How unscrupulous politicians undermine Nigeria’s democracy

 

Wealth Without Work

 

Pleasure Without Conscience

 

Knowledge Without Character

 

Commerce (Business) Without Morality (Ethics)

 

Science Without Humanity

 

Religion Without Sacrifice

 

Politics Without Principle

– Seven Deadly Sins by former Prime Minster of India, Mahatma Ghandi

 

Renowned Professor of Political Economy, Claude Ake, of the blessed memory, said Nigeria is running democracy without democrats. That has been the bane of the country’s democratic sojourn. From the First to this Fourth Republic, Nigerian politicians have shown undiluted egocentrism. That is the reason what happened last week at the National Assembly concerning electoral reform was not too surprising. Nigerians are too naïve to think that the country’s political elite will work only for public good.

Section 4 (2) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, as amended, says, “The National Assembly shall have power to make laws for the peace, order and good government of the Federation…” That’s fair enough but who determines what those adjectives mean? Our lawmakers interpret for themselves and by themselves what peace, order and good government mean.

The Ninth National Assembly raised our hopes to high heaven and decided to dash it at the last minute. They played us to believe they were serious with this electoral reform. They set up a joint committee comprising of the Senate Committee on INEC chaired by Senator Kabir Gaya, a former governor of Kano State and House of Representatives Committee on Electoral Matters, chaired by Aisha Dukku. For close to two years, they walked us through the process. They sponsored a Private Member Electoral Act (Amendment) Bill and several other electoral reform bills, about seven of them. The bill passed through the first and second reading and was sent to the committee on electoral reform for further legislative actions. The committee organised public hearings after receiving over 70 memoranda. The promise was that the bill would be passed by December 2020, then they said that was no longer realistic and pledged first quarter of 2021. When that was no longer feasible, they shifted the goalpost to the second quarter of 2021. That too was missed only for them to pass the bill on the last day of sitting before they proceeded on their two months’ annual vacation.

This was done deliberately. I had it on good authority that the technical committee that comprised the joint NASS committee on electoral reform, Office of Attorney General and the representative of the Independent National Electoral Commission had finished with their task since March 2021 and that the report could have been laid by April. This was not to be. Because of the hatchet job they intended to do, they left the consideration of the bill till the last day of their sitting. For the uninitiated, what the Senate did by passing the controversial Section 52 (2) in the manner they did by asking INEC to get approval from the National Communications Commission and the National Assembly before the commission will deploy electronic transmission of results was not part of what was agreed to at the technical committee level. Why then did the Senate decide to insert it into the version of their own bill? The simple answer is that they had to do that in order to derail the electoral reform process so that the status quo of having manual election result collation will be sustained. Meanwhile, every election observer knows that collation of election result is the weakest link in the electoral process as that is the pressure point for manipulation of election results.

The Senate that passed the controversial Section 52 (2) in the manner they did knew what they did is unconstitutional, ultra vires, null and void in the light of constitutional provisions in Sections 78, 160 and Paragraph 15 (a) of the Third Schedule of the 1999 Constitution as amended. Many of them were aware that in 2018, when they introduced the controversial Clause 25 (1) which increased the number of election days from two to three and order sequence of elections for INEC, the President vetoed that bill on the grounds that the NASS has no such power to so influence INEC. Why would the senators repeat this same mistake with the controversial Clause 52 (2)? I say it without equivocation that it was done deliberately.

Many of us who watched the House of Representatives deliberation on the bill saw how the Deputy Speaker who presided over the deliberation rigged the voice vote over the controversial Clause 52 (2) last Thursday. Even when the Speaker, Femi Gbajabiamila, decided to invite the NCC to tell his members about Internet connectivity and security of our cyberspace for electronic transmission of results, it was an act with a predetermined outcome. Why should the NCC commissioner that came be given the members dated information. The man gave Internet connectivity as of 2018 when we are in 2021. NASS is talking of possibility of hacking but they forgot that INEC has been doing electronic (biometric) voter registration since 2006 without much hassles. Nigerian banks have been doing Internet banking for over a decade despite the fear of hackers. We have been registering National Identification Number registration, Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, passport and driving licence electronically without any considerable backlash.

In order to expose the perfidious treachery of the National Assembly, INEC had come out to say that it had the capacity to transmit election results electronically from all parts of Nigeria. “We have uploaded results from very remote areas, even from areas where you have to use human carriers to access. We have made our own position very clear, that we have the capacity and we have the will to deepen the use of technology in the electoral process,” INEC’s National Chairman and Commissioner for Information and Voter Education, Mr. Festus Okoye, said on Channels Television last Saturday.

Away from the shenanigans of the National Assembly on electoral reform, it is on record that it is the unscrupulous and desperate politicians that engage in election violence. They recruit political thugs to foment trouble during party primaries, campaigns and elections. They engage in underage voter registration, multiple registration and multiple voting. Recall that there is a serving governor INEC had exposed as having registered twice, both in Abuja and his state capital. This same breed of politicians which cut across party lines engage in vote-buying and spend over and above legal campaign finance limit. It is these same desperate politicians who would put INEC Returning Officers under pressure to make a wrong declaration as happened in Imo State during the 2019 National Assembly elections.

They also use all legal and extra legal means including inducing INEC staff in order to rig election for them. One of such instances was exposed when nemesis caught up with a professor in University of Calabar who aided and abetted a notable politician to rig election in Akwa Ibom State. On March 25, 2021, High Court in Akwa-Ibom State sentenced Peter Ogban to three years in prison, for election fraud. The court, which found Ogban guilty of fraudulent manipulation of election results, publishing and announcing of false results, also asked the professor to pay N100,000 fine. Ogban, a professor of soil science, and a returning officer in the 2019 elections in Akwa Ibom North-West District, was charged for manipulating the election results of two local government areas – Oruk Anam and Etim Ekpo.

Unprincipled politicians stop at nothing to win elections. They kill, maim, rig, induce and do everything humanly possible to undermine the electoral process. They use the security agencies to harass and molest opposition candidates and parties in order to pave the way for election rigging. They chase away agents of opposition candidates and even buy out judges of election petitions tribunals in order to win elections. There are ample cases in point. It happened in the Ekiti State governorship election of 2014, Osun State governorship supplementary election of 2018, and Kogi State governorship election of 2019.

Space will not allow me to recount the testimonies of some past political leaders on how they rig elections in Nigeria. First is the account of former Cross River State Governor, Donald Duke, who in July 2010 at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja gave a blow by blow account of the modus operandi of governors and Resident Electoral Commissioners to thwart the mandate of the electorate. Former Deputy Senate President, Ibrahim Mantu, eight years after the confession of Duke also informed the world on Channels Television that he helped his party — the Peoples Democratic Party — rig elections in the past. He said he helped the party to rig the elections by bribing officials of INEC as well as security agents.

Until Nigeria is able to thwart the self-serving and egoistic efforts of these unscrupulous and unprincipled desperate politicians, our elections will continue to be a hollow ritual. It will continue to be the contest for the most violent, richest, and undesirable elements. Citizen action is needed to safeguard this democracy from being completely hijacked by political hawks who masquerade as democrats. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.