By Segun Adeniyi
At his inauguration on May 29, 2007, President Yar’Adua took the rather unusual step of conceding that the elections that had brought him in office “had shortcomings.” As a result, he pledged to reform the nation’s electoral process. Exactly three months later, he took that promise beyond rhetoric as he established a 22-member electoral reform committee to examine and identify lapses and inadequacies that have stifled the yearning for free and fair elections in Nigeria.
The mandate of the committee, headed by former chief justice of the federation, Justice Muhammed Uwais, included a review of Nigeria’s history with general elections and identification of factors that militate against their credibility.
On January 16, 2008, five months after inaugurating the committee, the president held a consultative meeting on electoral process in Nigeria with all the state governors, the leadership of political parties that won elections in one or more states in the 2007 elections, the leadership of the National Assembly, and the heads of various security agencies. He opened the discussion by acknowledging that the history of elections in Nigeria had been that of controversies, adding that the responsibility for all the failures lay mostly with the political actors. “No matter the legislations, no matter the efforts we put at electoral reforms, unless we the political leaders change our attitude towards election, we will continue to have problems.”
After his brief, all the journalists were excused because as he said, he wanted a frank and open discussion. Even when that had been done, he looked in my direction rather apprehensively, as if he considered me to be one of the reporters he had only moments ago excused. The import of that became glaring when he began to speak again. “Now that journalists have left and all of us are politicians, we should be able to speak the truth,” he began, “If we will be honest with ourselves, we all know how we rig elections in this country. We compromise the security agencies, we pay the electoral officials and party agents while on the eve of the elections, we merely distribute logistics all designed to buy the votes….”
For about twenty minutes, the president spoke candidly about the methods usually adopted to manipulate elections, stopping occasionally to ask rhetorically whether his observations were false. Nobody controverted him, and so he concluded by telling the participants that collectively, they could lay a new foundation for democracy in the country if the political elite had the will.
That candid declaration by the president achieved its aim as it emboldened others to speak frankly. It was a most enlightening session that revealed quite clearly that the average Nigerian politicians would rather not leave matters in the hands of the electorate on polling day. The meeting, which commenced at 11a.m, eventually ended at 5.30p.m with the constitution of four committees under the coordination of the VP. One of the committees’ tasks was to examine the role of security agencies in the course of elections and why murder and arson perpetrated on polling day were usually treated as “electoral violence,” with nobody ever successfully prosecuted for such heinous crimes.
The session also agreed on the composition of the bi-partisan committees whose recommendations were expected to shape the agenda for the next meeting, which, as it would turn out, never held. In fact, that would be the first and last of such meetings. The Uwais Committee, however, continued its work, and after sitting for one year, during which they received hundreds of memoranda and conducted several public hearings across the country, came up with extensive – and rather radical – recommendations in their report, which was made public. Some of the recommendations included:
- Establishing a new, truly independent, non-partisan and impartial INEC composed mainly of representatives of professional groups who are nominated through the National Judicial Council.
- Abolishing the state independent electoral commissions and resident electoral commissions so that INEC handles all elections in the country.
- Establishing a political parties registration and regulatory commission to, among other things, register political parties, monitor their organisation and operations, and arrange for the annual auditing of their accounts.
- Establishing an electoral offences commission to investigate electoral offences and prosecute offenders.
- Establishing a constituency delimitation commission to handle the creation and periodic review of electoral constituencies, and
- Stipulating the time limit for disposing of election petitions, that is, four months for election tribunals to deliver judgement and two months for the conclusion of all appeals.
The committee also recommended the use of electronic voting machines for future elections, stipulation of additional conditions to be met by any political association seeking registration as a political party; and the introduction of independent candidature in all elections. Equally recommended was the injection of a dose of proportional representation into the current “first-past-the-post” electoral system, in order to promote greater inclusiveness and minimise both pre- and post-election tension; holding all elections on a fixed date, at least six months before the expiration of the term of incumbents, to allow adequate time for election petitions and appeals to be concluded before swearing anyone in; and staggering elections such that National and State Assembly elections hold two years after presidential and governorship elections.
