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Further Harassment Of Iwu Rings Hollow After Yar’adua’s Tribunal Victory By Olufemi Prince Omoyole
The Presidential Election Tribunal has spoken and it is loud and clear, and in case you haven’t heard, then hear this: Professor Maurice Iwu is the chief returning officer in the presidential polls in 2007 and the result he declared has been upheld to be absent of any irregularity that can merit any consideration for nullification. Therefore, from this point onwards, all reasonable men and women and people of goodwill anywhere will agree that any further haranguing of Iwu strains the canons of fair debate and strengthens the notion that those who are continuing to harass him are doing so out of personal spite. However, if anybody still wishes to complain, they need to pause for a moment and consider the following scenarios which have long stalked our polity and will remain with us with or without Iwu.
The Nigerian voter is a special case. The monumental level of poverty and deprivation in the country affects or even controls voter behavior, as majority of Nigerians are likely to vote for the highest bidder. And Maurice Iwu did not give anybody money to vote a certain way. Aside from this, most voters are simply cowed by party stalwarts or peer pressure to vote against their conscience and no Iwu can change that. Another factor that affects voter behavior is our well known system of ‘communal voter conspiracy’ where communities get together and decide to give most of their votes to only one party, except in a few ultra-metropolitan areas with little or no ethnic homogeneities or ancestral bonds. This is true of both the North and South. If you doubt it, go and ask the Emirs, Ezes, Obas and all the other layers of community leadership common to many locales in Nigeria and they will give you details of how they preside over nocturnal meetings where decisions like this are reached every election period. The 2007 elections couldn’t have been different from the 1979 where the Yorubas as a community closed ranks behind UPN, Igbos did same for NPP, the Kanuris for the GNPP; and the Hausa/Fulani, the minorities plus some Igbo no-conformist republicans banded together to give the NPN a national victory. Certainly, Maurice Iwu did not invent this culture. The only election that defied this pattern was Abiola’s in 1993 but the same set of Nigerians seeking nullification of the 2007 election pressured Babangida into nullifying it.
So, all the blame-mongers are either ignorant of the uniqueness of the Nigerian voter culture or are trapped in terminal hostility to an Iwu who happened to have presided over an election that they could never have won anyway. The learned justices of the Presidential Election Tribunal being Nigerians themselves are well aware of this cultural trend and thus could not have been expected to return a verdict of nullification. And should nullification have occurred, whoever wins in any re-run would have won for the same reasons that Yar’Adua won in the first place, and that is not because of any irregularity or any acts of omissions or commissions on the part of Maurice Iwu or with any other new umpire that might have replaced him. For good measure, it is very likely that the same set of serial complainers will still rise against any new umpire and harangue him until he buckles under and declares them winner or eats crow and recant like the Kenyan umpire did with disastrous consequences.
It is now clear those who pressured Iwu not to hold the election and even went to court to stop it are abusing the opportunity of petitions and appeals to achieve the same dubious aim. They forget that cancellation of the election by administrative or judicial fiat could have brought the following scenarios into play: Some mischief makers would have instigated violence against Ibos by claiming that Iwu, an Iboman cancelled an election won by a core Northerner as part of an Ibo plot (again?) to frustrate OBJ’s (or Yorubas’) power shift to the North. OBJ could have gleefully declared a state of emergency and thus achieve his third term ambitions by default and thanks to Atiku and others who were gallantly opposing third term and pressuring Iwu not to hold the elections all at once. What a contradiction. The much worrisome ‘failed state’ predicted for Nigeria by America would have come to pass before time; and a restive army could have struck to restore order, and justifiably so. Nigerians would have been likened to the gladiators of ancient Rome who sang ‘Mori Turi Te Salutamus’ (we, who are about to die salute you, our king) as they marched past their Emperor into the arena to fight lions made raving mad through starvation. In this case, the King would have been OBJ and the lead gladiators would have been Atiku and Buhari.
A popular adage in management goes thus ‘if you think that training is not important, you should try ignorance’. As applied to the 2007 elections, if you think an election that ushered a crucial transition should have be nullified either by fiat or judicial pronouncement, then try no-election or the famous nullification of Abiola’s election in 1993. Therefore, as the tribunals weigh the remaining isolated prayers for nullifications, the learned justices will do well to look to the kernel of the ruling issuing from the Presidential Election Tribunal as a boilerplate and persuasive authority in support of the growing notion that the Maurice Iwu gave Nigeria the best free and fair elections that could have been possible under the circumstances. Around the country, the strongest case ever established in favor of nullification is where a candidate of a registered political party was excluded, and we have seen some tribunals actually nullifying on this account. But now that the Presidential Election Tribunal has ruled that not every irregularity is sufficient to warrant nullification and that irregularities are matters of ordinary course in all elections (citing that of Gore versus Bush in the United States), it is time for the tribunals to take adequate caution before giving any merit to any argument that rests solely on the premise of exclusion or other like irregularity. Technical violation of a statute is bad and should be discouraged but there is also merit in the opposite argument that they are merely borderline to a process that can never be in clinical compliance with the statute. That is why the framers of the Electoral Act saw fit to resort to generous use of the legal words of art: ‘substantial compliance’ or ‘substantial impact on outcome’ when they drafted the Act.
A good but controversial example is a situation where a party known to exist only on the pages of newspapers or inside the attaché of one man seeks nullification merely because it was excluded from the ballot. In such a case, the tribunal will be well within the universal rules of evidence and fairness to require such party to show strict proof that it had the numbers, the structure, the preparedness, and the spread to win the very election from which it was excluded. Another fact such a party or candidate must establish before relief should ensue is that it was itself in compliance with the strict statutory mandates on national spread. So, absent the high probability that an excluded party had provable or judicially-noticed chances of winning, it will comport with real-world principles of political justice to conclude that such a party or its candidate only existed to play a spoiler role in a volatile polity like Nigeria that does need such dangerous distractions. In such a case, nullification will hardly comport with the ratio in Atiku/Buhari versus Yar’Adua.
Omoyole wrote in from Abuja |