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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
In Search of Free and Fair Elections
Last Saturday, the Arewa Media Forum (AMF), which I chair, organized a one-day conference on how the country can hopefully end its long-running history of election rigging. Like all Nigerians, members of the AMF felt concerned that successive elections in the country have got only progressively worse, with the last April/May elections being unquestionably the worst of the lot.
Former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, under whose watch the elections were conducted, may disagree with this almost universal verdict. As former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Alhaji Aminu Bello Masari, who was the special guest of honour at the conference pointed out, the president seems to have given Al-Jazeera the Qatar based television station one of its favourite sound-bites when he told its global audience that there was “absolutely nothing fraudulent” about the elections.
However, whatever Obasanjo’s convictions, the fact that the last elections were a huge farce is impossible to deny. Even President Umaru Musa Yar’adua, its single greatest beneficiary, seems to have been forced into admitting that the elections were fundamentally flawed as was implicit in his promise to reform our electoral system in his very first address to the nation.
The first thing to note about the conference was the sparseness of its audience. The venue which was the main hall of Arewa House, Kaduna, with a capacity I estimated at 500, was barely half full. Perhaps the one-week, twice-a-day jingles about the conference on Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria, Kaduna, the Freedom FM Radio, Kano, and the full page public notice in the Daily Trust of the Thursday before, plus the banners at some selected roundabouts in Kaduna, were not enough publicity. We had, however, expected that the subject of election rigging was of sufficient concern to the public that it would attract a large audience with even much less publicity than we gave it.
The relatively poor turn-out prompted Malam Yunusa Tanko, the National Secretary of the National Conscience Party, to lament over the seeming disinterest of the political elite and even the general public in anything which is of no direct and immediate benefit to them. “This hall” he said, “would have been full if it had been at the summons of the governor of this state”.
Be that as it may, what the audience lacked in quantity was more than made up in quality with many leading residents of Kaduna like Malam Adamu Fika, Wazirin Fika and former head of the federal civil service, Malam Balarabe Musa, first civilian governor of Kaduna state, Malam Turi Muhammadu, former managing director of the New Nigerian Newspapers, Col Hamid Ali, Secretary-General of Arewa Consultative Forum and Alhaji Yusuf Ladan, Dan Iyan Zazzau and a veteran broadcaster, in attendance.
The Kaduna State governor, Arch. Namadi Sambo, as the chief host, was represented by a two-some of Alhaji Umaru Sani, his media adviser, and Alhaji Saidu Kankangi, a permanent secretary in Government House. From farther a field came political big wigs like Alhaji Ahmed Hassan, a PDP stalwart from Jigawa state, Alhaji Farouk Lawan, a ranking member of House of Representatives and Dr. Usman Bugaje, the Action Congress governorship candidate for Katsina State.
The second thing to note about the conference was the absence of three of the four lead paper presenters. Their absences were, however, for good, or more accurately, “bad”, reasons. Chief Olu Falae, a leading opposition politician, could not come because a burst dam at his farm a few days to the conference forced him to stay back to attend to the extensive damage that occurred. Senator Uche Chukwumerije couldn’t come because his lawyers told him two days to the conference that he had to be physically present last Friday and Saturday at the election tribunal handling the petition against his re-election. Chukwumerije, it is to be noted, is one of very few senators who managed to survive the onslaught of the Obasanjo political machine for their role in scuttling the former president’s third term agenda.
The brilliant and resourceful Dr. Enyantu Ifenne, a leading contender for the seat of the Idoma speaking senatorial district of Benue State, had to heed the advice of friends who told her to lie low because of the death threats she had been receiving for her central role in documenting and marshalling the case against the “victory” at the polls of the defending senator, Brigadier-General David Mark, the Senate President.
All this left only Dr. Abubakar Siddiq Mohammed, a senior lecturer in political science at Ahmadu Bello Unviersity, to present his paper in person. Chief Falae still sent in his paper which was read on his behalf by Malam Balarabe Musa. Chukwumerije and Ifenne were replaced by former Assistant Inspector General of Police Bashir Albasu and Mr. Emma Ugbuoja of the Advocacy and Mobilization Alliance for Credible Elections. Both were originally slated as discussants.