On January 16, 2009, the president appointed a committee to produce a draft white paper on the report for the Federal Executive Council (FEC), which eventually held three consecutive sessions spanning several hours, during which it agreed that the funding of INEC would be a first-line charge on the consolidated revenue fund of the federation. The goal was to ensure that its financial and administrative independence was guaranteed.
The FEC also accepted the recommendation that politicians convicted of violence during elections, in addition to any other punishment, should be barred from holding public office for 10 years. Indeed, all the other recommendations by the committee were accepted except the following:
- Injecting a dose of proportional representation into the current “first-past-the-post” electoral system, in order to promote greater inclusiveness and minimise both pre- and post-election tension.
- Holding all elections on a fixed date, at least six months before the expiration of the term of incumbents, to allow adequate time for election petitions and appeals to be concluded before swearing anyone in.
- Staggering of elections such that National and State Assembly elections hold two years after presidential and gubernatorial elections.
- Shifting the burden of proof from the petitioners to INEC to show that disputed elections were indeed free and fair and complied with the provisions of the Electoral Act 2006. (This last recommendation was against the cardinal principles of law, which provides that whoever asserts must prove).
The most contentious, however, was the recommendation that INEC members should be nominated by members of the NJC. This had been a thorny issue within the white paper drafting committee, and Mr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, a permanent secretary in the AGF office and a former INEC secretary, had argued with the AGF over this provision, which he considered cardinal to the Uwais report.
Given his experience and exposure, Baba-Ahmed’s view could not be taken lightly, but Aondoakaa would argue on the point of law that in the presidential system of government, the power to appoint or nominate could not be taken away from the president. He would adopt a similar premise when he intervened at a heated FEC session during which some members had taken the issues personally, as if it was the integrity of Yar’Adua that was being questioned. So, the discussion became, unfortunately, an emotional one.
Justice Uwais, who was invited to the FEC session argued forcefully that if that aspect of the report was removed, Nigerians would not believe the government was serious about electoral reform. He said that almost all the memoranda that the committee received canvassed the position that the choice of electoral officials should be made by the NJC and that it had been the main issue at the public hearings they had held.
From the tone of the discussion, I could immediately discern that Justice Uwais would feel let down if the clause was removed, so shortly before the last FEC session on the report, I tried an intervention. As members were seated in the council chambers, I asked Uwais whether he was disposed to the idea of a meeting with the president before the session began. I suggested that it would be helpful if he could personally express his misgivings and offer some advice. When he said he wouldn’t mind, I rushed to the residence and met the president at the study examining some papers as he sipped his tea, preparatory to leaving for the FEC session. I pleaded with him to tarry a while to have a private audience with Uwais, and when he agreed, I went back to the council chambers and brought Uwais to meet the president. The duo met for about 15 minutes, but it didn’t appear as if it achieved any meaningful result.
With the handling of the Uwais report by the FEC, the public felt betrayed, with the consensus being that there would be no free and fair election in Nigeria until the appointment of the INEC chairman was insulated from the president. For him to therefore retain the power to nominate the chairman and INEC members conveyed to critics the impression that he was not serious about electoral reform, especially at a time when Prof. Maurice Iwu was being singularly held responsible for the problems associated with the 2007 general elections in the country. This in itself was a simplistic reading of events.
While it is agreed that the 2007 elections were deeply flawed, it is necessary to put it in context. The problem with the elections began when, following his failed third-term bid, Obasanjo decided to scuttle Vice President, Atiku Abubakar’s ambition to succeed him by setting up an extra-constitutional body to examine allegations of corruption against seeking public office at both the federal and state level, based on EFCC reports.
It was on the basis of Atiku’s indictment alongside others by this committee that an “EFCC advisory” was forwarded to INEC to ban certain office seekers, including the former VP. While many of these candidates were eventually excluded from the election (a development that would later set the stage for further confusion in the polity), Atiku sought legal redress, and the Supreme Court quashed the ban on him on the eve of the presidential election. With ballot papers already printed without his name, another set was ordered, with all the attendant logistical problems that INEC could not handle. So from the outset, the 2007 elections were doomed to fail.
Excerpted from Segun Adeniyi’s book “Poweer, Politics & Death”
