Narrowing the frontiers electoral criminality

The national assembly is currently holding public hearings into a bill to create Electoral Offences Commission. Such a public hearing is an important part of the legislative process. It gives the people the opportunity to offer views that the lawmakers may take into consideration in arriving at the final shape of the law for the […]

The national assembly is currently holding public hearings into a bill to create Electoral Offences Commission. Such a public hearing is an important part of the legislative process.

It gives the people the opportunity to offer views that the lawmakers may take into consideration in arriving at the final shape of the law for the good governance of the Nigerian federation. 

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Professor Mahmood Yakubu, chairman of INEC, has consistently made strenuous efforts to push for the total sanitation of our electoral system and our elections. He met a flawed electoral system and flawed elections. His legacy would be a new image of our electoral system and our elections. He would turn the tide against rigging before and during the conduct of elections and make the conduct of our elections and the results therefrom respectable locally and internationally. Through his singular effort, one of the major sources of election rigging, to wit, the manual collation of results, has become history. I can hear the politicians wailing. I am tempted to crow.

I am glad that the national assembly also appears willing and prepared to protect the integrity of our electoral system by strengthening the system with laws that protect it. The integrity of our elections matters. Blatant election rigging has consistently thrown the mud in the face of the integrity of our elections. It has been beyond pathetic and shameful even for a country which, as we say in Agila, has burnt down its house of shame.

Politicians deploy thugs to intimidate their opponents they cannot buy; their thugs bend them or break them; they openly buy votes; their thugs openly stuff ballot boxes; they snatch ballot boxes and give victory to the losers at every election. These are grievous offences committed with sickening bravado and impunity. No one is held responsible. We throw up our hands and wail in helplessness with the portentous declaration, God dey. I am afraid that is a fatalistic cry. God no dey.

An electoral offences commission with an election offences tribunal will end the election thuggery and make those who commit these offences individually answer for them. We cannot expect to have a sanitised electoral system and elections when the thugs roam the land and abbreviate the people’s right to freely choose, all things being equal, their representatives in government.  

The late President Umaru Yar’Adua was so dissatisfied with the conduct of the 2007 general elections that brought him to power that he promised at his inauguration, to reform our electoral system to enhance the integrity of the electoral umpire and make our elections credible through an honest adherence to the rules that undergird our electoral system. Election observers rated the 2007 general elections as the worst so far in the country. It abysmally failed to rise up to the low regional standard at the time. 

Yar’Adua set up a 22-man electoral reform committee headed by Mr Justice Muhammadu Lawal Uwais, former chief of Nigeria. I remain fascinated by the work of the committee and its various ground-breaking recommendations that if implemented would have made the current effort by the national assembly unnecessary. But no sooner the committee submitted its report to the president in December 2008 than the forces that have retarded and continue to retard our national progress and development, began the corrosive process of ensuring the president did not implement the recommendations of the committee. They were protecting their age-long privileged positions. Those unmerited privileges are gradually eroding now with the national assembly chipping away at them through amendments to the electoral act.

The current bill before the national assembly is consistent with the recommendation of the Uwais committee. It recommended the establishment of “an autonomous and constitutionally recognised electoral offences commission through a bill in the national assembly and empowered to perform the following functions:

1. Enforcement and administration of the provisions of this act; 

2. Investigation of all frauds and related offences; 

3. Coordination, enforcement, and prosecution of all electoral offences; 

4. Enforcement of the provision of Electoral Act 2006, the constitutions of registered parties and any other acts or enactments; 

5. Adoption of measures to identify, trace and prosecute political thuggery, electoral fraud, political terrorism and other electoral offences; 

6. Adoption of measures to prevent and eradicate the commission of electoral offences; 

7. Adoption of measures which include but are not limited to coordination, prevention, and regulatory actions.” 

I have not read the bill in the national assembly, but I would imagine that its sponsors must have taken the rationale for it inherent in the recommendations of the Uwais committee as a starting point to make even broader provisions to make the commission effective. An electoral offences tribunal, not bogged by the often-unnecessary delays in the regular courts, will help to cage the offenders and free our system from their impunity. 

Democracy thrives best in a self-policing system watched over by the people and their representatives in government. We have come to a point in our democracy that its full flowering as a government birthed by the people through the ballot box is the government of the people in the service of the people. 

The Uwais report made this telling observation our lawmakers would do well to bear in mind: “Nigeria’s experience with democratic elections since independence has been rather mixed. Although the country has managed to transit from one administration to another, hardly any election conducted in the country has been completely free of charges of irregularities, electoral malpractices, violence, and various degrees of disruptions. The factors responsible for this state of affairs include, among others, the character of the Nigerian state as the arena for electoral contests; the existence of weak democratic institutions and processes; negative political culture; weak legal/constitutional framework; and lack of independence and capacity of the election management bodies.” 

Need I say more?