Category: Editorial

It is official: more than 90 percent of applicants seeking placement in the Nigeria Police Force fail to score up to 30 percent in recruitment examinations. Many are academically challenged, reflecting the poor calibre of operatives that would get unleashed on the citizenry should they end up being enlisted into service.

This trend was made known by Police Service Commission (PSC) Chairman, Alhaji Musliu Smith, who described it as a sad reflection of the society. In an address at a sensitisation and townhall meeting on police recruitment early last week in Birnin-Kebbi, the Kebbi State capital, he said it was alarming the society’s best were not attracted to join the police. “Part of the challenges the commission discovered during recruitment exercises in 2019 was the academic challenges of the applicants,” he noted, adding: “If our responsible and upright young ones are discouraged from joining the police, where are we going to source police officers of our dreams? Police and policing are a noble act and deserves the best of the society to join and change the narrative on the issue of internal security of our nation.”

The PSC boss, whose address was read by deputy director, Hajiya Hawa Komo, also said there was need for communities to raise the alarm when they notice dubious characters seeking to join the police. “There have been cases of robbers finding their way into recruitment camps. We must all come together to ensure only the best apply for and are recruited into the Nigeria Police,” he admonished, noting that public disenchantment with the force and failure of citizens to appreciate the police and policing had impacted negatively on the quality of persons applying to get enlisted.

PSC’s stakeholder engagement initiative is commendable, and Smith was right about the implication of the kind of people applying to join the police. The force at the lower rungs isn’t attracting bright minds in the society and tends to be a prospecting ground for jobless hordes seeking a bite of the proverbial national cake through quota system-based government employment. Whereas some sections of the country regularly oversubscribe their quotas, there are other sections that hardly utilise theirs. And it has been alleged that rather than be based on merit, career progression in the force is systemically skewed in favour of a region of the country to the disadvantage of the other region.

Smith was not entirely on point, though, about the route to redressing the trend. It is true to some extent that community members have filtration role in the quality of people enlisted into the force by encouraging their bright minds to join, and blowing the whistle on bad elements seeking to be recruited. But a more assured way is to tackle systemic disincentives that do not make the police professionally attractive and rewarding. For one, the barracks of police training colleges are an eyesore and would not attract anyone worth his professional salt to join the force. There are other grossly abusive welfare conditions applicable to recruits in training. This factor, perhaps, explains why many products of the system, upon interfacing with the public, betray an abused mentality that they in turn inflict on the citizenry through extortionate and oftentimes downright criminal behaviours. Government recently raised the salary of policemen, but the challenge goes beyond that and requires an  overhaul of the entire system.

Another measure that may be helpful is to raise the entry qualification for police recruits. This, of course, would entail a radically enhanced wage package; and why not? Nigeria regularly appropriates huge sums on security provisioning, but we see little that is done with those funds because they do not get applied as appropriated. There is need for budgetary prioritisation by government that will make funds designated for police operations invariably get applied to those operations. Besides, police operatives need be kitted with tools that have worked in other climes – body cameras, for instance – to regulate their conduct while dealing with the public. A new police will require more than community engagement on quality recruits.

Had the Federal Government decided to go the way of post-civil war Nigeria, the slogan today would be, ‘to rebuild the North East is a task that must be done’. This probably informed the establishment of the North East Development Commission (NEDC) in 2017. The devastation wrought upon the region by the insurgency that has raged since 2009 has reduced many towns, institutions and initiatives to rubble. Only recently, the governor of Borno State, Professor Babagana Zulum, lamented that at least two of the local government areas of the state are desolate as all the people have fled to escape from the Boko Haram and Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP) terrorists.

What is called the Buhari Plan for Reconstruction and Rebuilding the region has to be given fillip now that the President and the six governors of Borno, Yobe, Gombe, Taraba, Adamawa and Bauchi states appear to be speaking the same language, and at a point that the project has the support of the international community. So far, the World Bank, African Development Bank, European Union, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), United Kingdom Agency for International Development and the United Nations are all in support of ensuring that life returns to the region. This is the way to go.

