Comrade Nwagwu Ezenwa is the Chairman Partners for Electoral Reform (PER) and board member of YIAGA. In this interview with BODE OLAGOKE, he speaks on why Olisa Agbakoba SAN, was wrong to call for INEC Chairman’s sack and lists some necessary reforms INEC should do going forward, among others.
Some persons have recently asked that the chairman of INEC be suspended or removed from office. How would you react to this, especially, with the outcome of the 2023 election?
For me, a lot of people use sophistry to engage election issues. Just recently, Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, hugely respected because of his contribution to the struggle for the restoration of democracy and human rights in Nigeria had taken a broadside, asking for the sack of the chairman of the Electoral Commission and he hinged his call on what, what we know, which is the logistic challenges that dodged the 2023 presidential election.
But let me just say it clearly that for many people now, what they do is, ‘believe me, because my name is Olisa Agbakoba’, but we’re not just going to believe you because your name is Olisa Agbakoba. We’re going to believe you only from the point of the knowledge of the real issues that you are able to exude. Number one, when he made that call, he stayed quite a lot on the issue of logistics. But anybody who followed the 2023 elections might have been able to look at the context in which that election held.
The issue of the unnecessary colouring of the Naira, which brought about shortage of cash both for citizens and for institutions, and for an organisation like INEC that its activities actually depend on vendor relationship, that catastrophic policy of the CBN was a setback for logistics for the election. We also know the issue of fuel scarcity during that period.
The circumstance around that election was held around the period of fuel scarcity and the rest of them.” In good time, the issue of perennial and logistic challenge is something we’ve not been able to cure, because we’re also a big country. And we’re also now battling with issues of insecurity, banditry in some parts of the country. So under that kind of climate, somebody who is a participant observer in election issues should not make the kind of call that Olisa Agbakoba made.
Even more importantly, he (Agbakoba) also said recently that he made a shocking discovery that our election is manual, and I asked him, ‘Where have you been?’ If as a SAN you didn’t know that election in Nigeria is manual, then it means that you have no right to make a call on issues that are not very substantive. And being a SAN does not confer knowledge of electoral issues. You have to have a painstaking participant engagement with the process to be able to understand it. And that for me is important. What are the real issues, what are the issues of 2023 elections? The matter is at the tribunal, so there are very limited areas in which we can intervene, but let us put it in context that we had a very difficult period.
It was the first time that we did not postpone election in the last three election cycles. We braved the odds. In 2011, Professor of Attahiru Jega called off election when election had already started. We postponed in 2011, we postponed in 2015. So, if we successfully pushed through in spite of these challenges, I think the people who manage that election should be commended, in spite of these challenges that I have outlined, And I think that people should not use sophistry to iengage election issues. If you also know that people hide under one finger you you are a politician with partisan inclinations and the outcome of the election doesn’t favour you or go the way you want. And then you start making a call pretending to be now a rights advocate.
But a lot of people, apart from Agbakoba, share the view that INEC didn’t perform well in the election. What’s your take?
The work of the leadership of INEC is to inspire confidence in the electoral process. And you don’t expect the leadership of INEC to come out to say before the election that there will be glitches. They should inspire confidence. And one of the ways to inspire confidence is a process that is their own.
This process is entirely INEC’s initiative, the IREV. And I think, many times, we make that mistake. It is part of the reform process that the Prof Mahmoud led commission initiated to do what? to help interested parties to follow the election.
Now, it is not a civil society creation. It is not a media creation. It is INEC itself that said ‘look, we’ve checked our records, there is no way anybody can get 1999 election results in the cloud, there is no way we can get 2007 election results in the cloud. Now and I need for for this to be properly put in context and understood. The issue of transmission of results is an add on. I don’t know how many times we will put this, it is something that is added.
The conclusion of election collation announcement of results ends when form EC8a has been given to a party agent. Once the results is entered manually, because election is polling unit-centric.
It is very important to underscore this. It is a polling unit event. When everybody has casted their votes and it is counted. It is recorded in a form called form EC8a, that form is given to the party agents. It is given to security. It is that result that is entered manually, that is now uploaded into the IREV. Now what does that tell you, results and announcements has ended.
