Legal experts and human rights activists have blamed poverty, youth unemployment and illiteracy for the rising attacks on the offices and facilities of the Independent National Electoral Commission across the country.

They spoke against the backdrop of INEC’s recent report chronicling the attacks on its offices nationwide.

A Lagos-based human rights lawyer and social commentator, Evans Ufeli, pointed out that unemployment and poverty, especially among the youths, were traceable to the attacks on state-owned facilities in recent times.

Ufeli told newsmen that Nigerians were angry because “they are poor, don’t have jobs and lack the enabling environment to start a business.”

The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, had on Thursday, May 27, 2021, disclosed that no fewer than 41 INEC offices were attacked by non-state actors between 2019 and 2021.

Of the 41 incidents, nine occurred in 2019 while 21 took place in 2020. In 2021 alone, 11 attacks on INEC facilities were recorded across seven states.

He noted that 14 states of the federation had been affected by these attacks with Kaduna, Borno, Lagos, Ondo, Bayelsa, and Osun states recording one incident each; Anambra and Taraba (two cases each); Enugu and Ebonyi (three cases each); Abia and Cross River (four cases each); Akwa Ibom (Five), and Imo (Seven).

However, Ufeli stressed that the strings of attacks “is a clear symptom that Nigeria has collapsed under unemployment and poverty.”

He said, “It is unthinkable that we are doing this to ourselves and the unborn generation. At the end of the day, we find out that we have crippled and destroyed whatever we have left of our democracy. It is painful and pathetic.

“Nigerian leaders only tackle the symptoms of problems, not the root causes. What forces people to attack state-owned resources, burn them and vandalise them? Anger! Why are they angry? They are poor and don’t have jobs and do not have the enabling environment to start a business. It is that simple! We live in a country where we have 14 million children that are out of school and there is no specific policy to address that. They are the ones who do these kinds of things. They have grown to become an abstruse problem in society.”

The lawyer further explained, “Think about the next 30 years and what the harvest of violence will become compared to the 80s. The Nigerian leaders stopped thinking a long time ago. The futuristic dynamics of the solutions to Nigeria’s problem is being kept in abeyance. Nothing is working because the leaders are not thinking.

“Insecurity has its roots in the inequitable distribution of the wealth of this country. If you look at the location of these attacks, we find elements of agitations for secession and self-determination oozing from there. The issue of lack has permeated the fabric of this country. Unemployment is now on a large scale.

“Energy must be dissipated whether positive or negative. Anywhere you have energy, it is meant to activate actions. A youth population of this magnitude and a massive scale of unemployment, with no enabling environment for business create a lot of problems for us as a country.

“Build factories and industries that can absorb this energy and see how peaceful this nation would become in a short time.”

Another legal practitioner, Selina Onuoha, identified anger, injustice as some of the other factors causing attacks on INEC facilities.

“Some of these youths no longer see INEC as the body of integrity and fair play they once knew. Some believe the system is corrupt. They will say, ‘we voted for a particular person, but when the result is announced by INEC, someone else is mentioned. Why?’ This is devastating for them, and they just want to vent their anger on something.”

“They don’t mind if it was their money that was used to build these facilities or not. They just want to destroy it, so the government will spend more money repairing them. For them, they are punishing the government,” she added.

She also identified illiteracy as another factor, pointing out that enlightened persons would know that an attack on INEC facilities was an attack on their rights as citizens.

On how these attacks could affect the conduct of the 2023 general elections, she said, “The government has this year, the whole of 2022 and part of 2023 to work on these facilities and enhance security around them to avoid further attacks. The government should not use that as an excuse not to hold the general elections, before these things get out of hand.”