We must, however, point out that there is no need rebuilding areas that are still under incessant attacks by the enemy. As some of the governors have rightly noted, there are projects that have been constructed and destroyed over and over again. Apart from the waste of resources on rebuilding such unsettled areas, human lives are also at risk and the misery indices are higher. There are states where the military have secured the peace for some years now, and the towns, in terms of physical and social infrastructure, are still in ruins. These areas should be given priority attention, with the people moved back to regain their livelihood. Many children from such communities who were uprooted by the war should be resettled and assisted to begin the journey to civilisation once again – with children who have missed schooling returned to regain the quest for knowledge.

Read Also: Zulum warns on ISWAP threat to Nigeria

The NEDC should step up its activities. It has the duty of stepping up advocacy for the reconstruction process and encouraging the private sector to participate fully. But it can only do this by being transparent in the application of resources mobilised from national and international bodies. It, being a product of law, has responsibility of continually getting professional bodies to ascertain the quality of jobs being done and basic human needs provided before returning the people to their ancestral homes. All key actors in previous schemes such as the General T.Y. Danjuma-led Victims Support Fund and the defunct Presidential Initiative on the North East (PINE) still have roles to play. Having been enlisted in the project at some point, their interest should not be allowed to wane. They could be involved in some of the commission’s activities.

President Muhammadu Buhari’s promise to restore peace to the region before he hands over to his successor in May, next year, can only be meaningful if the towns and villages are occupied again by the indigenes who are fully mobilised to contribute their quota to the national economy. General Paul Tarfa who heads the board of the commission has his job cut out for him. If he discharged his task creditably, history would remember him for good. The commission should not be allowed to go the way of similar intervention agencies that only had abandoned projects to show for their decades of existence, despite funds allocated. The people of the North East have roads, water supply lines, electricity transmission facilities, schools, medical centres and other monuments that tell tales of Boko Haram devastation, reminding them that life is yet to return to normal. General Tarfa and his men should wipe tears off the faces of the hapless and innocent people.

They have Rwanda as one source of inspiration. Since Paul Kigame took office as President in 2000, the country has secured the respect of the international community with its massive rebuilding efforts. With modest resources and about 12 million people, the President mobilised his people to put the past behind them and work for a country that the future generation would be proud of. Nigeria can do better, especially as ours is not a civil war with the effect of rupturing social relations among the people of the North East. The 2016 Recovery and Rebuilding Assessment that put the required funding needed at $6.7 billion should be revisited and the masterplan drawn up adhered to. If the NEDC men work at it, the ashes of the North East could yet be turned to beauty.a

In January 31, the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) finally paid accrued allowances to Super Eagles players, eight days after they had crashed out of their bitter-sweet campaign, at the just concluded African Cup of Nations (AFCON)  in Cameroon.

That wasn’t a tale of better late than never.  It was, instead, an ugly but perennial pattern, which should never have been.  Sports authorities must develop a culture and discipline of prompt payment of allowances.  That will ginger the athletes and recharge their commitment and patriotism.

On January 4 ahead of the Cameroon championship, Ahmed Musa, Super Eagles captain, told The Punch that the NFF was still owing the team allowances for two past matches.  The captain said the full squad would meet and decide on how to handle the outstanding payments.

Yet, at Garoua in northern Cameroon, where the team was based for AFCON group stage matches, they went on to post a Cinderella show with three straight wins — the only side to achieve that feat at the completion of the group matches — before the team’s shocking ouster by Tunisia, at the Round of 16.  Even more than the straight wins, the team’s brilliant and attacking play endeared them to near-everyone.

Still, the reward that greeted their heroics was the old dampener: delayed allowances.  A similar incident almost derailed Nigeria’s quest at AFCON 2019 in Egypt.  After gaining quarter-final berth with a match to spare, non-payment of allowances nearly torpedoed further progress.

After players’ protests in the camp and a boycott of a scheduled press conference by the team, the Super Eagles went on to lose to debutants and minnows, Madagascar, in their last group match.  Might that have been the story, yet again, had Nigeria crossed the Tunisia hurdle at Cameroon?

It is good that the NFF finally transferred the outstanding allowances.  Sporting Life (February 1) reported that the players, coaches and other back-room staff received US$ 840, 000 in cumulative cash.  That is to be commended.

