Chief Ezenwa Nwagwu is the Chairman Partners for Electoral Reform (PER) and board member of YIAGA Africa. In this interview with BODE OLAGOKE, he speaks on the recent elections, why Nigerians must protect INEC as an institution and some of the lies and propaganda against the outcome of the election, among others.
The just concluded general elections came with its challenges and some have described it as one of the worst elections, what’s your take?
As an election enthusiast, one who has participated in elections, not just in the country or in the African continent, but one has also been privileged to, not just observe elections, but also prepare election observers in some other countries of the world. I feel that after the 2023 election, it appears that Nigeria needs to set up a Truth Squad. I call it a truth squad because we need a truth squad because, if we don’t do that, we will then be consumed by the lies, the propaganda, and the misinformation and disinformation that characterised public commentary and engagement after the election. First is the preponderance of the wholesale condemnation of the election by clear partisans.
You know, everyone who has lost election believes, and you hear them say that ‘this is the worst election since 1999.’ And that for me is scary, It is scary because it is not only a diabolical lie, it is founded on ignorance, ignorance of history, ignorance of process. Where are we coming from? It’s very, very important that we know that the journey for 2023 did not start in 2023. We have had elections, and those who say this is the worst, I actually have been reflecting in my head, what could be the basis of that? We transited from military to civil rule in 1999.
That 1999 election was midwifed actually by the military. The next order of election that we had was 2003. But even before then, we started political party engagement in the 1920s by the colonialists. It was the colonialists, who introduced political parties, and those political parties were actually used to serve the interests they were introduced and ran by the colonialists. But our people who got into it, got into a platform that they used to engage the colonialists, right? And it was a national platform, especially for Lagos and Calabar.
That gave opportunity for indigenes to participate in the activities of the colonial government. We moved on till about the 40s when we started having ethnic engagements, the parties such as the NCNC then called the National Council for Nigerian and Cameroon, and then later became National Council for Nigerian Citizens was a national national party. And that was the engagement, then we went back to ethnic parties throughout the 1940s, the NPCs, that’s the, Northern Peoples Congress, NEPU and all of those, we started going back to organising and mobilising of political parties along ethnic lines. We left there, up to the 70s to about 79, that was when the constitution started making it clear that we cannot tolerate ethnic political parties, and religious parties that are built on religion or ethnicity. So we started thinking of national parties, and all of that. So we came from somewhere, then we had military rule. The military rule impacted on democratic practice.
A lot of people today, who are involved in this thing, have no experience of democracy. All they knew is the immediate effects culture that we inherited. So this background is important, that we came into 1998 election organised and by the military. By 2003, there was no culture of expedience in terms of political organising. So the political parties that we had, were manifesting all kinds of negative tendencies.
By that time, money bags have started taking over the parties, members no longer owned those parties. It now became the people who had the resources that owned parties. Membership dues were no longer paid, so it became a winner takes all. Do or Die really, that was what the then President called it. So we did not have a voter register, an authentic voter register in 2003. We didn’t have properly, indeed we had shoddy organised elections, and we had outright rigging. In most cases you could even be voting and the result of where you’re voting will be announced. In most cases the results were written in hotel rooms. That is where we came from.
By 2007, the winner of that election had come out to say the process that brought me is not something that I can be boastful about and he set up the Justice Uwais Reform Committee, which has some recommendations. But from that process, we started organising to have a voter register and INEC bought about 130,000 laptops went to the wards to go and do registration afresh. And then we had a temporary voters card. After that, we went into smart card readers. We have permanent voters card now. So this is the process that we have come through to get to 2023. By 2023, INEC had a plan.
That plan was shared with political parties, civil society, the media and all of that. We started with voter registration exercise, that voter registration produced for us a 93 million voting strength from 84million in 2019. Then we went into candidate selection process. The political parties recruited people who will fly under their banners. By our Constitution, individuals don’t run for election. In the ballot, there is no individuals, what you have in the ballot is parties. You get what I’m saying? So from that point, we have been presented with the 18 political parties who fielded candidates to run this election. We went from there to creation of new polling units, all the voting points that used to be voting points were converted. So we now have 176,000 polling units away from the 120,000 that we used to have. All that was to create access for more voters to participate in the electoral process. So after that, there was claim and objection. The voter Register was placed in the ward and in the polling units for one week, for citizens to go and check whether their names were omitted or not. After all of that, we came to February 25th.
