I woke up several times peeping for the first sign of dawn before my phone finally rang at ten-past-six. A family friend who suspected we would be voting at the same place wanted to know if I was already at the booth because she couldn’t find it.
I missed her call. When I called back about 15 minutes later, she had found the polling booth and was number 96. This was at six-thirty when the orange shafts of the sun’s ray were just piercing the grey morning sky.
I asked what it was like at the polling centre. She responded that the centre, Kado Bimko Primary School, Gwarinpa, Abuja, was already filling up. Voters had appointed an unofficial numerator to assign numbers to the early birds to avoid a rush. When I arrived at the centre shortly afterwards, I was 142 on the list, and voters kept coming. There were no officials yet, so my luminous green vest with the “Media” tag made me look like one. For this particular voting centre, the geolocator: www.pollstats.org.ng, which…
