Election 2003

Election 2003: Can INEC break the jinx?

Mohammed Haruna

For Dr. Abel Goubadia, the Chairman of Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), nothing could be more unfair than the public’s tendency to blame his commission for the crises that have bedeviled Nigeria’s electoral process. Problems like the confusion over the registration of new political parties or others like delays in compiling a voters’ register or constituency deliminiation which has sparked internecine communal clashes in places like the explosive Niger Delta region.

Mid January this year, the INEC chairman held an interactive session with top media executives in Lagos, Nigeria’s media and commercial capital, during which he laid the blame for such crises outside the body itself. “There is”, he said, “the erroneous tendency to blame all shortcomings in the electoral process at the doorstep of the electoral commission”. The responsibility for these shortcomings, he said, can be traced mainly (1) to the presidency which often gave INEC too little money, too late for it to function properly, and (2) to bickerings between the executive and legislative arms of the central government which delayed the passing of the first electoral law since the 1998/99 elections conducted by the military.

INEC’s briefs are to (1) register voters, (2) register political parties, (3) monitor political campaigns (4) deliminate constituencies and above all (5) conduct elections. In all these INEC’s standing in the public eye, and certainly in the eyes of the politicians, has been pretty low. So low that there is, as of today, widespread concern that it may bungle the next general election scheduled to begin on April 12. There is widespread fear that such bungling may land the country in a serious political crisis.

Indeed, only last week, the chairman of one of the newly registered parties, Alhaji Haba Frai of the National Democratic Party, threatened to take INEC to court if it did not shift the elections. Fari, in a letter to the commission’s Chairman, pointed out that holding the elections as scheduled will be in material breach of the Electoral Law 2002 for at least two reasons. First, Section 1(5) of the act says the commission must have a voters’ register ready 60 days ahead of the elections. Today, less than forty days to the elections INEC has not been able to display even the preliminary voters’ register it compiled last September. Second, Section 25(1) of the act says INEC must have the list of candidates standing for the various elections ready 90 days before the elections. As with the voters’ register, INEC is already in arrears of this deadline.

The INEC Secretary, Dr. Hakeem Baba Ahmed, has responded to NDP’s threat by insisting that the elections will go on regardless. INEC itself, however, has been issuing its own threat. Last week, the secretary warned that unless the commission gets about 16 billion Naira (about 115,000,000 dollars) it needs to conduct the elections, they may not be held at all.

Between April 12 and May 3, INEC is expected to hold a series of three elections with two possible presidential and gubernatorial run-offs, making a total of five. The first in the series is that of the central legislative body, the National Assembly. Next would be the presidential and gubernatorial elections on April 19. Possible run-off for these two elections are scheduled for April 26, for the first run-off, and April 29 for the second. The last in the series will hold on May 3. These are the elections into the State Houses of Assembly.

With threats of litigations by at least one political party should INEC go ahead with the elections as scheduled not to mention INEC’s own threat concerning delays in receiving the funds for conducting the elections, Nigeria seems headed for a political crises which bodes ill for the country. Twice since the country’s independence in 1960, have civilian administrations conducted elections and twice have the elections flopped. These were in 1965 and 1983. Each failure had precipitated long intervals of military rule.

After President Olusegun Obasanjo won the 1999 elections at the end of the second military intervention which lasted over 15 years, the hope was that the country would be third time lucky in transiting from one civilian regime to another. The crises that have bedeviled the electoral process since then does not suggest that Goubadia’s INEC would succeed in breaking the jinx that seems to surround Nigeria’s civilian to civilian transition.

Goubadia himself, as we have seen, thinks it is unfair to blame his commission for the crises-ridden electoral process. The chairman is right up to a point. Take, for example, the problem of the registration of voters. When Goubadia replaced Chief Ephraim Akpata as Chairman following the latter’s death early in 2000, one of his first acts in office was to announce that he would computerize the compilation of the country’s voters register. Hitherto, such compilation has been manual, with attendant inaccuracies and delays. For more than one year after he approached the presidency for the funding of the exercise, he was studiously ignored. Apparently frustrated by the presidential silence over his request, he took his case personally to President Obasanjo himself, and told the president that this commission would like to commence the computerization of the compilation of the voters’ register in November 2001. This way, he said, a voters’ register would be ready for the Local Government elections scheduled for February 2002.

