We may not have heard the last word on the amendments to the Constitution and final shape of the Electoral Act. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is working towards meeting the very high expectations of Nigerians. The political environment is dotted with events, manoeuvres and scheming, all of which will have profound impact on the preparations for and the conduct of the 2011 elections themselves.
And all these are being challenged by insufficiency of time to resolve, as well as the fear and danger of the failure to actually organize credible elections in 2011. Perhaps the only thing one could say with certainty is that there is no alternative to having a democratically-elected government in place on the 29th of May, 2011.
There is a raging and worrying controversy over what constitutes the correct procedure for constitutional amendments. Threats of litigation abound, and the possibilities that opposing parties may dig-in will erode the precious time there is left to put the matter of the legal framework for the 2011 elections to rest. The amendments to the 2006 Electoral Act, which are tied to the conclusion of the Constitutional amendments themselves, are yet to be signed into an Act, and INEC is already working as if the 2010 Act is its enabling law. INEC and the nation are virtually resigned to having elections in January 2011, yet whether this is the law is uncertain. There is also the near absence of a serious discussion on whether INEC can actually produce an acceptable voters’ register before January, 2011.
Critical timelines are at risk to the extent that these arguments and legal issues are not resolved. As at now, the enabling law for the conduct of the 2011 elections is the Electoral Act 2006, but this does not reflect many of the innovations and amendments that are being proposed in the 2010 Act or in the Constitution. INEC has told the nation that it has virtually no voters’ register, and will compile a new one before the end of November, 2010. New issues with potential to create new controversies, such as the reported attempts to legislate the Order of Elections are being debated. The nation’s appetite for credible elections has been whetted by the appointment of many men and women of integrity and proven competence into INEC, yet there is very little on the ground to demonstrate that it takes a lot more than a group of good people in INEC to deliver credible elections.
The absence of a legal framework for the conduct of the 2011 Elections represents an unacceptable and threatening situation.
There is an urgent need to revisit the amendments which have brought forward the elections to January 2011. In spite of INEC’S commitment to operate and deliver within the timelines which it will have, I have doubts over its ability to undertake a huge array of tasks in addition to preparing for credible elections in January 2011. In the first place, even with all the money it has asked for being made available to it within the time requested, the mechanics of procuring and deploying equipment and material, training of personnel, conduct of field exercises, processing of data and ultimately producing a new and reliable voters register complete with biometrics containing 70 million voters is near-impossible task, even with the best efforts of INEC. The Commission needs a lot more time, say until February 2011 to produce a brand new Voters Register.
Whose interests will be served by a situation in which INEC is stampeded into an election that is poorly-planned and conducted? What will the nation gain by having elections in January 2011, with all the booby traps, even if they are unintended? Is INEC being asked to undertake an impossible task, for which the nation will pay dearly?
The nation will lose nothing if the leadership revisits the provision that elections must hold in January 2011. The rationale for holding elections in January, and allowing all litigations to be concluded before May 29th which was made by the Electoral Reform Committee (E.R.C) was well founded, but we have lost too much time to make it useful at this stage.
Another contentious issue is the reported attempt by the legislature to include provisions prescribing the Order of Elections in the 2010 Act. We need to be clear about this issue: not only is there a Supreme Court ruling against this when it was earlier attempted, the manner in which it is being introduced now into the Bill almost as an afterthought cannot be removed from the context of current manoeuvres over particular candidates and the debates over securing a level playing field. The attempt to legislate the Order of Elections is likely to be defeated in the end. But there should be political will on the part of the president and leadership of the legislature to resolve this matter quickly.
In terms of the need to address other critical issues that are central to organizing credible elections in 2011, one of the most important is INEC’s commitment to a critical self-assessment, and a willingness to restructure itself to achieve the required levels of integrity, competence and reliability. We need to know what happened to the mutilated register of voters, how it was mutilated, who did it, and at what cost to the nation. The leadership of INEC needs to be convinced that it has no fifth columnists within it.
Another round of elections which will be roundly condemned as organized fraud against the Nigerian people will fatally injure our democratic process.
Excerpts of remarks by Dr Baba-Ahmed, a former INEC scribe, at 25th annual conference of Federation of Muslim Women’s Association of Nigeria (FOMWAN) in Abuja last week.
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