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But not the delay.  For context: CACOVID, Nigeria’s private sector coalition against COVID-19, by January 26 had delivered on the US$ 80, 000 cash it promised for goals the team scored at the group stages.  CACOVID made the promise at the virtual eve of the competition.   Yet NFF, to which AFCON is a calendarised event, tarried till January 31.

This tardiness is not fair on the players who gave up their Yuletide comfort to camp in Abuja, in preparation for AFCON.  More: they endured a psychological block, no thanks to the sudden change of old gaffer, Gernot Rohr, with caretaker coach, Augustine Eguavoen.  Even with that, they delivered limited success.

Besides, had the media not cried foul, who knows if those payments would still have been paid by now?  It’s the same odd cycle plaguing Nigerian sports!  It’s a long enduring negative culture that should be broken up forthwith.

This umpteenth delay, like old ones, was blamed on the usual bureaucracy.  If the NFF are not in hock for money, they blame delay on payment transfer infrastructure, especially while the body had to liaise with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to send the forex-denominated money.

While there are always bottlenecks in any bureaucracy — especially in financial protocols with in-built checks and balances to avert sleaze — more pin-point planning, giving enough time for delays in the process, could eliminate those bottlenecks.

Besides, AFCON, the World Cup, Olympic Games, African Women Championship (AWC) have near-rigid timetables.  That normally should guide careful planning.  You just don’t start running helter-skelter for funds (on the eve of each championship); or on how to transfer them (eons after the championship), when other countries are already planning ahead for the next major sporting feast.

That, however, appears the ugly culture here; and the net effect is stunting the growth of Nigerian sports and cramping the performance of athletes.  The Federal Ministry of Youth and Sports should fashion out better allowance-management processes with the various sports federations.

This call can’t be more urgent or more timely. After the unexpected collapse at Garoua, Cameroon, the Eagles have a titanic task against neighbouring Ghana, to nick one of Africa’s five slots at the World Cup in Qatar, later this year.

Let everything be done so that there are no financial distractions in the build-up to that contest. After the setback at AFCON, the World Cup qualifier is a battle that must be won.

A Federal High Court sitting in Abuja has ruled that Section 4(1)(a) of the Nigeria Police Trust Fund (Establishment) Act 2019, is ultra vires Section 162(1) and (3) of the 1999 constitution, and the judgment has thrown a spanner into the desperate search for extra source of funding for the Nigeria Police. Section 4(1)(a) had empowered the Federal Government to deduct 0.05 per cent of any funds in the Federation Account and 0.05 per cent of the net profit of companies operating in the country to fund the police.

On its part, Section 162(1) provides that “the Federation shall maintain a special account to be called “the Federation Account” into which shall be paid all revenues collected by the Government of the Federation….” Sub-section 3, provides that: “Any amount standing to the credit of the Federation Account shall be distributed among the Federal and State Governments and the Local Government Councils in each state on such terms and in such manner as may be prescribed by the National Assembly.”

In that suit filed by Rivers State government, the Federal High Court, per Justice Ahmed Mohammed, held that funds standing to the credit of the Federation “can only be distributed among the federal, state and local governments in each state of federation and not directly to any agency of the Federal Government, including the Nigeria Police Force.” The Rivers State government brought the suit against the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF), Accountant-General of the Federation, the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) and the Minister of Finance.

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The court also ordered the Federal Government to refund to the Rivers State government, her share of all deductions already made. The court however refused to make similar order with respect to funds deducted from the shares of the other 35 states of the federation, on the premise that the Rivers State government did not bring the suit in a representative capacity on behalf of the other states.

For us, while there is urgent need for a better funding of the Nigeria Police, which has been grossly underfunded over the decades, it must be done in accordance with the provisions of the constitution. As confirmed by the judgment, it is not all laws made by the National Assembly that are legitimate. Where a law is deemed ultra vires, it is appropriate to challenge that law. On many occasions, the Lagos State government successfully challenged the validity of laws which contravened the principles of federalism.

Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State, in stating the motive of the state for approaching the court said: “For me, it is a victory for democracy. And I have always told people, it is not whether you must win or not, but it is a matter of when you see issues that you think are in contravention of our constitution and other laws, there is nothing wrong for you to challenge it, so that the right thing can be done.”

