gets monotonous and sometimes won't take note as such. But with the BVAS, such magical counting are rendered implausible in 2023.

So for those who are expecting the old ways to play out in the 2023 Presidential Election, it will definitely be a year of inexplicable wonder and dismay. The movement of the people and especially the awareness and involvement of the youths in the 2023 Presidential Election is the thunderous wonderment, amazement and paradigm shift or gestalt switch to stun the celebrated experts. Now, and after this, we may begin to count to new coins in 2023 and beyond.

The 2023 Presidential Election in Nigeria may not be too close to call after all.