Author: The Nation

By Kayode Robert Idowu

Former President Goodluck Jonathan is in perfect stead to take a broad overview of the Nigerian electoral process and make suggestions that could make the system work better. Amidst pervasive sit-tight syndrome in Africa, he was the first and perhaps only leader yet on the continent to concede defeat in an election he contested as an incumbent even before the poll was formally called by the umpire. Since he lost re-election as Nigeria’s leader in 2015, he has postured as a statesman and has been enlisted by multilateral agencies to lead observer missions to elections in African countries and beyond. Thus, he is perceived as having learnt by personal practice and by observing practices in other milieu what it takes to have elections that come high on the integrity scale.

The ex-president early last week shared perspectives on what ails our elections in this country and remedial steps that could be taken towards meeting up with global best practice. Speaking during a media visit in Abuja, he canvassed the view that the ballot solely should determine who occupies electoral offices in the land and not judicial orders resulting from litigation by political gladiators. According to him, the high rate of litigation evidences less that satisfactory quality of elections because countries that conduct free and fair polls experience few election-related court cases whereas fragile democracies are hallmarked by numerous court cases trailing elections. In another vein, he deplored the high cost of elections in Nigeria and urged that voter inducement be criminalised.

Jonathan’s advocacy about the primacy of the ballot resonated against the backdrop of multiple instances of the Nigerian judiciary overruling poll outcomes declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and imposing court-ordered outcomes. For example, Bayelsa Governor Duoye Diri of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was ordered into office by the Supreme Court after the candidature of David Lyon of the All Progressives Party (APC), who the electoral commission returned as winner of the state’s governorship vote, was disqualified by the court. Before that, the apex court had sacked Emeka Ihedioha of the PDP who had been returned by INEC as winner of the  governorship poll in Imo State and installed Hope Uzodinma of the APC . There were others like Rivers and Zamfara states where the judiciary voided whole party lists and saddled the electorate with no-choice options of alternative parties.

According to the ex-president, the standard practice should be that the election management body exercises sole responsibility for returning poll winners while the judiciary complements by either upholding declared results or nullifying flawed elections and ordering reruns. “The ballot paper should be the only basis for selecting political leaders. I have said this before and will always repeat it. I am not saying the judiciary is not doing well, but my point is that our laws should suppress the issue of the judiciary returning candidates. If a candidate is declared winner after a flawed electoral process, what the courts can do is annul the election and order a fresh one where a winner will finally emerge through the ballot. The ballot paper should decide who holds any elective office from councillorship to the presidency. That is democracy,” he argued.

In the Nigerian experience, political gladiators who lost elections fair and square have been known to openly threaten upturning voters’ choices through the judiciary. They boast that the duel isn’t over until they’ve deployed technicalities of law in the courts to thwart whatever was announced as poll outcome by INEC. It is tendency such as this that gives the proposition by Jonathan its resonance. In other words, our laws need recalibration to exclusively entrust voters with making electoral choices – whether rightly or wrongly made. Where voters make erroneous choices, it should be their prerogative to correct or, indeed, retain such error through the ballot at another opportunity. It shouldn’t be for any other authority, the courts inclusive, to foist remedy on them.

All these presuppose, obviously, that the electoral commission is imbued with sufficient integrity to guarantee that the will of voters prevails at all times through its processes. But even where there are issues with the process, it should be only a last resort for the courts to annul polls and order fresh ones as Jonathan advocates, and that is where the flaws are gargantuan and fundamentally make announced outcomes untenable. Elections shouldn’t be lightly annulled because it costs huge sums to stage them and it would be an unsustainable drain on the nation’s treasury to have casual reruns. It isn’t for nothing that elections are spaced in most countries. Israel might seem an exception, having staged four parliamentary elections within two years; but that was because the outcomes of those polls were repeatedly gridlocked and fragile alliances crafted to run the country have been collapsing. Even then, Israel is not a good illustration of elections that come costly, considering that the country has a virile economy with a voter population of just 6.5million, unlike Nigeria with wobbly economy and over 84million voter population.

