2023 ELECTIONS: What Nigerians Must Do To Avoid Repeating 2015 Mistake —Odinkalu
An international scholar and former chairman of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Professor Chidi Odinkalu, speaks to DARE ADEKANMBI on what the focus of election campaign should be for the candidates and the electorate, impeaches the independence of INEC, among other issues.
By September 28, it will be official for political parties to go on the streets and seek votes from the electorate. As someone who has been observing politics in the country and at one time a part of it, what do you think politicians should do differently this time in terms of unfolding their plans?
I can’t swear that I have been part of Nigerian politics, mind you. I don’t belong to a political party. I am not in PDP or APC or ADC or Labour Party or any other party. As a Nigerian, I followed electoral politics in Nigeria since at least the Constituent Assembly elections in 1977 and indeed the Local Government elections in 1976, as far as my consciousness goes.
I think the one thing that has defined Nigerian politics and campaigns in the last decade has been an absence of issue-based politics. In 2015, Goodluck Jonathan, who was in his second term, promised Nigerians ‘transformation’ and General Muhammadu Buhari promised ‘change.’ Nobody asked either of them what any of those concepts meant. So, people queued up ultimately behind Buhari who promised ‘change’ at over 70 years of age; change that he was not able to implement when he was in his 40s. Now that Buhari has proved an absolute disaster because there is no other way to describe him, people are now wondering how they got themselves into the nonsense that is happening in the country.
In 2019, he promised to take Nigerians to the ‘next level’. Did Nigerians ask him and his party ‘next level to what?’ Next level is not a destination; it could be for worse or for better. But nobody asked if it was for better or worse. Change can be for worse or for better. People just accepted an swallowed it and we are where we are today.
What I would like to see done differently this time is that citizens should be prepared to ask questions from any of the leading candidates and get to the nitty-gritty of what exactly they are selling.
You want Nigerians to be critical in their engagements with the candidates and the parties when they come asking for their votes. But most of these Nigerians are poor and are preoccupied with how to survive rather than being critical of the political class.
That surely does not mean that poor people are stupid. Nigerians are not necessarily poor. They are impoverished. There is a difference between poverty and impoverishment. The latter is what somebody does to another person and that is exactly what has happened in the case of Nigeria. Politicians have allocated public resources to themselves and in so doing made the people poorer. We are speaking on a day when it has been announced that the brother of the First Lady [Aisha Buhari] has been appointed to head the NSPMC, which is the company in charge of mints in the country. Somebody was saying he is qualified, why not. I was like how silly can we be? Why can’t people understand it when they are destroying themselves? Why is it that it is only the families of people who are in temporary power in Nigeria that have a monopoly of capability, exactly at the time when their families are in power? The husband of the president of the Court of Appeal, all of a sudden, is the only qualified person who can represent Bauchi North in the Senate. And once his wife is no longer the president of the Court of Appeal, the person who comes to substitute him is the son of the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN). You could go on about this story, about how Nigeria has basically become a feudal piece of real estate and the feudalization of Nigeria is part of the pauperization and the impoverishment of the people.
First of all, poor people are not necessarily stupid. Second of all, Nigeria does not suffer from poverty. Nigeria suffers from impoverishment inflicted on it by politicians and it is precisely because of these two reasons that the people need to insist on asking critical questions. If we don’t, then we are condemned to living in this condition and even worse.
How much of a hindrance do you think vote merchandising will be to the primacy of issue-based campaign? Politicians think electorate have a price and they stockpile tons of money to induce them at elections and care less about campaigns or selling their programmes to the voters.
But we could all see that vote merchandising did not work in Osun State governorship election.
But there are reports that the two major parties bought votes and maybe perhaps the voters decided in favour of the higher bidder…
But it was APC which is the ruling party that is in the position to spend more money to buy votes. You can’t tell me that PDP had more money to spend in Osun than the APC. Clearly not. So, it did not obviously work in Osun State. The fact is even that in off-cycle elections, it is easy to concentrate money and security assets on the state where election is holding. But in a general election and on a day when people are electing the president and the National Assembly members, there is a limit to how much you can lay on the services of the bullion vans and the mint to buy up voters in 36 states. It is just logistically and materially pretty much impossible to pull off across about 174, 000 polling units in the country. That is not easy to do. The reality is there are limits to how much you can buy votes or your way into the presidency. Governor Nyesom Wike has already learnt that in a hard way at least at the level of party primaries. In truth, one of the four leading candidates will be president of the country in 2023 if the elections take place in February 2023.
In terms of specifics, some have said candidates who are not talking about restructuring or devolution of powers and how they are going to revive the flagging economy should just be ignored. Do you share such view?
My view on this does not really necessarily matter. In a lot of these things, we are only having asymmetrical conversations. There are different conversations taking place in the North from what is taking place in the South. There is some consistency to that. For instance, the #EndSARS protest was a major movement in the Southern Nigeria. It was not quite the same event in the North as it was in the South. In a lot of states in Northern Nigeria, there was no #EndSARS protest. But it was a very big thing in Southern Nigeria. In the same way, restructuring is a major conversation in Southern Nigeria, but in Northern Nigeria, they are talking about unity of the country. These are two different conversations. For people in the South, a lot of the revenue goes to funding Nigeria comes from the South, whether it is revenue from natural resources or revenue from innovation and taxes. For the North, the North-West alone has produced the presidents of Nigeria for 22 years which is over one third of the period Nigeria has been in existence.