As some have argued, the right thing to do concerning the funding of the police is to amend the extant laws to allow sub-national police, at state and even local government levels. If that is done, each state will fund its police according to its resources and needs. As the experience of most state governments have shown, they have limited powers to properly oversight the police posted to their states, even when they answer the chief security officer of the states, and have spent huge state resources to make police in the states more efficient.

As the suit between the Rivers State government and the Federal Government has shown, there is no shortcut to federalising policing in Nigeria.

Most Nigerians are unlikely to be shocked at the latest disclosure about the quantum of crude oil theft going on in the country. If anything, the figures merely restate a scandal that bears the hallmarks of our typically indifferent leadership; an exemplification of the curse of the hydrocarbon resource and the pervasive outlawry that attends to activities linked to it.

This time it was businessman Tony Elumelu, speaking to members of Course 30 of the National Defence College on the theme, ‘Strategic Leadership: My Business Experience in Abuja’, last week. He told the elite participants of the institute that Nigeria lost $4 billion worth of crude oil to thieves in the first nine months of 2021. An operator himself, he puts his company’s share of the theft at 50,000 barrels per day out of its total output of about 87,000 barrels per day.

That the disclosure however is nothing of a marked departure from the trend already long established by the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) over the last few years is merely stating the obvious. Take its 2019 audit for instance; NEITI found that the country actually lost 42.25 million barrels of crude oil valued at $2.77 billion – although it found that the loss was 21 per cent lower than that recorded in 2018, which was 53.28 million barrels. Overall, NEITI report put the crude oil theft at around 138,000 b/d with the value at $40.06 billion in the course of the last 10 years. That, to put it mildly, is scandalous.

As for the latest statistics, what it shows is that the situation has actually grown much worse than it was in 2019. Even more significant is the revelation of an officialdom that is not only somewhat complicit, but one that has conveniently neglected to develop the capacity to curb the untoward activities despite their glaring potential to undermine our national security.

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Of course, the quantum of losses would ordinarily have beggared belief – save that this is happening in Nigeria. Put in context of national expenditures, the nine months theft alone is more than twice the amount spent ($1.5 billion) to deliver the 157-kilometre Lagos-Ibadan standard gauge railway. It is also nearly 50 percent of $8.3bn of the entire contract sum for the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) from Lagos to Kano which, although the Federal Government had awarded China Civil Engineering Construction Company (CCECC), but has been stuck at the level of negotiation over funding with the Chinese. And all of these in a nation of decrepit infrastructure, and at a time she’s borrowed to the hilt.

And now we have as correlates, oil prospecting companies at the mercy of criminal gangs; serial divestments by multinational oil companies, particularly from inland basins linked to such disruptions – all of these going on for years with neither the Federal Government nor the security agencies able to arrest them.

Bad as the activities are for the economy, their implications for national security are best described as frightening as it is understood that the illegal activities could not have assumed such scale, let alone be sustained over the years, without the collaboration of foreign criminal elements. For, while Nigerians ought to be alarmed about the level of the haemorrhage being revealed, the bigger worries are the real threats to the stability of the country from such well-oiled, sophisticated and highly networked but nonetheless shadowy non-state actors.

This is why the Federal Government must act quickly to confront the menace. It is apparent that the industry requires a new framework to police its operations. That the Nigerian Navy in particular has not been able to arrest the situation is shameful and unacceptable. Like the other on-going war on terror, the president should consider issuing fresh marching orders to the navy to get the job done. As for the two new regulators – the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission and the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Authority – the least Nigerians expect to see are new thinking and competences brought to bear, going forward.

It has been a major conundrum in this democratic process. How can we maintain integrity of governance either in the centre or in the constituent parts, like the state and local governments, while prosecuting elected executives?

In the much-awaited constitutional amendments to the 1999 grundnorm, it is expected that the wholesale immunity granted top executives of this democracy may be become history. Presidents, vice presidents, governors and deputy governors will no longer enjoy the blanket protection of the law. While the law may preserve them in offences over capital civil matters, criminal ones may break them open for prosecution.

While we expect that law to come up for the grilling that transforms recommendations into law, another bill fell flat last week.

The bill, sponsored by Segun Odebunmi (APC, Oyo), is titled, “An Act to alter Section 308 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 to extend immunity to cover presiding officers of the legislative institutions.”

