PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

 

2007 Elections: Programmed to Fail?

 

Two years ago this month, Vanity Fair, the London based monthly magazine that combines the gloss of say, Ebony, with the investigative prowess of, say, The New York Times, carried a 25-page investigative story of how George W. Bush became the 43rd president of America in 2000 following the most controversial presidential election in the country’s history. The long and short of that story was that Bush lost the popular vote but became president all the same because of a massive voter fraud perpetrated in Florida by his younger brother, Jeb, the state’s governor. Worse still, the story showed, Bush clinched the world’s top job because the American Supreme Court, packed with neo-conservative judges by his father, George Herbert Walker, the 41st president, and before him by Ronald Reagan, the 40th president, weighed into the disputation that ensued over the election with blatant partisanship in favour of Bush.

           

Although the focus of the Vanity Fair story was on the high-wire intrigue that went on at the Supreme Court during the 36 days that followed the elections, it also dwelt at considerable length on the important sub-text of how the Florida government rigged its electoral machine - the hardware, the software, the bureaucracy and all - to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of African-Americans, a vast majority of them Democrats.     Exactly two years on this month, the magazine’s editor, Graydon Carter, in his Editor’s Letter, called the 2000 elections “surely one of the sorriest acts of voter fraud in modern history.” As if in agreement with Carter, The Economist of October 14, carried on editorial which advised against the use of certain types of voting machines in the forthcoming American mid-term elections into the Congress.    

            

Titled “Crash and reboot”, the editorial warned that “The wrong kind of voting machines could bring chaos to the mid-term elections.” These, said the magazine, were “(not) the ones with hole-punches and their chards, hanging, swinging and dimpled. Since the debacle of 2000 in Florida federal money to the tune of several billion dollars has been lavished on replacing them. Unfortunately many have been replaced with new ones that may be even worse.” These machines, observed the magazine, leave no paper trail, vital for recounts should the need arise, and have a tendency to break down.

           

The way to avoid this potential chaos in the mid-term elections, the magazine said, was to revert to the good old paper ballot. “The solutions,” it said, “are not hard to find: a wholesale switch to paper ballots and optical scanners; more training for election officials; and open access to machine software. But it is too late for any of that this time – and that is a scandal.”

           

The Economist’s piece of advice is one that our own federal authorities and our so-called Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) can do with.
And fortunately, unlike with the Americans, it is not too late for them to heed the advice, except, of course, if the authorities are determined to frustrate the voters’ will as part of their agenda to perpetuate themselves in power.    

            

The Economist of October 21 carried a story, this time on the danger that our own  general elections next year may end in chaos. The story quotes Dr. Jibrin Ibrahim of the Centre for Democracy and Development as saying that the elections “are being programmed to fail.”

           

In case you think Ibrahim is being unduely alarmist, consider the following facts. First, the National Assembly, whose membership is overwhelmingly PDP and over which the presidency appears to hold sway, took its time to enact the electoral law for the next elections that some experts allege is full of loopholes.. Second, the presidency appears to have deliberately under funded INEC to the extent that its chairman, Professor Maurice Iwu, himself widely believed to be a pliable protégé of some powerful men in the presidency, had to scream out loud the other day about being starved of much needed cash to carry out his basic functions.

           

Third, for the first time in Nigeria’s electoral history, there is a looming danger that we will not have a voters’ register ahead of  a general election. Talking to some very senior officials of INEC, it seems the main problem is the decision – probably not independently arrived at by INEC itself - to change the method of preparing the voters’ register from that of periodic manual registration to one of routine registration using electronic means.

           

Which sounds alright since we are in the 21st century in which the computer rules. Trouble is, those who took the decision did so apparently without regard to the absence in Nigeria of the basic condition for the proper functioning of the computer – notably the availability of clean, reliable and stable electricity and of enough people with the technical know-how.

           

Not only do we not have clean, reliable and stable electricity and enough technical know-how, the decision to import the machines for an e-voter register appears to have been taken above the heads of the INEC leadership. This must be why months after all the machines should have been delivered, INEC appears helpless to bring the supplier to account for the failure to deliver even a small fraction of the goods.

           

Howbeit, the registration, initially scheduled to start on September 30, was shifted to October 23. Even then the few machines that have been delivered appear too complicated for the temporary hands recruited by INEC to operate reliably, mainly because they received too little training too late. Today, nine days since the beginning of the exercise, the story has been of routine failures by machines and men to register voters within the stipulated five minutes per person. Instead the stories you hear is of the machines and men taking anywhere between twice and eight times as much time to register a voter.

             

Early this month Afenifere, the umbrella Yoruba socio-cultural organization, issued a statement calling for the sack of Professor Iwu as INEC chairman. Iwu, it alleged, has made himself available to be used to scuttle the next elections.

 

At the risk of appearing to defend Iwu , I must say Afenifere has been too harsh on the INEC chairman. Iwu may be a pliable chairman of INEC, but even if he isn’t, it would not make much of a difference to the outcome of the next general election, as long as President Obasanjo is determined to cling onto power beyond 2007, which pretty much seems to be the case in spite of the collapse of his Third Term Agenda.

Back before 2003, the INEC was, overall, more independent-minded than it now is. Back then at least some of its national commissioners like Alhaji Shehu Ahmadu Musa, Professor Shehu Galadanci and Hajiya Fatima Muazu and its Secretary, Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, strongly resisted pressures from above to bend or break some of its rules and proceedures. Their resistance, however, did not stop the ruling PDP from perpetuating the most massive electoral fraud in Nigeria’s history in 2003 akin to the 2000 American electoral fraud.

 

The way to avoid chaos in the next general elections, therefore, does not lie in sacking Iwu. It lies in the presidency and the ruling PDP simply allowing INEC to do its job and providing it with the wherewithal to do so. More importantly it lies in the civil society standing up to defend it right to the vote.

 

For a start INEC itself should learn a lesson from the American election debacle in Florida in 2000 and revert back to the good old manual register for the next general elections. All it would then need to do is update the existing register. After the elections it can then go back to the e-voter register since it would then have nearly four years to do a good job. That period would be more than enough time to recruit and train those that can operate the electronic machines reliably. It would also be enough to search for and import the machines appropriate to our level of sophistication and know-how.

 

Obviously the only thing between this simple solution to a potential electoral debacle next year and the debacle itself is the determination of those in power to cling on to it, come hell or high water. Sadly this determination seems all too apparent. And that, to rephrase The Economist of October 14, would be worse than a scandal.

 

A jinxed Fourth Republic?

I was in the middle of writing today’s column at home when my wife tip-toed into my study to give me the terrible news of the week-end ADC crash in which the Sultan of Sokoto and the spiritual leader of Nigeria’s Muslims, Alhaji Muhammadu Maccido, his senator son Badamasi and Senator Sule Yari Gandi, an implacable opponent of the Third Term Agenda, among others, perished. Words cannot begin to describe the shock of this terrible loss to Nigeria and to the Muslim umma.

 

But then the Almighty Allah, from Whom we all come and to Whom we shall all return, knows best. Only He knows why the country has witnessed such a catastrophic rate of deaths of society’s high-and-mighty and the not-so-high-and-mighty from the criminal negligence of those in authority and from violent crime itself.

 

We can, of course after changing our ways, only pray to the Almighty Allah to forgive our sins and mistakes and to remove from us whatever or whoever is the source of the evil that appears to have stalked this nation since the beginning of the Fourth Republic.

 

Meantime, may the souls of those who perished in Sunday’s aircrash rest in peace. And may the Almighty Allah forgive reward them with aljanna firdaus.