By the way, Jonathan did say high rate of electoral litigations signpost poor quality of elections and hallmarked fragile democracies. That is true. But it can be argued that the tendency as well derives from the desperation of political actors and sometimes obtains even in developed democracies. This was the case in the 2020 United States elections where ex-President Donald Trump fiercely resisted conceding the poll and mounted multiple legal suits to upturn the victory of President Joe Biden but was thwarted by American courts. Where politicians are sportsmanly about elections, the rate of recourse to litigation would be minimal and the courts would have fewer invitations to review voters’ verdicts.

The other issue of worry for the former Nigerian president is vote buying and voter inducement by political gladiators, which he advised should be criminalised and offenders barred from polls. “The problem we have in Nigeria is the use of money to induce voters. Compared to other African countries, we spend too much money here. Probably, we need to review our laws because I have observed a number of elections in African countries. For instance in Tanzania, a candidate (cannot) print his name on matchboxes or any items to woo voters. If you do that, they say that you are inducing the electorate. It is against their laws. But here if somebody is contesting elections, you buy bags of rice, wrappers and all manner of items to induce the electorate. Ordinarily, our electoral laws should frown on such practices. If you do that, you should be disqualified from contesting in the election,” he said.

While Jonathan’s concern is highly germane, Nigerian law already criminalises vote buying and voter inducement. Section 130 of the Electoral Act 2010 (as Amended) does this, with sub-section (a) of that section criminalising the inducer while sub-section (b) criminalises the induced voter and stipulates as penalty for both a fine of N100,000 or 12-month imprisonment or both. The challenge, apparently, is that the law is not being vigorously applied, and that might be because of the mammoth scale of violation. The pervasiveness of violation is itself a function of the desperation of political actors for power amidst increasing use of technology by INEC to foil historical abuses of the balloting process. But there are also the factors of distressful socio-economic circumstance of most Nigerians and widespread illiteracy, among others, which predispose the average voter to exchanging his voting power for a mesh of pottage. Meanwhile, these are factors that only the power elite – those who exploit the very factors to readily induce voters – are in the best position to remediate.

The observations by ex-President Jonathan are timely and almost read like a liturgy for the lawless. The challenge with Nigerian elections in my view, however, isn’t per se the laws, but our political culture and sociological context. It is as Cassius, in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, says: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

• Please join me on kayodeidowu.blogspot.be for conversation.

By Alade Fawole

At last, US President Joe Biden has announced his administration’s intention to withdraw America’s combat troops from Afghanistan by September 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York. Other NATO and coalition troops would also be fully withdrawn latest by that date. Biden’s decision to end the longest and costliest war in American history is not only courageous but also makes absolutely perfect sense. Except perhaps for war-mongers in the Pentagon, the defence contractors, armaments manufacturers and the politicians whose elections they bankroll and for whom war is good business, getting out of Afghanistan after two decades of what, to borrow General Omar Bradley’s characterization of the Korean War, can be justifiably described as “a wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”

A cursory glance at the compelling statistics will reveal why the withdrawal decision makes good sense. In the 20 years of the bloodbath, the US expended a staggering sum of $2 trillion, lost 2,400 service men, and recorded 20,700 wounded service men, according to The New York Times, April 14. With the exception of the casualty figures on the Afghans side, all other statistics of the war are so staggeringly unfavourable to the United States and so weighted against rationality and commonsense for America to want to continue with it. Afghanistan’s casualties is put by some reports at 157,000 deaths, of which roughly 43,000 were civilians; 235,000 displaced according to UNHCR; accompanied by extensive physical destruction, massive environmental contamination from exploded ordinance and their attendant diseases and ailments; risks and dangers from unexploded munitions and landmines scattered over the Afghan landscape; large numbers of child and youth soldiers who have never known anything but war and who will necessarily pose post-war danger to the civil population; widespread hunger and starvation among the displaced, etc. These are the deadly footprints that America is leaving behind in hapless Afghanistan after 20 years of bloodshed. Does it make any sense to continue inflicting these horrors on a people?