As I said earlier, what the conference lacked in the quantity of its audience was more than made up in its quality. This clearly reflected in the quality of the interventions from the floor which in turn was probably a reflection of the quality of the lead papers themselves.
The ball for the quality debate was set rolling by the special guest of honour, Alhaji Aminu Masari, when he said in his brief remarks that the root of electoral fraud in the country lies in the reluctance of Nigerians to stand up for their freedom of choice. Otherwise, he said, they should have decried the lack of internal party democracy which presaged the general elections. “How,” he asked pointedly “can people expect someone to give them something he does not have?”
This, of course, begged the question of how people can defend their right to chose in a country where, as Falae pointed out, politics has since become a full time job of “do or die”, instead of an avenue for public service. This transformation of politics, he said, was the reason why rigging has since degenerated from being a matter of stealing by stealth to an act of open warfare.
Falae’s solutions were four-fold: demonetize politics by making political office part time or better still by going back to the parliamentary system of the First Republic; have a genuinely independent electoral body; adopt a modified form of Option A4 for voting; and, above all, educate and mobilize people for civil resistance against rigging.
These looked specific and practical enough on the surface, except for the bit about organizing people to resist rigging which begs the question of who would do the organizing in a situation where the political elite seem to profit as a class from widespread ignorance, illiteracy and poverty.
However, specific as his other solutions looked, it is debatable that they can end rigging in the country, if only because, as Mr. Emma Ugbuoja pointed out in his submission, fraudulent elections in the country have hardly been due to a failure of our laws. Rather they have been the result of the impunity with which those in authority have disrespected and even out rightly subverted the laws.
Even then there was consensus at the conference that laws can still play important roles in bringing about free and fair elections. They can do so, most participants seemed to agree, if the two most critical institutions in the conduct of elections, namely the election commission and the police, can be made truly independent.
In this respect, Bashir Albasu’s dispassionate paper was perhaps the most practical at the conference. Among other things, Albasu told the conference that so long as the Constitution and the laws of the country give the president absolute power to hire and fire the top echelon of the police as is presently the case, so long will it be impossible for the police to reject the president’s orders even when they are improper and unlawful. Similarly, he said, so long as the Police Service Commission which is responsible for recruitment, transfer, discipline and promotion of the police rank and file is stuffed with politicians, so long will the force be unable to act with fairness during elections.
However, not withstanding the consensus about the need to reform our electoral laws and our Constitution, there was near unanimity that it would have been more useful if President Yar’adua had instituted a judicial commission of enquiry into the last election rather than merely set up a committee to reform the existing electoral law. To only seek to reform the law, several speakers from the floor, notably Dr. Usman Bugaje, said, is to do great injustice to the hundreds, if not thousands, of Nigerians who were killed or maimed in the course of the election. It was, they argued, also to ignore the need to get the INEC leadership to account for the tens of billions of Naira that it spent with apparent recklessness in organizing and conducting the election.
Several speakers did indeed call for the outright cancellation of the election, calls which prompted the chairman of the occasion, Justice Anthony Aniagolu, the long retired judge of the Supreme Court who will be 85 on October 22, to call for caution. Better, he said again and again, to build on what we have no matter how flawed, subject of course on the outcome of the petitions before the election tribunals, than to throw it all away and risk anarchy or even the break-up of the country. Aniagolu came all the way from Enugu with Mary, his wife of several decades.
All told the conference was, I believe, a useful exercise in the search for a credible Nigerian democracy.
It is, of course, not possible to do justice to all the papers presented at the seminar without reproducing them. The Arewa Media Forum intends to do just that by circulating them as widely as possible. Hopefully the dialogue they will help generate will lead us out of the political mess in which Nigeria seems stuck since independence simply because members of our political class are scared stiff of free and fair elections. |