The law, sponsored by the same lawmaker who may be priding himself on some of the obnoxious and authoritarian statutes of this republic, seeks to shield the senate president and speakers as well as other officers of the legislature. This may be spurred on by collegial envy: if the executives can sin without a day in court, so should they.

That is not acceptable. The idea of immunity came into being not to canonise the executive, but to save the republic, to protect governance from forces of distraction. The impeachment clause walks into the scenario when the integrity of the chief executive, whether president or governor, comprises the capacity to govern or to govern in a legally unencumbered manner. Some governors and deputy governors have gone the way of impeachment because of the existence of the law.

The recommendation by the constitutional amendment committee to pare the impeachment prohibitions to accommodate criminal offences derives from a great heart. But we must tread with caution. We accept that chief executives should not have limitless powers. They should not become gods in a democracy.

The criminal offences may include such acts as murder, sexual violations, disobedience to the rule of law. We have witnessed under this democracy some members of the executive accused of some of these offences. It could make them puff in defiance.

The immunity clause exists not because of well-meaning citizens. It is because of foes who may, for partisan or personal grudges and calculations, take advantage of the law to cripple or distract the executive from exercising the full reach of their vision, energy, talent and time to fulfill the mandate from the people.

Some may have lost the election, and their mission would be to make the state or country difficult to govern. All they need to do is take advantage of the law to toss stones at the government’s glass house.

On the other hand, governors and presidents have taken advantage of the clause to sow discord and exercise despotic powers while in office, and they extend this to the state coffers that they see as their own and appropriate with cynical glee. The clause emboldens them because they know that if there is any prosecution, it has to wait till their tenures expire. They take advantage of the judicial process afterwards and foment a rigmarole such that the cases suffer interminable adjournments. After a few years, the public forgets as the story tails into oblivion. It is a self-serving view that works because very few chief executives have gone to gaol or suffered agony of refunds.

Yet the amendment does little to cover these aspects. It limits itself to matters like harassment or murder, cases that are often difficult to prove in court. We, in principle, support the limited immunity, but we caution that the law be drafted in such a way as not to be exploited by pedantic lawyers to bring the state down with their selfish designs. We may not be surprised that portions seen as criminal may, by the devious genius of the lawyer, turn into a civil matter, and the wall between civil and criminal will blur.

Again, the lawmaker’s immunity is different. There is little or no damage done when a speaker of a state assembly or the president of the senate suffers from an impeachment clause. They do not deserve to be protected. The lawmaker, unlike the governor, does not hold a government bureaucracy. They do not preside of a state or national budget, they do not carry in their heads a vision or programme for implementation. They do not have a team selected personally to execute a wide range of ideas.

It is simply institutional envy that has propelled that suggestion by Odebunmi. It is instructive that it has been stepped down by the deputy speaker Ahmed Idris Wase, and the House of Representatives members have not wedded themselves to the egregious logic behind such a Neanderthal notion.

About 23 years after, a conundrum still hovers over the death of Chief Moshood Abiola, who won the 1993 presidential election and spent three years behind bars.

After the cruelty of the Abacha years that followed the tragic rigmarole of the Babangida transition programmes, Abiola died in the presence of an American delegation led by the Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering.

Reports have it that the eminent billionaire, publisher and philanthropist drank a cup of tea offered by the American envoy. Some foreign reports said he was actually poisoned by the Americans to tear the country away from the paralytic stranglehold of the June 12 crisis. So, dispatching Abiola would afford the country a new start, especially with the head of state also sent to his grave.

Both men held intransigent positions. With them out of the way, Nigeria would enjoy a new lease of democratic life. It was speculated as the Machiavellian aperture to a return to normalcy in a country where a sullen cabal of military tyrants held sway while a gathering of men and women in democratic resistance roiled the state both home and abroad.

Holding the Americans responsible was not going to be an easy task, and the Americans have not admitted to a slow execution of the Nigerian billionaire democrat. But the matter has been allowed unsolved, an indictment not only of forensic medicine but also international investigations.

General Abdulsalami Abubakar who succeeded Abacha and who takes credit from presiding over the transfer of power to civil rule delved into the matter recently, but not wisely. He said without evidence that Abiola did not die of poison.  He narrated what happened on the fateful day, and how he allowed the American delegation access to Abiola. Along with Pickering was Susan Rice, who became US representative to the United Nations in the Obama years.