Another reason to discontinue the war is that you cannot fight a war of an indeterminate duration in someone else’s territory and expect to win totally. Except you totally annihilate your adversaries, all that they need do is patiently wait you out, knowing that someday you’re gonna become exhausted and war-weary that you’ll contemplate packing up and leaving for home. This is one such war that America could never hope to win, for the stakes are different for Americans, fighting a foreign war that majority of them could not see the need for, and for the Taliban for whom the war is an existential imperative, a fight for the control of their land and way of life as they see it.

Waiting America out and wearying its soldiers on the battlefield has been a part of the Taliban’s playbook. Experience has taught them that, at some point, domestic pressures in the US would eventually render continuation of the foreign war no longer defensible, more so that America has not recorded any meaningful and sustainable victory on the battlefield where its youth have been dying for no apparent just cause. One would ordinarily have expected US policy makers to have learnt this from their Vietnam experience: no matter what military victories you record on the battlefields you will never totally defeat foreign adversary permanently on its own soil! This is more when the Taliban are obtaining foreign support from some of America’s friends such as neighbouring Pakistan, and even notable adversaries like Russia whose predecessor, the defunct Soviet Union, was humiliated out of Afghanistan with the help of the US, and others such as Iran. What goes around surely comes around so, for the Russians, it’s time to pay America back in its own coins!

Let’s remember how America got into this war in the first place. Its forces launched a massive invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Islamist extremist Taliban regime of Mullah Muhammad Omar in Kabul whom America had accused of sheltering Osama bin Laden, the leader of the Al Qaeda terrorist group presumed to have masterminded the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon on the outskirts of Washington DC. on September 11, 2001. The pretext was that Mullah Omar had refused to surrender bin Laden, and, pronto, two of the most hawkish war-mongering neocons in the George W. Bush administration, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, both who would also cause invasion of Iraq two years later in 2003, went to work on the invasion plan. Osama bin Laden’s presence in Afghanistan had served as the casus belli for America to change the regime in Kabul.

It is hard to say what this withdrawal portends for Afghanistan’s future, for no government has been able to withstand the Taliban without the backing of US and allied forces. It is doubtful that the present government of President Ashraf Ghani can withstand the expected Taliban onslaught once the coalition forces withdraw. But then, it is better to allow the Afghans to sort out their own internal problems whichever way they can, than allow Americans to continue destroying their country and disrupting their lives in a war that is clearly unwinnable. After overawing the Afghans in the early days of the invasion and ousting the Taliban, the war has bogged down to fire-fights with no discernible winners, and it became quite clear years ago that the problem of Afghanistan didn’t admit of purely military solutions alone.

Like them or not, the truth is that the Taliban are a persistent and enduring feature of Afghan politics and society, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Overall, America’s policy has been a failure, and no countries would be more pleased to gloat than America’s foes like Russia, Iran, Pakistan and China, all who are seeking a stake in a post-American Afghanistan! It is a cruel irony that the same Taliban that American forces ousted from Kabul 20 years ago is also the one now literally chasing America out of Kabul. They will return to power and once again re-impose their brand of extremist Sharia rule that America’s invasion had halted two decades ago.

After more than four decades of endless war that had begun with the Soviet invasion in 1979 and later America’s own in 2001, there is no doubting that Afghanistan truly needs durable peace, but it is doubtful under impending Taliban forceful take over. No one knows the fate that awaits the long-suffering Afghan but it does not seem a pretty one, judging by the Taliban’s previous record of extreme brutality, wanton violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms, restriction education for females, summary executions, etc. Afghans do not need further interference by self-appointed foreign do-gooders in their internal affairs. What they need instead is genuine and altruistic support of the international community, to help them restore sustainable peace and stability to their war-ravaged country, put in place a good, responsible and accountable governance system. But whether they will ever get it is anyone’s guess.

• Prof Fawole is of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.