By openingIkechukwu Amaechi
Attahiru Jega, a professor of political
science and immediate past chairman of the Independent National Electoral
Commission (INEC), is a very lucky Nigerian.
He is one of those fluky human beings the
Scripture tells us are blessed because their sins are covered. He remains the
only INEC chairman to “successfully” organise two national elections – in
2011
and 2015.
For a job that has become the nemesis of most
otherwise solid reputations, Jega left office with his intact. Today, he is
hailed in some quarters as the best thing that has happened to Nigeria’s
democracy since 1999.
He left office on June 30, 2015 to return to
his lecturing job at Bayero University, Kano, where he was vice chancellor
before his appointment in June 2010 by former President Goodluck Jonathan.
That was after he had disclosed in March that
he would not accept tenure renewal. Had he wanted, perhaps, he would still be
INEC chairman today.
Shortly after leaving office, Jega, former
national president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), won
the
2015 edition of the Charles T. Mannat Democracy Award.
It was presented to him by the United
States-based International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES),
administrators of the award, at an elaborate ceremony in Washington D.C. on
September 29, 2015.
Every year, IFES, a pro-democracy
organisation that advocates improved electoral systems around the world,
recognises the accomplishments of individuals in advancing freedom and
democracy by bestowing awards on them in honour of past chairs of its
board of
directors: Charles T. Manatt and Patricia Hutar, and Senior Adviser, Joe C.
Baxter.
While Jega was honoured under the Charles T.
Manatt Democracy Award category, it is instructive that his co-awardees were
U.S. Democratic Leader, Nancy Pelosi, and Republican Congressman, Ed Royce.
Jega was chosen as the international figure
for the award, according to the promoters, for leading the INEC to conduct
what
they perceived as one of the most credible elections in Nigeria’s history,
even
in the face of alleged intimidation and sabotage by some of his own staff and
officials of the Jonathan administration.
“Chairman Jega’s leadership was instrumental
to Nigeria’s successful general elections in 2015,” said IFES President and
CEO, Bill Sweeney.
But was Jega indeed the messiah he is
acclaimed to be in Nigeria’s ever wooly and corruption-infested electoral
process? Were the 2015 elections really successful or were they deemed free,
fair and transparent simply because the opposition won?
What made the two elections conducted under
Jega’s watch more transparent and credible than previous ones? Can available
facts validate claims that he delivered on his mandate?
If his mandate in the 2015 polls was to
ensure a Muhammadu Buhari presidency, willy-nilly, he did excellently
well. If
that is what the praise-singing is all about, then, he deserves even more
accolades.
Anything short of that is sheer hypocrisy,
Nigeria’s biggest undoing.
Why?
After Jega’s first outing as INEC Chairman in
2011, election-related violence in Northern Nigeria left more than 1,000
people
dead.
The victims, according to Human Rights Watch,
were killed in three days of rioting in 12 Northern states of Adamawa,
Bauchi,
Borno, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Niger, Sokoto, Yobe, and
Zamfara.
The violence, which began with widespread
protests by supporters of the then main opposition candidate, Buhari, of the
Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), following the re-election of Jonathan,
of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), also left more than 65,000 people
internally displaced.
The polls were largely riddled with
malpractices, logistical deficiencies and procedural inconsistencies with
voter
turnout of about 78 per cent in the South South and the South East,
particularly in the presidential election, which analysts insist exceeded the
national average by at least 50 per cent.
Yet, Corinne Dufka, then senior West Africa
researcher at Human Rights Watch, claimed that “the April elections were
heralded as among the fairest in Nigeria’s history” while grudgingly
admitting
that “they also were among the bloodiest”, even as she urged “the newly
elected
authorities to quickly build on the democratic gains from the elections by
bringing to justice those who orchestrated these horrific crimes and
addressing
the root causes of the violence.”
Of course, nobody was punished for the
heinous crime even as the presidential election divided the country along
ethnic and religious lines.
Then fast forward to 2015. The elections that
garnered world acclaim for Jega are coming out unstuck at the tribunals.
As I write, 82 elections have been annulled
and still counting. Even by Nigerian standards, this is quite staggering. And
so alarmed was Jega’s successor, Mahmoud Yakubu, that he has decided to
launch
an investigation.
On Thursday, January 21, Yakubu said the INEC
will study the circumstances that led to the nullifications and evolve
measures
to tackle the issues.
“Now, we have 82 elections nullified by the
Court of Appeal, two of which will still proceed to the Supreme Court. But in
addition to the nullified elections, we have 15 other elections where
petitioners were declared winners by the courts.
“The courts did not decide that we should
conduct re-runs there. They said that we should issue Certificates of
Return to
those declared winners by the courts,” he explained.
The number of annulled elections in 2015 is
48 or 141.2 per cent more than the 34 elections nullified in 2011, while only
20 were cancelled in 2007.
These are statistics coming out of the INEC
itself. A report in one of its news bulletins recently said the INEC will
conduct at least 78 re-run elections in 2016 based on verdicts issued by the
Court of Appeal.
“A breakdown of the elections indicates that
the commission will conduct 10 senatorial elections, 12 state constituency
elections and 37 state assembly elections.
“Others are 17 federal constituency elections
and two governorship re-run elections, subject to the verdict of the Supreme
Court,” the bulletin said.
There would have been more annulments and
rerun polls if Jonathan did what Buhari did in 2011; that is, reject the
result
of the election. Of course, 2015 would have also been bloodier if Jonathan
had
joined his detractors on the scrap heap of impunity and bloodletting.
Ironically, to conduct elections that
resulted in the worst number of fatalities and highest number of
annulments and
rerun polls at very huge cost to Nigeria, the INEC got more money under
Jega’s
watch than any of his predecessors.
Unlike former President Olusegun Obasanjo who
starved the INEC of funds in order to blackmail it into doing his devious
bidding, Jega’s INEC didn’t suffer such indignities under Jonathan.
Granted, the electoral tide seemed to have
sharply turned against Jonathan before the 2015 ballot and there seemed to
have
been a preponderance of opinion that the opposition may, indeed, carry the
day
because not only had the Jonathan Presidency become a huge joke, but also,
many
Nigerians had good reason to be concerned about being put in the cross-hairs
over a potential Jonathan victory.
But the fact that the man most Nigerians
seemed to have preferred was declared winner of the poll does not ipso facto
make the election free and fair.
Put differently, the possibility that in a
free and fair poll, Buhari would have defeated Jonathan is no proof that,
warts
and all, the 2015 elections passed the integrity test.
Yakubu is understandably perturbed. Short of
accusing his predecessor of giving a tailwind to fraudulent polls, he asserts
diplomatically that he wants to find out why many elections were annulled.
Good!
But the answer, to my mind, is simple. The
elections Jega conducted in 2015 were fundamentally flawed. Insisting,
therefore, that he erected fool-proof electoral architecture which his
successors only need to consolidate on is disingenuous and a disservice to
this
country.
The consequence is that the first two
post-Jega elections were inconclusive though they were stand-alone polls
because they were predicated on fraudulent foundation.
Truth be told, Jega left behind no solid
foundation that anyone can build on. To claim otherwise simply because
Buhari,
this time around, benefited from Jega’s electoral sleight of the hand, is
sheer
hypocrisy.
And the price a nation pays for getting
addicted to a diet of hypocrisy is that at the end of the day, nothing
changes,
at least not for the better, as the recent Kogi and Bayelsa governorship
polls
proved.
*Ikechukwu Amaechi is the Editor-in-Chief and Managing
Director of TheNiche
newspaper. He could be reached with ikechukwuamaechi@yahoo.com