Now, when you are talking about restructuring, it is not necessarily a vote-winner in Northern Nigeria. So, restructuring is very much a Southern idea and this is not a question of whether or not I agree with it. I am just telling you what I see as the situation in the political firmament. If your proposition is that those who speak to restructuring will get votes from the South, I agree with you. And if it is that those who talk about it will get votes from all over the country, I will ask you to have a second look at Northern Nigeria again.
Two key factors, ethnicity and religion, have come to shape conversations in the build-up to the elections. I remember it was so when we had the first republic when parties were strong in the regions of their founders and so on. Why is it impossible for us to do away with these factors in the country’s national life?
It all depends on the context you are talking about. You and I were adults when [Olusegun] Obasanjo was president of Nigeria and his presidency was not necessarily defined by either ethnicity or religion. As a matter of fact, Obasanjo was rejected by the South-West from which he came and nobody has claimed that Obasanjo became president or was re-elected because he is an evangelical Christian, of course he is a Baptist. Most Nigerians don’t know Obasanjo is a Christian or a Baptist. Most Nigerians didn’t know that President Umaru Yar’Adua had a religion.
But much of the division in Nigeria now is down to President Buhari and what he has done to the country and we have got to be very clear on that. He has absolutely ruined Nigeria in terms of issues of ethnicity and religion and it is because of him that the issues that you talked about are real. Buhari has turned Nigeria into North-South, Christian-Muslim and all of those cleavages. It is as a result of that, that the 2023 elections will be won not on uniting the country, but along those divisions that are so unnerving about Nigeria. As I say repeatedly, Buhari has totally mismanaged our diversity and exposed those fault lines. That is the really sad thing about the Buhari presidency and Buhari’s misadventure in power.
There have been various conversations around the major candidates. There are those who say PDP and APC have been tested and have failed, calling for a different party from the two, which is why the Labour Party animated by Peter Obi is creating ripples and getting support from those who feel it is the turn of the South-East to produce the next president. Others see the race as a straight fight between Tinubu and Atiku. What do you think?
Well, the race is down to Nigerians on who should lead the country. Whoever they choose, as long as INEC and that is a big if, if INEC chooses to create a level playing field and be a neutral umpire, then the person who fulfills the two major requirements of securing the highest number of votes and scoring 25 per cent of the votes cast in two-thirds of the states of Nigeria will win. It is as simple as that. Whosoever Nigerians choose to confer that privilege on should be Nigeria’s president. It is not for me to tell you who that person will be because I am not a babalawo and I am not endowed with those skills to prognosticate and see vision. I am also not a Nigerian evangelical pastor or Imam who can see into the future. I can’t tell you who is going to win the election and how the person is going to do it.
Whether it is by structure or instruction or by divine intervention is not the least of my problems. The rules are very clear. So, let the rules be applied and let Nigerians make choices and let the person who fulfils those conditions be president.
The biggest issue I see with the elections is INEC’s independence. Will INEC be neutral? That I really think is a particularly important issue. I don’t think INEC, under the current leadership, has been neutral or independent. I have to make myself very clear on that. I will be happy to go on record on that and will be happy for Professor Mahmood Yakubu to prove me wrong on that. There are two major issues here. One, when you look at the list of INEC’s RECs, which is now before the National Assembly, you will see that a good number of them are political appointees and the constitution is very clear on this. If you are partisan, you are not to be so appointed. Buhari tried it before with Loretta Onochie, it took pressure from Nigerians to preclude her from being appointed INEC national commissioner. Now, he has nominated someone who ran for office as APC governorship aspirant in Sokoto State to become a REC. That is the first thing, that the independence and integrity of INEC have been questioned.
The second thing is that INEC, in my view, is being dishonest about the effect of insecurity on the elections. There are lots of parts of the country in both South and North that INEC can’t safely deploy election personnel and materials. In parts of Kaduna North, Kaduna South, even in parts of Imo State, including the local government area of the governor, it is difficult to safely deploy election workers there. The same situations exist for Katsina, Zamfara or Niger states.
INEC has not been honest and clear in coming out publicly to say these are the places it can’t safely deploy election workers. Even the governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufai, has had to write to the president about Ansaru that it is setting up a parallel government in the state and taxing people and precluding people from campaigning. But INEC is telling us it will be able to conduct elections in every local government area in the country, which is blatantly and manifestly false. So, if we are in a situation in which INEC can’t be honest with the problems it is having and address those problems, how do you expect them to be honest about credible elections? There could be a third issue, which is, if INEC is not being honest about this, how can INEC technology work? INEC is saying that it has this new magical solution called BIVAS for everything that has plagued our elections in the past. But there are parts of the country where insurgents have taken off telecoms masts and we know there are parts of the country where BIVAS is not going to work. Again, INEC is not coming up clearly on that. So, these are some of the issues that make me go on record on this matter. This particular INEC, I am sorry, appears crooked and it is not up to the job at the moment. It could change. But it is not, at this particular time, up to the job of organising free, fair and credible elections. Let them prove me wrong.
But Buhari has repeatedly assured Nigerians that votes will count and has been making reference to the Osun election where the ruling party lost?
Under the Nigerian law, the president lacks the capacity to guarantee the independence of the electoral process. As matter of fact, that the president is saying that should trouble everybody because it is really not his job. It means INEC is not independent. It is the chairman of INEC who should be telling us that. For the president to be the one giving us that assurance, then it means there is a subornation of security and the judiciary for INEC. It is not the business of the president to get into that territory.
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