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“So, it was at this meeting when the American team was meeting Abiola he fell sick and suddenly the security officers called the medical team to come and attend to him, and when they saw the situation they said it was severe and they needed to take him to the medical centre.

“So it was the medical team plus the American team that took him to the medical centre, unfortunately at the medical centre he gave up.”

This perspective does not in any way clarify why he died so suddenly during the American visit and why he was given a drink without the supervision of any of the normal security protocol. Why would the delegation appear with a tea jug on such a sensitive moment?

The matter remains on the conscience of not only the military but also the American government. Merely saying he died of heart failure does not excuse it. What was in the tea, and why did it become like his hemlock?

It might well be that Abiola had a sudden heart attack. Health matters are not always easy to predict. A healthy person in one minute may fall in the next. Yet, because of the circumstances of his death, questions have been propounded. Because his life was larger than life, and the man’s latter-day struggles transcended his life and family but concerned a whole generation of Nigerians, it made little sense that an international inquest into his death is treated with cold disdain.

Many died, including his wife Kudirat, and prominent Nigerians like Alfred Rewane and Bagauda Kaltho, so such tragedies need a clear closure. The June 12 election is the event from which Nigerian democracy flows today. The Buhari administration, after contempt from previous governments, immortalised the man by granting him a holiday on June 12.

The world and the Nigerian government can only do his ghost good service by unveiling how he died.

The move by the National Assembly to abridge the right of Nigerian citizens to express themselves fully in the democratic process is simply unacceptable. What distinguishes citizens from foreigners and other residents of the country is the right to full participation in the electoral process. They, by law, have the right to present themselves for any office of the land for which they are legally qualified; they have the duty to decide those to run the country or any unit thereof and have a responsibility to keenly follow the process with a view to ensuring that only the best emerge as leaders.

It is in this context that we consider the provision in the electoral bill just transmitted to the president for his assent as defective and unconstitutional.

The Nigerian constitution establishes, in principle, the office of the citizen, who has the sole right to determine those qualified to run state machinery. Since independence in 1960, Nigerians have taken delight in the fact that they could freely approach the courts to set right whatever they consider wrong in the administration of the state. The courts are there as the final arbiters. It is therefore wrong to have a move by some people enjoying their office at the pleasure of the people to seek to take away this fundamental right.

Section 31 of the extant Electoral Act allows a citizen to challenge and interdict the credentials submitted by any candidate for offices spelt out in the constitution. This could be done by sending petitions to the electoral commission or filing a case in the law courts. The provision is to ensure that the wrong candidates do not get elected. Besides, it is in recognition that the commission on its own could not know these candidates and thus requires the assistance of the public to check infiltration of impostors into the process. The documents required of candidates include educational certificates, birth certificate, and those other issues that would have been filled into relevant forms and sworn affidavits before judicial officers. When a candidate claims to have worked in an organisation creditably for specified years, whereas he was dismissed, he perjures and this could be pointed out by a citizen. When a man doctors his age to meet up with requirements under the law, it is a defect of character that should not go unpunished. And, when a candidate presents a forged certificate for election, those who know should play their needful role of getting him removed from the process.

The Supreme Court had ruled in the case filed by former Vice President Atiku Abubakar that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) does not, on its own, have the right to disqualify a candidate under the law. This power is reserved for the courts. As such, the responsibility is left to the general public. When the electoral commission publishes credentials of candidates in an election, it is thus left for concerned citizens to challenge false depositions and presentations. To reserve this right to those who might have contested against the said candidate is to rob the society of decency. It is known that politicians sometimes treat malfeasance with kid gloves. In some cases where godfathers have interest in a particular candidate and are determined to force him through the process, aspirants may lack the courage to challenge whatever is presented as it could be interpreted as challenging the authority of the godfather. The society would thus suffer the consequences.

In the new Nigeria that we are all desirous to have, there should be no room for “lepers” in the public place. The only way to ensure that only those known to be fit are elected is to ensure that all citizens keenly watch the process and have the right to approach courts to weed out candidates who perjured in filing their papers.