PERSPECTIVE

INEC and the next elections

By

Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@yahoo.com

It may not have been Mr. Abel Goubadia’s worse day in office as the chairman of Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission, but it was also hardly his best. The chairman has had his fair share of bad patches since 2000, when he replaced Mr. Ephraim Akpata who had died a little after President Obasanjo became the country’s first elected president following Akpata’s successful handling of Nigeria’s first general elections in 15 years.

One of such bad patches for Goubadia was a day in August last year when one of the national electoral commissioners, Mrs. Mary Obegolu, threatened to bring down the whole house if Goubadia carried out his threat of publicizing her internal indictment for allegedly accepting a multi-million Naira bribe in return for awarding a legal consultancy to a hastily formed legal consortium in which her lawyer-son was involved.

Goubadia called her bluff and Mrs. Obegolu tried to carry out her threat by publicly counter-charging that all her colleagues, including the chairman, having been involved in underhand dealings. The chairman, as an example, she said, would find it hard to explain a mansion he was building in his home town of Benin, based on his known income as a career technocrat.

Somehow neither the authorities nor the press or the public took her allegations seriously. Instead she was summarily removed and her case handed over to the police for investigation and prosecution. Little or nothing has been heard of the case since then.

The bribery scandal had occurred against the background of widespread disaffection among political parties and politicians with INEC’s handling of the registration of new parties since the last exercise in 1998. There were widespread disaffection also with its preparation of a new voters’ register for the country. The combination of the bribery scandal and the general disaffection with INEC’s handling of the registration of political parties and voters’ register led politicians to call for the dissolution of INEC.

These calls had hardly died down when Goubadia embarked on a mission that led to the most serious internal rift in the commission, namely a mission to challenge the decision of the National Assembly that all the next five general elections – elections into the state houses of assembly, the governorships, the senatorial, house of representatives and the presidency – should be conducted in one day. The National Assembly had taken his decision in passing Electoral Bill 2002 late last year.

The legislators’ insistence on conducting al the elections in one day, although potentially an obvious logistical nightmare, had apparently been informed by their suspicions that there was a secret pact between the governors and the president to support each other’s second term bids and, this way, get rid of rebellious elements in the National Assembly who have proved a thorn in the sides of the governors and the president. The governors saw many of these legislators as potential threats to their second term bids, while the president found the persistent legislative challenge to the exercise of his executive powers worse than annoying.

By holding all elections in one day, the legislators reckoned that governors, whose election comes before the National Assembly’s, would not be in a position to work with the president to get rid of inconvenient legislators.

On receiving the bill, President Obasanjo simply refused to sign it. The bill, as sent to him, he said, was in violation of the Constitutional provision that gave INEC the prerogative of fixing the days for lections. The National Assembly, which for several months had been threatening to impeach the presidency for alleged infraction of several constitutional provisions, showed every sign that it will over-ride the president’s veto.

In the circumstance, the decision by Goubadia to sue the National Assembly over Electoral Bill 2002 looked too much like a mission to preempt the legislative over-ride of the president’s veto, even to some of Goubadia’s colleagues. They all shared his concern about the near impossibility of conducting five elections in one day, but the problem with Goubadia’s decision to go to court was that it was his decision alone. Not only did he not table the matter before the commission for discussion, virtually all of them learnt of his decision for the first time from the pages of newspapers.

Not surprisingly, the first meeting of the commission after the court case was reportedly the most acrimonious in Goubadia’s two years as its chairman. Speaking for the disaffected commissioners, Alhaji Shehu Ahmadu Musa, Makama Nupe, Goubadia’s unofficial deputy, reportedly took strong exception to Goubadia’s solo effort in challenging the National Assembly. The chairman’s action, he reportedly said, exposed the commission to charges that it was acting to a script dictated by the presidency. This, he said, could only do considerable, if not irreparable, damage to their past individual reputations as top class public officers. Musa, himself, exemplified this reputation as a former federal super permanent secretary, a secretary to the federal government and someone who had conducted the least controversial census in the country to date.