AC learnt that president told Goubadia not to bother because the Local Government elections will not hold. This came as a surprise to Goubadia and the other commissioners who accompanied him to see the president since the tenure of the Local Governments was to expire in March. However, at the time of Goubadia’s visit, the National Assembly, apparently in cahoots with the presidency, was working on a bill to extend the tenure of the Local Governments by one year. This seemed to be in keeping with PDP the ruling party’s wish to rearrange the normal sequence of the general elections by starting with the presidential elections and ending with those of Local Governments.

State governors, including those belonging to the ruling party, had vehemently opposed the extension of Local Government tenures in their belief that the extension was aimed at giving the presidency undue advantage in deciding the outcome of the general elections. They were so strong in their opposition to the extension that they had collectively sued the National Assembly to the Supreme Court charging the legislative House with attempting to commit an unconstitutional act.

The governors won their case in March when the court granted their prayers. By then, however, it was well past the February deadline for the Local Government elections. In any case, INEC had, by then, not been able to prepare a voters’ register. In the end it was not given money to prepare one until May 2002. It then took about a couple of months to make preparations for the exercise. In the end it was not until September 12 that it conducted the exercise. Quite predictably, the exercise, which lasted for ten days, was a near total fiasco, with INEC officials turning up late or not at all at many registration centres all over the country. INEC claimed to have released 70 million registration forms as against an estimated target of 59,500,000, but everywhere there were of shortages of the forms.

Apart from what seemed a deliberate presidential decision to starve INEC of funds, the voter’s registration exercise had also been delayed and complicated by another presidential decision to link the exercise with the National Identity Card project which had dragged on since 1979. The project had become politicized when Afenifere, the Yoruba cultural group lead by Chief Abraham Adesanya, demanded its implementation as a condition for Yoruba participation in the next general elections. Adesanya had told a Pan-Congress of the Yoruba in Ibadan, the political capital of Yorubaland that the National I.D. card was the only way to prove that the age-old numeral superiority of the North over the South was not mere fiction foisted on Nigeria by the departing British colonial masters who had favoured the more pliable Northern politicians as successors.

By deciding to link the voters’ registration exercise with the ID card project, President Obasanjo, as a Yoruba, apparently shared Afenifere’s sentiments. The possession of the ID Card, he said, would henceforth be necessary for the exercise of one’s voting right. Not surprisingly, this decision was rejected out-rightly by the North who feared that the linking of the two exercises was aimed at reversing the demographic structure of the country to favour the South, the Yorubas in particular.

In the end Obasanjo \bowed to the Northern opposition largely because of legal and logistical obstacles to his decision. Legally, the INEC was forbidden from working with any other organ in compiling the voters’ register and logistically, the deadline for the supply of the hard and softwares necessary for linking the two exercises could not be met.

While INEC was facing difficulties in carrying out its functions due to delays in getting funds and due also to the politicization of the compilation of the voters register, things were hardly getting any smoother on the legislative front. Not long after Guobadia settled down as the commission’s chairman, it submitted a draft bill to the National Assembly for the enactment of the first electoral law since 1998. By the time the bill became law on December 5, 2001, the day Obasanjo signed it into law, it bore little resemblance to the bill the commission had initiated. By then, so many controversial clauses had been introduced into it at the behest of the presidency that it seemed doomed for the graveyard even before it could actually take effect.

Of all the controversies that surrounded the law, the biggest was the attempt by the presidency, working hand in glove with some key federal legislators, to smuggle in some clauses into the law whose effect was to make it difficult to register new political parties as well as to bar any new ones from contesting the presidential elections before 2007. The most notorious of these clauses was Section 80(1) of the law which sought to reverse the order of the general elections by making the presidential elections that normally comes last, first.

