After months of legal fireworks, the Supreme Court ruled on a plethora of issues surrounding the February 25 presidential election. But this ruling has also thrown up some pertinent issues concerning the electoral system in the country, writes KUNLE ODEREMI.
Since Nigeria returned to civil rule in 1999, no general election has been held without a great fight among the key presidential candidates over the outcome. Each test of will and guts by the gladiators throws up very crucial and fundamental issues that usually shape electoral management.
The protracted battle over the results of the 2023 presidential election has also brought to the fore germane matters, especially aftermath of Thursday’s judgment by the Supreme Court on the appeals filed by the presidential candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi of the Labour Party. The verdict came amid the tense political climate generated by the acrimony and bitterness because of the accusations and counter accusations bordering on issues concerning the eligibility, academic qualifications, and other backgrounds of the candidates, especially that of President Bola Tinubu, the standard-bearer of the All Progressives Congress (APC), whose election was upheld by the apex court after a season of pulsating legal fireworks.
In its preparations for the general election, the seventh since 1999, the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC had proclaimed a total of 93.5 million prospective registered voters. This was after it had activated 2,673 additional permanent voter card registration centres across the country. The National Assembly amendment of the Electoral Act further empowered the commission on the introduction of more innovations; especially technologies LLC that would help drive the process, thus the use of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for fingerprint and facial biometric identification and authentication of prospective voters.
The orchestrated campaign by the stakeholders on the IREV Portal designed to harbour the results made it a reference point prior to the elections. In its judgment, the Supreme Court declared that IREV was no collation centre or the commission under compulsion to have used it as initially presumed by a lot of Nigerians. This seeming greyness on the issue surrounding IREV informs call by some vested interest in the legal battle that began at the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) and concluded at the Supreme Court on Thursday for an earnest commencement of the process of amending the Electoral Act 2022 and relevant portions of the 1999 Constitution to remove all forms of ambiguity before the 2027 general election.
One of the advocates of a fresh amendment of the Electoral Act is Professor Paul Ananaba, who was counsel for the Labour Party at the courts. He believes that some politicians tried to exploit the seeming lacuna in the law to compromise electoral and political matters. However, he said the process of amending the Electoral Act should involve all other critical stakeholders in the system if there has to be a paradigm shift. Ananaba said the legal practitioners who are involved in handling election petitions, among others, should be carried along to make their inputs.
One other area that the Senior Advocate of Nigeria underscored is the timeframe provided for by the law over issues relating to petitions arising from the conduct of elections. Professor Ananaba said the current 180 days set aside for aggrieved parties to file petitions could be abridged to two weeks since the agents of the candidates and political parties at the polling units at the time of the elections already have copies of the results. He submitted that the process should be fast-tracked by the tribunals and Supreme Court using just two weeks to treat the petitions and appeals therefrom so that all the election matters are concluded before the swearing-in of whoever emerges as winner at the poll.
While some have suggested that Nigeria adopt the Kenya model, others like another legal luminary, Adebayo Ojo differed because, according to him, Nigeria and Kenya do not have a similar electoral and political system. Ojo, who is a member of the legal team of President Tinubu, posited elections could be conducted nine months before the date of the winner taking the oath of office. Ojo argued that said such an arrangement would allow matters concerning elections and the outcomes to be resolved without disruption. The interface by the two legal titans also touched on the issue of evidence act in the dispensation of justice.
There is the question of who should have the onus over grave allegations arising from the petitions and claims of aggrieved candidates after the election. Ananaba is of the view that the burden of proof over alleged serious breaches of the law should be on the shoulders of the INEC, and not on the candidates. However, Ojo again differed that since the Evidence Act remains the guiding light, especially on issues bordering on criminal allegations like forgery.
He explained that since the parties are required under the law to have agents at the polling units, the onus of proving allegations of fraud and breach of the guidelines, procedure, and process of elections should be on those who make such allegations.
One of the grounds that the PEPC and the Supreme Court ruled against the candidate of Peter Obi was that a number of the witnesses that testified at the tribunal were indeed from the collation centre, and not as polling agents. There are more than 176,000 polling units across the country.
The figure rose remarkably after the INEC activated an additional 2,673 polling units before the general election. Each of the 18 political parties that fielded candidates for the elections is supposed to have at least two agents at each unit. But, Ezenwa Nwagwu, who is the chairman of Partners for Electoral Reforms, said many of the parties hardly had agents in the majority of the polling units due to the huge logistics arrangements usually involved.
It was also alleged that most of the ones that often show up at the polling units often disappear once the elections are concluded without recourse to their principals. So, it becomes difficult for the parties to have reliable records for proper documentation. In short, a lot of the so-called agents are said to be poorly equipped in terms of capacity, depth, and knowledge of the importance of the assignment in their hands.
From the antagonism on display before the apex court settled the battle over the winner of the 2023 presidential poll, another subject that had remained on the front burner was about edibility of candidates. Parties set committees to screen their candidates before submitting their names to the INEC. The thoroughness of the screening exercise pales into insignificance often as most of the names as candidates get the clean bill of health. Issues relating to their eligibility end up at the election petition tribunals.