This one is for academics, it is for interested parties who want to follow their election. And there’s a leeway also that this IREV is internet dependent. What does that mean? You need network to be able to upload. Now INEC says it had glitches. When these glitches happened, they failed in communicating.
There is no excuse for that. They spent 48 hours keeping Nigerians in the dark in terms of the presidential election. But like I said, it is an add on. But today, majority of those results are available for those who have party agents to now crosscheck and then use it to approach the tribunal. It is INEC that created it for itself.
That is number one. Number two is to say the election is a process. It starts with the opening of the polls. Polls did not open in a lot of polling units on time, because of this logistics challenges that we have already outlined. What happened is that where there were those challenges, there was an extension of time. And INEC brought in what you call the BVAS. This BVAS is an identity theft manager. Anybody who comes to the BVAS is identified as the real owner of the PVC before you can vote. Now this BVAS from all the reports – EU, domestic, international reports tell you that accreditation and voting went in 98% of the polling units. That’s a huge credit, it is an excellent mark.
Now where we have these issues is transmission which by that period, election has ended. A serious political party already had copies of those results and could then do a cross check. So harping on conclusion of an election and using that as a mark as to whether election was good or bad is what I have been talking about, using sophistry to engage election issues, not from a participant observatory knowledge of how election processes went.
We were in Kano reviewing this 2023 election; we were Enugu reviewing the 2023 election, with traditional rulers, civil society organisations and religious leaders, and shockingly, and I’m talking about respected traditional leaders and Chairmen of Christian Association of Nigeria, the Imams of those states and all of them in the room.
They started with this kind of exuberance in terms of, you know election was this and that. And the question was asked in this hall of 100 people, how many people here have any form of the Electoral Act. And in that hall of about 100 people, we had less than eight people who had their Electoral Act. And out of that eight, only about two have read it. and they pontificated on election. The fact that somebody is something does not mean that that person has invested time in understanding this process.
And for those who understand it, we were even criminalised from even providing the knowledge. They want you to apologise for sharing knowledge that you have on a matter that you are engaged in everyday. They want you to apologise for their ignorance.
Do you think INEC failed to educate citizens on some of these processes you have explained?
Nigeria is the only country where people say that you do not carry us along. You should carry yourself along, you should invest in knowing especially if you will have opportunity of public commentary. Because the tragedy of public commentary is that ignorance parades as authority. Yes, there are institutions of states that have responsibility for voter education and for civic education.
NOA for instance. Have you bothered about the budget of the NOA? What is the budget of NOA to carry out these enormous responsibility? It is NOA that will talk on polio. It is NOA that will talk on water sanitation. But has anybody taken the pains to say this organisation that has this enormous responsibility what is the amount of money that is available for them to do this work? Civil Society Organisations are donor dependent. Oftentimes, you touch these issues, but how much can we do? It’s a big country. There were four reports issued before this election, citing the number of places political parties have presence in the 36 states of the country.
Not many of us have interest, those reports are available. None went to check to know where people have presence or where they dont have presence. INEC published the percentage of party agents that political parties have before this election. How many of us took time to find out what is the percentage of party agents that party ‘A’ had before the election? Many of these political parties were claiming that they have citizen agents. That citizens will be the observers.
That is preposterous because citizens agents do not get form EC8a, a it is only accredited party agents that can collect form EC8A. So if you say you have citizen agents, it means you do not have agents at the polling unit level. And if you don’t have agents at polling unit level, you’ll just be speaking that we are coming from a place where everything that is done was rigged. Let me give you the figures and I want you to check the figures by yourself.
Kano’s voting strength in 2023, according to the voter register is about 6 million. Lagos is about same population, Rivers 3 million and many other places. What we used to have in the past was that those results were kept to balance out whatever happens in different parts of the country. Kano did not bring 2 million out of their 6 million and you don’t know that it is the BVAS that made that happen.
