Baobab

IN CROWDED vegetable markets and on the porches of traditional chiefs’ houses, Nigerians have in recent weeks been registering to vote. Many registration centres consisted of little more than a plastic table, a laptop and an umbrella for shade. But the goal—to compile a new, high-tech voters’ list for Africa’s most populous country—is seen as crucial to preventing rigging during presidential, parliamentary and state governorship elections due in early April.

Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s president, has made the $580m list the costly centrepiece of his pledge to oversee proper polls this spring. The ruling People’s Democratic Party, on whose ticket Mr Jonathan is running, has won three elections since army rule ended in 1999, all marred by violence and fraud. A bogus voters’ list featuring Nelson Mandela and Mike Tyson allowed for much of the foul play.

Nigeria’s election commission is now working on a snazzy biometric list, complete with photographs and fingerprints. During a three-week registration drive that ended on February 7th, the commission says over 65m voters had their pictures taken and their fingers scanned. Laminated voters’ cards with barcodes were handed out. The fingerprints are now being cross-checked at a central server that will remove duplicates, if all goes to plan.

But registration alone was chaotic. Too few kits were dispatched. Registration officers kept running out of ink and plastic for the cards. Nigeria’s woeful electricity supply, an irony of Africa's largest oil and gas producer, caused further problems. Some voters waited for hours and returned day after day; others gave up. "I’ll wait another minute but then I have to go back to work," said Ifeoma Okfor, a seamstress who had been queuing for three hours one day in her slum on the edge of Lagos, the commercial capital on the southern coast. "The election is not the most important thing for me."

Lists were meant to have been displayed at polling stations from February 14th, so that voters could spot any errors. In many parts of Lagos and some northern cities they are yet to appear. In any case, there are few ways to verify the claims of those who registered. Census results have been hotly disputed since the first post-colonial survey in1962, as each state’s population is tied to its share of the national energy revenues.

Around half a dozen other African countries, including Congo and Mozambique, have each spent tens of millions of dollars on biometric voters’ lists in recent years to try and ensure clean elections. Others such as Ghana are considering it. It is expensive everywhere but Nigeria’s costs are particularly high, at around $8.90 per voter, largely because it is trying to complete a task that often takes at least a year in less than three months.

But Astrid Evrensel, editor of a book about voter registration in Africa, says biometric lists are often mistakenly viewed as a panacea. "The technology is just as good as the [people] who use it," she says. In countries where rigging is commonplace and perpetrators rarely prosecuted, politicians simply find other ways to help things go their way. Mozambique’s opposition parties felt that way when a biometric list was compiled in 2007-8. They said fewer registration kits were sent to their rural strongholds, while cross-checking was purposefully opaque.

In Nigeria, which has lurched between military coups and disputed elections during 50 years of independence, there are indeed many ways to fiddle a poll. Pro-democracy activists say that, aside from inflating the voters’ list with duplicates, tactics include bribing or intimidating voters and changing results after votes are cast. Some fear such plans are already underway.

"We have had reports of party members sitting by the centres and taking down the names and numbers of those registering," says Francis Onahor of Reclaim Naija, an activist group that collected SMS and email reports from citizens during registration. "What do they want them for?"