PEOPLE & POLITICS

By Mohammed Haruna

Electoral Reform : Politicians as bad workmen

kudugana@yahoo.com

Of all the speeches by President Olusegun Obasanjo in the last four years, his keynote address to the INEC-Civil Society Forum Seminar on Agenda for Electoral Reform which started on November 27, must rank among his best. The speech was well structured, coherent and written mostly in plain English. It was also devoid of the usual pretensions to high-sounding intellectualism.

The November 27-28 seminar was a follow-up on an earlier self-assessment by INEC of its performance in the April/May general elections. Naturally INEC, at the end of its self-assessment in August, did not return a verdict of failure against itself, but it was also realistic and sensible enough to admit to a lot of shortcomings in several aspects of the elections. The November 27-28 seminar was clearly meant to examine those shortcomings and remedy them well ahead of the next general elections in 2007.

The President’s keynote address acknowledged this need for, to use his own words, “fundamental reviews in key areas of our electoral system”. From the reactions of the participants to his address as the seminar got underway, it seemed the president touched the right cords with the participants, many of them opposition elements.

The one shortcoming of the address, however, again going by the reactions from the participants, was that the speech did not seem to come from the heart. The president lamented shortcomings in no less than four key areas of the electoral system reform, but as a participant noted in a private chat, the president, as the greatest beneficiary of an election which his party hijacked and subverted in a most blatant manner by the use of money and by the abuse of the power of incumbency, was the least qualified to shed tears over those shortcomings.

Crocodile tears or not, the president did indeed shed them in bucketfuls in his address. Among other things, he lamented, first, our first-past-the-post electoral system which, in his own words, “bestows the winner, by even the narrowest votes, victory, and the loser, virtually nothing”. This, he said, quite rightly, “is dangerous for democracy, not just because it reduces all political activity to the sole objective of winning elections, but also because without an effective opposition, democracy becomes a farcical mimicry of its fundamental assumptions.” For someone with a record of not brooking even the most ineffective opposition, the sincerity of this lamentation truly beggared belief.

Second, the president lamented the high cost of our elections. The 50 billion  Naira he said we spent on the last elections was “an unacceptably high expenditure”. There was also the need, he said, to put a cap on spendings by candidates. Fine words, all these, but again they sounded hollow coming from someone who took his time to fund INEC, causing delays which, in turn, led to INEC’s costly conduct of the elections.

As for putting a cap on spendings by candidates, one only needs to ask what the president did when his party and his campaign organisation embarked on a not-so-subtle blackmail of companies last year to contribute billions to his campaign chest, in flagrant breach of the laws of the land which expressly forbade such contributions.

Third, the president lamented the high incident of petitions in the last elections and expressed concern about their possible debilitating effect on the efficiency of the judiciary. Out of the 1,600 elections that were conducted, he said, there were petitions against the outcome of 900. This, he argued, could only mean either something was wrong with our electoral system or our politicians were incapable of graciously accepting defeat, or both.

The president is right in saying that the high incidence of petitions against the results of the last elections – over 56%  – is due both to defects in the electoral system and to the inability of our politicians to accept defeat. However, whereas the politicians the president probably had in mind are those in opposition, the more guilty party are those in power who are simply incapable of contemplating losing it and, as the records show in Africa, Nigeria included, they do everything to retain such power.

In expressing his concern about the negative effect on the judiciary of too many election petitions, the president, once again, stretched his own credibility a bit, not least because it was the same president who ordered the withdrawal of police orderlies from judges, something which had become a basic condition of service for the judges. This is not to mention what has since become notorious delays in releasing money for both capital and recurrent expenditure of the judiciary.

Fourth, but probably most importantly for the freedom of choice of the voter, the president, for the umpteenth time, lamented the large number of our political parties. We have too many of them, he has said consistently. In his November 27 address he repeated his call that most of the present ones deserve to be de-registered. Parties which, among other things, exist only to collect government grants and those that fail to “achieve an acceptable minimum of impact during elections” should be deregisterd, he said.