Coupled with this is what many political actors and observers describe as the lack of internal democracy in the choice of candidates. Unpopular aspirants are imposed on party members by influential chieftains and power brokers with the attendant bitterness and anger. All the four leading presidential candidates in the last general election had their individual share of the fallouts of the conventions that threw them up. The dist over those party primaries are yet to settle.
A former top functionary of the INEC, Oluwoke Osaze-Uzzi recalled how the political parties tried to frustrate the efforts of the commission to further firm up the Electoral management in the country. The ex-INEC national commissioner in charge of Voter Education cited the attempt by the commission to rejig the guidelines for the registration of political parties so that the system could work seamlessly. But the late legal icon, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, and the late governor of Kaduna State, Alhaji Balarabe Musa, literally torpedoed the exercise through a legal battle that terminated at the Supreme Court.
There was also an instance when one of the current leading political gladiators kicked against the scrutiny of the backgrounds of presidential candidates being put forward for elections. Therefore, the INEC does not have the power and mandate to disqualify the candidate of a party.
Meanwhile, with 12 days to the off-season governorship elections in Kogi, Imo and Bayelsa, the apex court has further raised public concern over the place of IREV in the conduct of the elections. The uncertainty surrounding the electronic transmission of the results is underlined by the experience of the country in the February election. However, the portal served its purpose in subsequent elections after the presidential election. Osaze-Uzzi, who said the commission did tremendously in other off-season elections in other places such as Edo and Osun states, expressed confidence that the INEC had the opportunity to raise the ante in the November 11 governorship elections in those three states.
Beyond the off-season elections and by-elections occasioned by unforeseen circumstances and judgment by some election petition tribunals, some prominent groups and campaigners have offered suggestions on how to improve electoral management in the country.
The Centre for Transparency Advocacy (CTA) comprises dozens of groups that monitored the last general election. One of its major recommendations after the elections was that the media, Civil Society Organisations, and all well-meaning citizens must demand that in order to achieve free, fair, and credible elections, INEC must maintain its independence. It equally declared that every stakeholder must rise to condemn any attempt to coerce the commission and its leadership to jettison the use of BVAS machines in subsequent elections. Above all, the CTA suggested that the use of BVAS for uploading polling unit results should be used in all elections, including the transmission of results through the IREV in real-time.
Some individuals believe that the INEC must be unbundled so that the commission can fully maximise its potential. They often recollect the report of the Justice Uwais panel on the INEC that made a lot of far-reaching recommendations filling the flawed 2007 presidential election. On his part, activist lawyer, Ebun Olu-Adegboruwa, again canvassed for the unbundling of the INEC shortly after the PEPC judgment on the presidential election.
He said: “There can be no real victory in the resolution of the legal issues by the court when the fabric of our democratic engagements seems to have been hijacked and compromised. Part of the lesson in this process is for us to go back and review the electoral process and the litigation following it. INEC, as it is presently constituted, cannot birth any credible election in Nigeria. In all, maybe there was too much expectation that the status quo would be upturned, whereas many of the principles of law canvassed had long been settled by the apex court. While encouraging all parties to continue in towing the paths already defined by law for the ventilation of grievances, we owe Nigeria an urgent duty to dismantle INEC, urgently.” Similarly, the Senator Ken Nnamani-led Constitution and Electoral Reform Committee (CERC) set by the APC had canvassed for the unbundling of the INEC and the creation of a Political Parties & Electoral Offences Commission to take over from INEC the responsibility of regulating political parties and monitoring of their primaries.
The INEC chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, is on the same page with those suggesting that the commission should be unbundled. He once noted that the attempt towards that direction had been delayed more than a decade after the Uwais committee made such a recommendation. He said: “The public hearing on the bill was being done 13 years after the recommendation of the Uwais Committee in 2008. And beyond that, there had also been so many reports basically calling for action on electoral offenders. No doubt, INEC is saddled with so many responsibilities ranging from the registration and regulation of political parties, registration of voters, delineation of constituencies, the conduct of elections/by-elections/referendum/recall, and prosecution of electoral offences, among others.
“We look forward to the day when highly placed sponsors of thuggery, including chieftains of political parties and candidates, will be prosecuted. The tasks are Herculean. At last, we are here today for public input into the Bill for the establishment of the Electoral Offences Commission, 13 years after the recommendations of the Uwais Committee (2008), echoed by the Lemu Committee (2011) and, most recently, the Nnamani Committee (2017).”
The clamour for the unbundling of the INEC was part of the resolutions of the Senate at a retreat held in Akwa Ibom last week it stated in a communiqué: INEC should be unbundled to improve its efficiency and effectiveness in the preparation and conduct of elections.”
Like Yakubu observed long ago, this particular suggestion has been on the drawing board with the authorities showing the lack of the political will to act decisively. More core issues keep surfacing at every election circle in the country. Will there be a difference this time?
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