All hell broke lose after it was revealed that the clause was surreptitiously inserted in the law after the bill had been passed by the National Assembly. Not surprisingly, everyone denied responsibility for the now orphaned clause. The legislators implicated in the act, including the Senate President, Chief Anyim Pius Anyim, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives , Alhaji Umar Ghali Na’abba, said it was the presidency which insisted on the clause when it discovered it was missing from the bill. The president, on the other hand, said it was the printers’ devil, and that the blame for what happened should go to the ruling party whose caucus had insisted that the presidential elections should come last.

The end result of these bickering was that it took another year for the National Assembly to replace the electoral law. This was after the Supreme Court had ruled on an action before it challenging the legality of the act that the insertion of Section 80(1) into the law was unconstitutional.

Clearly, Guobadia has a case when he told media chiefs in January that it was unfair to blame all the crises of Nigeria’s electoral process on INEC. His case, however, is valid only in-so-far as there were avoidable delays in enacting the country’s electoral law and also in-so-far as INEC was often given too little money, too late to function properly.

Beyond these, much of INEC’s problems were self-inflected. These self-infected problems seem to arise from Guobadia’s rather dictatorial style of leadership and his seeming inability to resist executive interference in the commission’s internal affairs.

On at least two occasions, this combination of Guobadia dictatorial style and apparent submission to executive dictations precipitated serious internal rift within the commission which nearly led to mass resignation of some of the national electoral commissioners. Probably the first of these occasions was sometimes in mid 2002 following the release of the funds for the compilation of the voters’ register. Prior to the release, the commission’s finance committee, headed by the chairman himself, met fairly regularly to decide on the award of contracts. After the release of the funds, the committee virtually seized functioning. Not surprisingly, rumours of financial shenanigans started spreading. The most persistent of these rumours surrounded the award of a multi-billion Naira contract to Images Technologies of South Africa for the supply of computer hard and software for the voters’ registration exercise. This was done without any input from the finance committee.

In the course of the award, INEC appointed four lawyers as legal consultant to work, in the words of INEC itself, “under the legal consortium of KDI0 legal consortium”. This appointment was kicked against by the legal department as a waste of INEC’s financial resources since all it entailed was drafting of the contract documents, a function the department has performed well on many previous occasions, but for which KDI0 was to be paid 2.5% of the contract sum amounting to over 123,000,000 Naira (about 1,000,000 dollars).

The INEC leadership rejected its legal department’s objections. It did so inspite of the fact that KDI0 consortium was hurriedly put together solely for the Image Consortium job, and was not registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission, as mandatory under the country’s company law.

Predictably scandal soon broke out over the award. It eventually transpired that the son of the national electoral commissioner in charge of legal matters, Mrs. Mary Obegolu, himself is a lawyer, had demanded for 23,000,000 Naira as fees for what he allegedly claimed was his mother’s role in the award of the legal consultancy to KDI0. The consortium initially refused to pay. After it eventually paid up, it reportedly complained to the chairman. This led to a confrontation between Mrs. Obegolu and the chairman who was reportedly furious that such a demand would be made. News of the confrontation eventually made it into the media, which in turn eventually led to the resignation of Mrs. Obegolu after she initially threatened to bring down the whole commission with allegations that other commissioners, including the chairman, have also always been on the take.

Somehow, her allegations did not stick. Instead, she was not only forced to resign, her case was handed over to the police for investigations. Since then the bribe money has been recovered by INEC but so far it is not clear how far the police investigations have gone and whether it will lead to prosecution.

While all this was going on, the most senior of the national commissioners and the unofficial deputy to Goubadia, Alhaji Shehu Ahmadu Musa, had apparently felt scandalized enough by the rumours of financial underhand dealings to send in his letter of resignation to the president. Musa was a member of the commission’s finance committee and he felt offended that the chairman no longer convened meetings of the committee since the commission received its funds from the presidency.