Acrimonious as the debate was, the commission, in the end, concluded it had no choice but to endorse the chairman’s decision, because the alternative of withdrawing the case from the court could only do even more damage to INEC’s reputation, already sullied by the bribery scandal in August and by widespread disaffection with its handling of party registration exercise as well as that of the voters register; to withdraw the case would have exposed the commission as a house divided unto itself.

As events turned out, luck smiled on the chairman, for, as we all know, the Supreme Court eventually ruled in favour of the commission by saying that the National Assembly’s insistence on all five elections in one day amounted to a usurpation of INEC’s constitutional prerogative of fixing the electoral calendar.

However even though the Supreme Court may have saved the commission members’ bacon, the commission’s litigation against the National Assembly, though probably its worst nightmare, is only one of its many other headaches. One such headache is the commission’s seeming inability to produce a voters’ register in the two years since Goubadia was appointed its chairman.

One reason for his inability was lack of adequate funding by the presidency, which holds the nation’s purse strings. And when the commission eventually got the funds, they came with plenty of strings attached.

As early as November 2000, the commission had requested for money to produce the register, but it had been studiously ignored by the presidency. The lack of adequate funding apart, there was also the initial decision of the presidency to tie the production of the voters’ register to the production of national identity cards, which would involve the use of digital cameras and computers. There were strong objections to this tie-in, mainly from the northern part of the country which feared a plot to disenfranchise its people due to the timing  - the rainy farming season – and the complicated nature of computerizing the voters’ cards. In the end, the federal authorities backed down from its initial insistence on the tie-in when it became apparent that neither the cameras nor the computers could be procured in time for the exercise to be carried out ahead of the elections.

The combination of inadequate funding of INEC and the delays in procuring digital cameras and computers for the computerization of the voters’ cards invariably led to a fiasco in the voters’ registration exercise in October, nearly two years after INEC first requested for money to produce the voters’ register. Nigerians, apparently keen to exercise their voting rights, turned out in their millions to register, but INEC officials did not seem to have made adequate preparations. Materials for the exercise were often supplied late to the registration exercise, that is when they were supplied at all. In most cases, the supplies were inadequate. Also the officials themselves did not appear to have received adequate training for the exercise.

The lack of a credible voters’ register so close to the elections could only be complicated further by a recent Supreme Court decision to liberalize the registration of political parties. Following a rash of applications for registration as political parties by scores of political associations, in the middle of the year, INEC registered only three, the UNDP, NDP and APGA. Three of the associations which did not make it, sued INEC, charging it with acting unconstitutionally. Late last year the Supreme Court ruled that INEC did indeed exceed its constitutional powers for registering political parties. As a result, the commission was forced to review its list and has now increased it to 22, up from six.

It is hardly difficult to imagine the logistical problems that will confront INEC in preparing for and organising five general elections beginning from March, with a list of 22 political parties and without a credible voters’ register. The logistics apart, there is also INEC’s image of a commission which is not so independent of the presidency.

The question is, can the commission overcome all these problems of organisation and image and give Nigerians a credible election for the first time under a civilian leadership? Since Nigeria got its independence from Britain in 1960, elections under civilian leaderships – in 1966 and in 1983 – have been flawed. Paradoxically those under military dictatorships – in 1979, 1993 and 1999 – have been widely acknowledged as free and fair, even though that of 1993 under military president General Ibrahim Babangida, was cancelled half way through the announcement of the results of the presidential elections.

The first of the elections conducted successfully by the military was under President Obasanjo, then a military dictator. The prospects that he would repeat his 1979 success as a civilian leader, looks very bleak – unless INEC can burnish its image of its being the presidency’s poodle. A major test of INEC’s independence is whether it can de-couple the governorship elections from the presidential one in response to well-founded suspicions that INEC tied the two together in submission to the strategy by Obasanjo’s presidential organisation of swimming or sinking with the governors. Governorship elections have conventionally always been held with those of state houses of Assembly while presidential elections, because it is the only one where the whole country is the constituency, has always been held alone. There is hardly any compelling reason therefore for joining the two.

If INEC will pass this and other tests of its capacity to resist presidential manipulations, then we would, for the first time in Nigeria’s history, have a successful civilian to civilian transition. The big question is can INEC successfully resist the presidential manipulations?