“What I want is justice, not only for me but for Afasites”- Damilath

Damilare Thomas (a.k.a Damilath), one of the three presidential candidates in the concluded 2018/19 AFAS election, walks AFAS PRESS through his defeat on the grounds of electoral manipulations, irregularities, inadequacies among others.

AFAS Press: You contested in the last election and one of your opponents was declared the winner. We learnt you challenged the result and took the case to the management. Did you exhaust all the channels in the faculty before proceeding to the school management?

Damilath: At the faculty level, the appropriate channels were contacted, within and outside the faculty.

AFAS Press: What response did you get at the faculty?

Damilath: Till now, we didn’t get any anything from the faculty.

AFAS Press: The electoral committee was confident in her declaration of the election results. Did you observe anything for you to be persistent in your complaints?

Damilath: The electoral committee did not communicate their confidence in the election to us. All they gave was an excuse– defending the aftermath conflicting figures. As a matter of fact, the whole electoral process was full of irregularities, manipulation, inconsistencies, and inadequacies. The whole electoral process was faulty. The figures was just an aspect among several other things.

AFAS Press: Can you share some of this?

Damilath: The first as mentioned were the conflicting figures and the result was released twice. The two results did not correspond. When the issue was raised, they said they had a meeting, they refreshed the computer system and were later able to discover void votes. When we were voting there was no room for void votes. I saw that as a kind of improvising.

Number two, in the election result, there was no account for void votes. They only focused on the presidency. For other positions, I believe we have more than 10 void votes. Another thing is that non-eligible voters voted. They told us before the election day that only students paid their dues as at 6:30 on Tuesday will be allowed to vote. But after the election, they came out to say that people paid their dues that day and were allowed to vote. Let me be clear on this, I’ve not seen anywhere in the world where election results would be released twice– two conflicting figures. Meanwhile, I had people that could pay that day and vote but I told them it was too late. That means that they were bending the rules and this was a determinant to some candidate success. Things like that should have been communicated to us beforehand. This has also invalidated the election.

Another thing was that the election process was not secured. I appreciate the e-voting system, but if you want to do e-voting, do what other people do to make it a success. Don’t just come and destroy the process.  Or because of your inadequacies and incompetence, you take advantage of the e-voting to manipulate the whole thing. What I know is that when you want to use e-voting, everyone should have a password peculiar to them. But students used their matric number as their entry and password details and it was pasted out there. That means I could easily copy someone’s matric number and vote. That invalidates the while electioneering process.

AFAS Press: Why didn’t you raise this during the election?

Damilath: I voted towards the end, but you don’t disrupt an election process. Plus,  I don’t have the power to stop the election, except you want to adopt a very wrong approach. They ought to know that you don’t share people’s details, and I couldn’t raise an alarm as it would be tagged as misconduct on the part of a candidate. There were also inconsistencies with the arrangement of names. The arrangement of names while voting is different from the results released. And in e-voting, it should correspond.

AFAS Press: Having observed all of these inconsistencies and choosing rightly to be of good conduct on that day, why was the issue extended to the office of the Dean of students’ affairs and the Registrar? 

Damilath: I did not report the issue to the school Registrar

AFAS Press: But the AFASIEC chairperson received a letter from the registrar to respond to the allegations on the manipulation of results.

Damilath: One thing about the issue is that I can’t say I have the total control on where it is going to.

AFAS Press: Are you going to acknowledge any finite response given by either office?

Damilath: Yes, if the electoral committee can defend themselves then it is acceptable.

AFAS Press: What’s the development now?

Damilath: I don’t really know, we submitted to appropriate channels and they said they would contact us

AFAS Press: Who were those you submitted the (petition) letter to?

Damilath: The Subdean, the Dean, staff adviser, faculty officer, Dean of student affairs, FLC, faculty executive council, Afasiec has a copy too. The election is not about me, many people invested in it. What I want is justice, not only for me but for Afasites.

AFAS Press: Do you think that the election was manipulated considering the composition of committee members across the departments in the faculty? 

Damilath: I have just expounded on what I meant by manipulation–when an election is not free and fair or when there is an iota of inadequacy. The way it is, I can’t say it is an effort of everybody but they’ve said that they have done a good election. We are only exposing the irregularities surrounding the election to them and they are to tackle it as a committee.