So, election is a process, it is not event. I had to come to this process. So if all of this process had been concluded, significantly, it came to the D day. What happens on D Day? The D day is opening of polls, accreditation and voting, collation of results, announcement and then the new Electoral Act, which is also part of the gains that has made 2023 what it is, is that we have a new Electoral Act that has significant things that are embedded in it and it was the struggle of the media and the civil society that produced that law. What is in that Act? That INEC will have its money one year before elections, that people living with disabilities will be provided with assistive materials, not whether the EMB likes it or not. It is now compulsory that there can be review of results on like when once a returning officer makes a call, you have to go to court to reverse it. Now, INEC can reverse and we saw that in Kano where Dogawa who had procured victory through coercion was cancelled instantly by the review of INEC and quite a lot of other issues. And many of the results that are coming from the states are being reviewed in Abuja. Unfortunately, there are people who are claiming hero status on account of something that were reviewed in Abuja, and they were mandated to go and announce it.
So I’m building this for the process. On that D Day, voting and accreditation, according to every report available was 98 percent success, meaning it went well. Significantly, is the issue results transmission, because I need to put this out there, result transmission process is manual. It is not electronic. INEC results transmission process is manual. Manual because once the results are collated and announced, it is entered manually into a form EC8a, and handed over to party agents and security. And if the media is interested, they can also get a copy before it is captured and uploaded into IReV. Now, the process of result transmission had worked effectively. The place that INEC incinerated itself was at the point of real time transmission. But the real time transmission is an audit. Result transmission process has already been concluded in the polling unit. So this IReV that has become the issue is an auditor. The IReV is an auditor. If the result that has been produced from the polling unit and taken to the collation centre is not matching with what was brought, the returning officer can refer to IReV; if there’s a dispute. If there is no dispute, then it is not important to go to the IReV. It is like the VAR in football. You have to score a goal. If there is doubt about the goal, you go to a VAR. You don’t subject every goal to VAR just because the opponent does not like the goal that has been scored; and says let us take every goal that has been scored to VAR. I think that is where the problem is.
Are you saying that INEC performed well?
I am saying that INEC performed creditably well on the 25th of February in terms of process, the hitch that it had was in terms of real time transmission of results. And the jury is not yet out as to whether it is internal subterfuge or whether it is deliberate or whether it is technological glitch as we are made to see. So the thrust of my conversation is that we cannot completely continue the narrative of saying everything was bad. We must also put out those things that worked significantly well in 2023. And one of the things we must protect going forward is the BVAS. The BVAS has helped us to ensure that Rivers cannot bring 3 million votes that used to happen in times past. Rivers, Lagos and Kano were the last results that used to come in every election in Nigeria. They waited until all other results are announced, but in 2023, Lagos results was among the first and it produced very significant low number of votes. So what used to happen, when people talk about voter apathy is that, I told you that we came from a place where we write results in hotel rooms and tell people to go to court. But politicians in 2023 were afraid of the BVAS, they don’t know what to do with it. And that accounted for the low numbers that you have seen.
Meaning that some of the claims that we have made before in terms of our voting strengths, the BVAS has exposed all of that to be as a lie. It is important to stress this issues, because I said before that the foundation for conversations and public commentary has been more of propaganda than one that confronts the truth. And many times the issue around truth is that propaganda runs faster than the truth. So, propaganda is stretching the country, stretching its bones. And one of the intentions is to criminalise the institutions and make INEC look weak and ineffective because of just one challenge in the whole gamut of the process, which is the transmission. I hear people say ‘oh, the transmission of result impacted,’ I said no. If it is not celebrating our romancing the indolence of the political parties who have collated their results, they should have a parallel vote tabulation. We were inviting people to our own data centre. How many political parties invited all of you journalists to their own data centre to see the way results were being computed? They didn’t do that, even when they came to collation centre, they didn’t have anything. They were shouting: “stop results”. just like that? And that is gaining currency. So my background to all of this is that we need to save the BVAS, we need to save the institutions and protect them.
But there were reports of violence and suppression of votes in many polling units. Does this give credence to the complaints of irregularities by the opposition?
Violence, suppression of votes, all of those things happened. But always remember that we have 176,000 polling units. So in talking about violence, we will not use purported observation, we have to use statistics and science. That is to say, in 176,000 polling units, how many polling units were affected by the violence, the voter suppression and all of that? And when we say that, we should also refer to what the media and civil society said when 19 new INEC officials were appointed. We came out to say many of these people who are appointed newly lacked experience, they have partisan background. Check where you have crisis in terms of opening of polls and see whether they are not located in the states that we highlighted, that there will be challenges.
Many of them subverted INEC. We told people that somebody in Sokoto contested election as at 2015, under the banner of a political party, you appointed that person into INEC. We told Nigerians that somebody’s elder brother is a member of the National Working Committee of a political party, yet you appointed that person, no conflict of issue. When we took it to the National Assembly, the politicians who are crying today, they were absent from that conversation.