Lagos could not do 2 million out of their 6 million. Rivers did less than 1.5 million or 1.6 million out of the 3 million and before the election, the governor of that state was posing that he will bring his 3 million. BVAS frustrated the ability of politicians to do that. We need to understand politicians and how they think. Part of the challenge for politicians is that the only election that is good is the one they won.
Are you trying to say that INEC does not have any blame in all that happened?. INEC assured Nigerians to upload results in real time but at the end of it all, many Nigerians were not pleased?
There is no way we can dismiss the shenanigans that happened during the election, there were such issues. But the positives, and that’s the point for me, the positives far outweigh the negatives. The positives are so many. Number one, challenge me that the President of a country, as you know how it is done, will just say okay, let me lose in my state. The chairman of a ruling party will lose his constituency to an opposition political party.
Many governors lost their deposits for the National Assembly where they have taken as retirement places. Those positives, for me, were remarkable. I’m not saying that there were no issues. An election is not a church service. Election is a competitive enterprise. We give comfort to the real people who cause challenges in the election. INEC does not cause voter suppression. Politicians do in collaboration with disgruntled INEC officials, right? INEC does not unleash violence; politicians unleash violence, and their political parties.
Now 90% of the time in discussing 2023 election, you focus on INEC and you leave the role of security agents; you leave the role of the political parties and their candidates and the role they play in making bad elections. INEC will bring its ballot box. In the most remote part of this country, there will be ballot box. INEC officials were killed in 2023 election, they are Nigerians. INEC officials were kidnapped.
By whom? Who kidnapped them? Who murdered them. We provide comfort for the political class and their inability to embrace reforms and conduct themselves in a manner that allows for free and fair election. So I’m not saying there were no issues and nobody can say that. But I am more interested in the positives. And I’m saying those who should criticise, when you say INEC said it will upload results real time and it didn’t do so. I am saying that you are dealing with a moral issue. It has nothing to do with the law. Because the law has been satisfied when collation and announcements had been concluded.
What reforms should Nigerians be pushing for in INEC going forward?
So the first thing I want to be engaged in and I think the media and civil society should pay attention to is the issue of political party organisation. I think that this idea of political parties being food catching machines needs to change. Where people run primaries in a political party, lose in that political party and then within 48 hours, they become presidential candidate of another political party, it diminishes us as a people.
We need to engage those issues, and that is why some people are talking about unbundling INEC so that you can have a Political Party, Registration, Oversight Commission that looks at those issues of internal party democracy. We saw that the political parties were a sham. People who could not conduct their own primaries. 90% of the cases you have in court are pre election issues that have to do with candidate selection.
I think that we need to pay a lot of attention on the issue of political party organisation and donors need to invest in training of political parties. The PDP when it was set up had a PDI, a Peoples Democratic Institute. Where it trained its cadres. It organised seminars and workshops. The PDI is dead today. There are no political parties that have training platform for their members.
Now membership of political party is fluid. Fluid to the extent that you can be APC in the morning, PDP in the evening and Labour Party the next day. We need to deal with that very quickly. The funding of political parties. We need to be clear that big pockets do not hijack political parties in the way we have seen it and chief executives of states do not become the people running those political parties because there will not be level playing ground if it is the governor or the president that funds the political party and not the members. That’s number one.
Number two is INEC. We need to look at INEC from the point of whether the interventions that we have used over the years, is still working. For instance, the issue of returning officers from universities. Politicians have known that either way you are going to recruit your returning officers from contingent universities and there is already collaboration with Vice Chancellors by politicians to brink malleable returning officers.
And we saw evidence of that in some of those places. We need to see whether we are not going to rejig that a bit. We want to also look at the appointment of Resident Electoral Commissioners. The media was also part of the struggle to make sure that people with partisan background were not allowed into INEC. What did we see? We saw that the National Assembly subverted all our efforts and brought in people who had partisan background and some of them had conflict of interest issues. And that manifested in the way they run election in their states. Many of them had partisan backgrounds. Many of them were appointed by people who are in government. So appointment of Residents Electoral Commissioners and National Commissioners needs to have a deeper scrutiny.
