The 2019 general and off-season elections conducted in the past year exposed the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to so much ridicule that the commission’s chairman has continued to adduce reasons for the outcome. In most cases, the reasons were considered untenable.
Almost all over the country, political activists and thugs conspired to frustrate all efforts to conduct free and fair polls. In some cases, as INEC admitted, the security personnel performed below standards as they joined in perverting the will of the electorate.
This has been the case for so long. In most cases, the same people who were engaged to pervert the electoral process one year ago are back in business in the next electoral cycle because they always slip through the system.
This, we believe, is largely because very few are ever prosecuted for electoral offences. This is an encourager. It has drawn many youths to the vice as it is a source of quick money.
Usually, INEC officials and the police chiefs bark before elections. Before last year’s polls, the President even warned that whoever attempted to snatch ballot boxes would not live to tell the story. He was accused of scare mongering and taking actions contrary to the tenets of democracy.
Yet, in many states, ballot boxes were snatched and, in some cases, figures were falsified either at the polling units or collation centres. Some thugs took it upon themselves to shoot into the air to scare would-be voters and polling officials in strongholds of their principals’ opponents. In such cases, such votes were cancelled.
Until electoral perverts are duly apprehended, diligently prosecuted and, where found guilty, punished according to the law, the numbers will keep growing. We agree with INEC that as presently constituted, prosecuting offenders is beyond its capacity.
The commission should not be distracted from its primary duty of ensuring that elections are conducted credibly. This is not so yet as logistics remains a nightmare. Security at the poll stations remains precarious as many poll officials are known to have been either abducted or killed. This cannot remain so.
We are glad that the INEC chairman, Professor Mahmud Yakubu, recognised this fact when he convened a meeting of the Inter-Agency Committee on Electoral Security to which the commission’s commissioners and heads of security agencies were invited.
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For the first time, in demonstration of the commission’s appreciation of the growing sophistication of the menace, heads of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) were invited.
As INEC has pointed out to the federal lawmakers many times, the only way to ensure that offenders are duly prosecuted is the establishment of an Electoral Offences Commission and the Electoral Offences Tribunal. The lawmakers have been reluctant to give their consent as they believe it would amount to duplication of agencies.
However, given our recent experience and the opprobrium that poorly conducted elections has attracted to Nigeria, creating these two agencies is not too much price to pay if only to have credible polls like other countries.
The task of putting pressure on the National Assembly to establish the agencies should not be left for INEC alone. It should be taken along with the current efforts at electoral reforms and amendment to the constitution.
This should be made a major goal for 2020. Passage of a new Electoral Act should not be left to the last minute when partisanship would have beclouded reasoning of politicians at the party, executive and legislative levels.
The advocacy on what should be done should be taken above the politicians, with the nongovernmental organisations, the mass media and the academia fully involved. As a starting point, let offenders in the 2019 elections be prosecuted as an example that no sinner would go unpunished in future elections.
INEC and the police cannot handle it all. But let the offenders, especially those linked to murder of political opponents, be punished in accordance with the rule of law.
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