The president reportedly rejected Musa’s resignation. Instead he wrote back to the commissioner pleading with him to stay back until at least after this year’s general elections. The president said he regarded Musa’s membership of the commission as central to its image as a neutral umpire for the elections.

It was this presidential intervention in the undeclared cold war between Musa and the chairman while apparently saved INEC from imploding for, there was a good change that Musa’s departure could have precipitated that of several other commissioners who have always looked up to Musa, as one of the most experienced top civil servants in the country, for leadership.

The second instance of serious internal rift in INEC was over the chairman’s plan to reorganize the commission following the KDI0 scandal. As part of his plan, the chairman decided to downgrade the legal department into a unit directly under his office. Virtually all the commissioners thought this was an over-reaction to the scandal. At a meeting last December, the chairman said he was over-ruling all objections to his decision irrespective of their merit. Not for the first time, Musa was said to have got so angry with the chairman over his insistence that he (Musa) banged the table and told the chairman other commissioners were not there merely to rubber stamp his wishes. Musa walked out of the meeting and went to his office to write a resignation letter. This time, however, he was prevailed upon by his colleagues not to send in the letter.

Apart from these two cases of KDI0 and the commission’s reorganization palaver, on a number of occasions, the chairman took important decisions on behalf of the commission without consulting his colleagues and sometimes at variance with decisions of the commissions, creating the impression that he took his orders from outside he commission. For example, when the National Assembly over-rode the president’s veto of Electoral Law 2002 – the president had vetoed the bill because he believed the clause ordering all elections to a be held in one day, interfered with INEC’s constitutional prerogative to fix election dates – Guobadia went to court to challenge the National Assembly’s decision without the commission meeting to discuss the matter. When he was confronted by other commissioners over his decision, he said he had mentioned it to them informally on several occasions and no one had objected. When it was pointed out to him that the matter was weighty enough to require a memorandum, he merely apologized.

Luckily for him, the Supreme Court ruled that the National Assembly’s decision for a one day election for all posts was a usurpation of INEC’s role. By then, however, his litigation had strengthened the impression that he often took the presidency’s side any time there was a disagreement between the presidency and other interested parties.

On another occasion he decided to charge processing fees for candidates against the advice of the commission’s secretariat. On January 17, the commission announced the processing fees of 500,000 Naira for presidential candidates, 300,000 Naira for governorship candidates, 280,000 for the Senate, 150,000 Naira for House of Representatives and 80,000 Naira for Senate House of Assembly. Twelve days later it slashed the fees by an average of four-fifth following public uproar and a court action against the fees by one of the political parties, the National Conscience Party, led by human rights activist and a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Chief Gani Fawehinmi. This time the INEC chairman was not so lucky with the courts; the Federal High Court in Abuja ruled that there was no statutory basis for INEC’s charge of processing fees.

The combination of these external and internal factors that seem to inhibit INEC’s independence and proper functioning has led to widespread fears that for the third time in the country’s history, civilians may fail the test of conducting a credible election.

The most obvious evidence that these fears are not unfounded is the inability of INEC to display a final voters’ register barely a month to the start of the elections. By INEC’s own admission, the September exercise was riddled by many multiple and under-age registration. The result is that in some local government as many as 40% of those who registered stood disqualified. Yet, an accurate voters’ register is central to the conduct of a free and fair election.

Not only is INEC behind its own schedule in displaying the voters’ register, it is also falling behind schedule on the display of the list of candidates for the elections. In fairness much of this is the fault of the party leaderships themselves who seem to change their lists without rhyme or rythym, hiding behind a court ruling that candidates are purely the internal affairs of the parties.

Ultimately, however, the responsibility for conducting a free and fair election is INEC’s. Its seeming inability to overcome the combination of these internal and external factors inhibiting its independence and proper functioning portends ill for the country’s nascent democracy.