Of all his lamentations about the flaws in our electoral system, this is the one that has been the most controversial. Those opposed to his views on the right number of parties for our democracy argue that it is a contradiction in terms to limit the number of parties in a liberal democracy.

The (text book) role of parties as the president said, is to aggregate, articulate and represent the interests shared by their various members. Parties, however, do not have to win elections to perform those roles. Indeed, they do not even have to contest elections to do so. It is, therefore, wrong to use elections as the yardstick for permitting the existence of parties.

As a matter of fact, the whole idea of registering parties even if they exist merely to win elections is wrong. Those who say that without registration all manner of undesirable parties may emerge assume that the ordinary man cannot tell between what is right and what is wrong. Or that even if he can, he still cannot be trusted to do what is right and refrain from what is wrong.

These assumptions, the records of our elections show, are, by and large, false. If anything, the problem of Nigeria is much less that of an ill-informed and ill-motivated followership than that of an ill-motivated but well-informed leadership. This leadership knows what is right by the ordinary Nigerian, but is too self-centered to allow that knowledge to deter it from self-aggrandizement.

No, the problem is not how many parties we have. Rather it is how those already in power wish to limit entry into the political arena so that they can continue to monopolize power.

The president’s concerns about the shortcomings of our electoral system, of course, went beyond the four key areas above. He did, for example, also talk about the financial autonomy of INEC, but unlike he did in the case of the number of political parties, he did not offer any specific solutions. Instead, he merely pledged his “willingness to consider all options to the current system with an open mind”.

As the president is most certainly aware, the current system has been under intense criticisms for being too dependent on the whims and caprices of the executive. Both foreign and domestic election observers have suggested that election expenses should be charged directly to the Consolidated Federal Account. The president said nothing about this suggestion, but I suspect that he is probably opposed to it.

If he is, he would be right on point of principle even if he himself has observed the principle mostly in the breach. Those who argue that INEC’s funds should be charged directly to the Consolidated Account – just like those who make a similar argument for the judiciary – seem to forget that to do so would amount to  a violation of the principle of separation of powers between the three arms of government. To do so would be  to turn INEC – and the judiciary for that matter – into a government all of its own. Unless INEC is to be managed by some supermen from outer space, this prescription is bound to be deadlier than the disease it seeks to cure.

That INEC, or for that matter any other institution, cannot be relied upon to self-police itself is evident from at least the financial scandal that surrounded the award of the contract for the computerization of the voters register last year, a scandal involving over 120 million Naira which led to the forced resignation of a National Commissioner. The chances were that if INEC was self-policing, the scandal would never have surfaced, or if it did, the INEC leadership would have had good reason to limit its damage to some very minor casualties.

Naturally, the fellows at INEC want complete financial autonomy. Indeed they want something much more. In its own submission to the November seminar, INEC requested that it should be given its four-year requirement well in advance! To me, it was truly amazing how anyone with even an elementary understanding of the concept of budgeting could ask for four years’ expenditure in advance. But then this was the logical absurdity that comes from prescriptions that assume that those we pick to manage institutions which are critical for the solution of some fundamental crises we are facing, must be a breed apart from other Nigerians. But, like it or not, the people at INEC, now and in the future, are only human like other Nigerians. Therefore giving them extraordinary powers is more likely than not to make them unaccountable and thus create more problems than it solves.

The bottomline of all this is that the solution to the defects in our electoral system lies more in our attitudes than in the defects themselves. As several participants at the seminar, including myself, argued, the problem with the system, as with the country in general, has been less with the tools of our democracy, defective as they are, than with the manner and the integrity with which we have handled them.

A bad workman, as the saying goes, will always quarrel with his tools. Defective as our tools of democracy are, we could still have got much better results from them if we had used them properly and with sufficient integrity. So far we haven’t, and if present trends in the ruling party and even in some of the opposition parties like the Alliance for Democracy – war-like divisions over the spoils of office – continue, then a thousand reforms of our electoral system would not make the prospects of genuine democracy in our dear country any brighter.