They didn’t near that conversation. So some of the manifestations that you see are a result of the internal subterfuge. Some of those who want to kill Mahmoud, let us also remember that Mahmoud came into INEC in November 2015. When he came in 2015, 10, or more active civil society actors were appointed into INEC. By 2023, the politicians pulled out all of those people, except one or two. Nigerians kept quiet and allowed that process. So the challenge for us is to reconstruct our narrative in a way that singles out the places where there were problems and not paint the whole election in black. And that for me is the cross of my engagement.
Those politicians who didn’t show up when the CSOs took this matter to the National Assembly but are now crying and feeling aggrieved, can we then say that it serves them right?
Like I said earlier, election is a process. Election is not an event. Election starts from the appointment of those who will supervise that election. Apart from the electoral integrity mix that we are going to have, the Electoral framework is also important, just as the appointment of those who will run the election. Look at Abia state for instance, on the day of the election. The resident electoral commissioner was locked up in a hotel. It took Commissioner of Police and the DSS to go and find him. Look at Sokoto, INEC had to ask those two to excuse them. In many of the states, they gave them money to activate RAC, they did not activate the RAC till it was late.
They gave them money to get vehicles, get 100 and something vehicles, some got only 20 and asked those vehicles to be going back and forth. We have continually maintained that Nigerians, our vigilance should not be short sighted; we should not be short sighted in our vigilance. If we want credible elections, we have to follow the whole process, all the hog. But beyond all of that, this is one election that has thrown up something we have not seen in Nigeria. The chairman of a ruling party, the chairman of a ruling party lost his states.
The President lost his state, the presidential candidate of a dominant political party lost his states. The governors, some of them of the ruling party, lost their states. I don’t know anywhere in the world where somebody will lose to make other person look good. I’m still thinking in my head where a politician will say let me lose so that I can win in other places, because it is a thing of boosting for politicians that they won their place. So to lose an election is something that reflects that the process is effective, and it could not be manipulated. Look at Nasarawa for example, where many of them were actually members of the ruling party, but because of the internal crisis of their political party, they had to go to SDP for instance, and won election under that banner.
So if you say the election does not go well, are you going to tell Senator Wadada to join you in that song? Are you going to tell the many Labour Party candidates all around the country who had won election, because if it was different, if it was when we were writing it in hotels, those people will not smell victory, because they will be told to go to courts? So these outcomes also validate the fact that first and foremost our BVAS has helped us, that at the top too, you are seeing review of elections. INEC has set up, abiding by the electron Act, reviewing most of the results. What happened in Abia, Obingwa for instance, it was not the intimidation that happened, happened there. It came to Abuja, it was Abuja that recalculated that result before it can come to what it is and asked that professor to go and announce
So what is the way forward, and why should Nigerians trust INEC in the off season governorship elections in Bayelsa, Kogi and the rest?
We have told you about INEC capture. We have told you about internal subterfuge as well. So the election audit will expose all of that, but in comparing Kogi and Imo and Bayelsa that will be coming on later, is comparing apples and oranges. Ekiti, Edo, Ondo, Osun. What is the number of the polling units? And Nigerians always make that mistake. “This Ondo election will be a litmus test.” Everything is a litmus test, without comparing that you have 176,000 polling units. And what is the challenge. The hacking alone on the backend, the hits that came on INEC system was shocking. I’m just saying that we need to be nuanced, the country needs to be nuanced in the way it engages election. And it must engage election from an informed point of view. So that partisan interests does not overshadow the commentary.
People who have knowledge about this must speak up and not allow closet secessionists who have trotted the different platforms and venting their frustration to take over the narrative. That’s my challenge. And I’m saying those who have this knowledge must separate what has gone well, and what has not gone well and allow the judiciary that has responsibility, not by itself. It didn’t give itself that assignment. It is also part of the electoral process. Tribunals are not been set up ordinarily. There are election petition tribunals that are also set up and I gave you example, I said President Muhammadu Buhari in 2007 won many parts of the country and by the virtue of that he was claiming that with that kind of results that he had, that he must have won everywhere.
The court said no, you did not fulfill the conditions. There was protest. There were all kinds of things but we are here. By the time he won in 2015. The courts now told other people that they did not fulfill the condition. He was now saying the Judiciary is the last hope of the common man. Those people who lost are saying judiciary is a scam. That’s where we are. Those of you who are knowledgeable, and I know many of you are, should put this narrative out and make the country know that 2023 was not Armageddon. It was not a disaster. That INEC performed creditably well up to the point where that challenges came. Where that challenge came from, time will expose it. But for now, we will have to live as a country and allow the people who have responsibility to look into the issue, to look into it and the outcomes produced from it can be fine for all of us.
