Former Lagos State Governor and ex-Minister of Works, Housing and Power, Babatunde Fashola, has urged Nigerians to view elections as inherently imperfect exercises and to focus on strengthening democratic institutions rather than continually disputing electoral outcomes.
Speaking on Friday at The Platform, a public policy forum held in Lagos as part of activities marking Democracy Day, Fashola said the complexity of conducting nationwide elections makes absolute perfection difficult to attain.
According to him, large-scale electoral exercises, particularly presidential elections, involve extensive logistical operations across the federation, creating challenges that no electoral body can entirely eliminate.
“Elections are an imperfect event because they require a large logistical operation across a federation,” Fashola said.
He explained that thousands of polling units across the country are expected to carry out the same procedures simultaneously, often under different conditions and circumstances.
“The reality of a presidential election is that all polling units across the nation have to be doing the same thing at the same time. The question then is how we assign blame when things go wrong, especially when the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission cannot be everywhere at the same time,” he stated.
Fashola noted that electoral shortcomings are not unique to Nigeria, arguing that even long-established democracies acknowledge such challenges while working to improve their systems over time.
