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Diaspora Perspectives On Maurice Iwu And The 2007 Elections By Jimmy Osifo Virginia Beach USA
After reading some essays posted to the internet on the subject of Maurice Iwu’s December 2007 trip to America to release the report of the 2007 general elections and other opinions expressed on the conduct of the elections, I decided to also write my own impressions and conclusions based on my personal and first hand observations of how the event panned out in Washington DC. I was present at the events where Iwu (who I have never met before) released the Election Report. I went home to do some more research and I reached certain simple conclusions which I will now proceed to share with my fellow Nigerians both in the Diaspora and at home. They are as follows:
One - A lot of folks are attacking Iwu because of their personal or political frustrations with his tenure as INEC Chair - it is either they could not compromise him or prevent the elections from holding or that they had some personal spats with him for losing an election that they had no political capacity to win in the first place. Some, like a Professor Bolaji Aluko with us here in the United States took it personal because his brother had lost a bid for the Senate, and he seems to openly blame Iwu for this. Further, it is well known to us in the US that Bolaji Aluko has a personal professional frustration with Iwu as a fellow Professor that was able to return home to something as important as chairing INEC while Aluko is trapped in America, having lost all hope when Atiku that promised him something lost the election to a Yar’Adua that has continued to ignore him.
Two – The report turned in by the EU Observer Mission is not credible because it is plausible that Iwu annoyed them by refusing their money, denying them presence at INEC’s meeting, and above all rejecting their illegal request for the biometrics of Nigerians (President Yar’Adua, Atiku, Buhari and Orji Uzor Kalu included), apart from the glaring fact that their report on the 2007 elections seemed to be a self-plagiarism of the same thing they had said in 2003 both in terms of choice of words and general assessments. The Kenyan riots have shown that too much leverage to foreign election monitors can goad citizens into resorting to violence over commonplace election problems that are better resolved by the judicial system.
Three – Maurice Iwu should be praised for his courage for standing up to the several interests and institutional difficulties hostile to the conduct of the presidential elections, and it was this singular act of courage that assured Nigeria her first civilian to civilian transition in history. If the election irregularities had been exaggerated to the point of succumbing to them to cancel the elections by administrative fiat, Nigeria would have been worse off for it. And the verdict in the presidential tribunal bears this out. Those judges at the Court of Appeals are Nigerians that, like the rest of us, know the duplicitous ways of our politicians too well.
Four – Nigeria should never take any grants from any foreign government to conduct our elections because those grants come with conditionalities that breach our national security and make us seem like a self-disrespecting ‘banana republic’ (to borrow Iwu’s words) and Nigeria is not too poor to provide the relatively low funding required for her national elections. Foreign observers are welcome but their report should never be given prominence to the point that it poses a threat to our emerging democracy or raised to the level that will create a pathological distrust of our own umpires.
Five – As the local government elections (NOT being conducted by Maurice Iwu) demonstrate, the problem of elections in Nigeria and amongst Nigerians is a cultural thing with Nigerians everywhere (including us in the United States). Even amongst Nigerian town unions in America, Nigerians take each other to court over who becomes Chairman of something as civic and little as a branch of a town union. Maurice Iwu has shown the way out because he seems to possess the strong character and consistency a volatile Nigerian electioneering climate needs in a federal electoral umpire.
Six - Nigeria needs to adopt a new system of permanent tenure for chairmanship of INEC - like Ghana and other countries which have done so with much success. This is the only fair way to retain the skills of those like Maurice Iwu who represents the best chance at giving Nigeria an election that leads to something (not one that gets annulled or stopped midstream – like in 1993, which was acknowledged as free and fair but which produced no transition – no pun intended).
Seven – Maurice Iwu is right that most parties and candidates lost because they didn’t have the requisite numbers to win elections, and those that won did so for the opposite reason. Contrary to submissions in opposite, this is an issue appropriate for comments by Maurice Iwu because he meant to serve a note of warning to parties to be better prepared next time around or merge with other parties that have proved stronger. In other words, it is not Iwu’s fault that the Nigerian opposition is fractured into more than 50 political parties, as opposed to Zimbabwe (or even the United States) with only one strong opposition.
Eight – Maurice Iwu’s press briefings should continue because through them Nigerians both at home and in the Diaspora are becoming more informed about what happened before, during and after the elections from someone in authority and with first-hand information. A more informed electorate and political class are less likely to be prone to repeating the mistakes of the past than the opposite. United States election umpires also have a duty to inform the public and they do so to the hilt and with lots of gusto..
Nine – Orji Kalu of PPA deserves respect and honor from all Nigerians for helping stabilize Nigeria at a critical time by joining President Yar’Adua’s GNU, and that should be a reference point that should encourage others still in the trenches to call a truce. Thus, President Yar’Adua should continue to extend an olive branch to Alhaji Atiku and General Buhari, despite their unreasonable intransigence. And finally, people should refrain from pressuring President Yar’Adua to tempt the unknown by forcing Maurice Iwu’s resignation. Nigeria should learn to reward public servants who, like Professor Iwu, succeeded in delivering on difficult and dicey national assignments
Jimmy Osifo wrote in from Virginia Beach, USA. josifo@yahoo.com |