If anything is established beyond doubt in the festering $2.1billion armsgate scandal, it is that there is a close link between questionable disbursement of the public treasury and slush funding of election campaigns. I advisedly used the words ‘questionable disbursement of the public treasury,’ and not embezzlement of public funds that it really seems to be, because not much is incontrovertibly established yet about the sundry allegations, the bulk of which pends in the realm of partisan altercation. The judiciary will have to pronounce soonest on what is fact and what is hype, and I won’t jump on the mob-jury train ahead of what is proven in court. But it is eminently clear, as it were, that nearly all of the funds involved in the present scandal were disbursed in connection with electioneering campaign for the re-election bid of former President Goodluck Jonathan in the 2015 poll. And it is hard to find a sector of the Nigerian society that is spared some indictment in the booty sharing: the political class, naturally – across party lines, traditional rulers and religious leaders, community leaders and elders, the armed forces and, indeed, the media industry. It was an all-embracing sleaze of slush money fest.
I stand with the Deputy National Publicity Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Abdulahi Jalo, who has called on former President Jonathan to speak up on the scandal. Jalo was apparently indignant at the class accusation of PDP members in the scandal, and had wanted the former President to clarify his own role as well as the involvement of the party. It is a shame that the party saw differently and distanced itself from this sensible call. In what betrayed gross moral deficit on the part of the former ruling party, its Acting National Chairman Uche Secondus was reported as saying Jalo spoke for no one but himself. Well, I think that only makes proving the scandal in court all the more imperative for the present government, so that the world could see whether the party was hand in gloves with the former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, who is accused of being the paymaster, or whether he acted as alleged outside the purview of the party, as Jalo was keen to establish. But that is really not my point of interest here.
Earlier on, Senate President Bukola Saraki was reported as saying the funds diversion scandal exposed the failure of the National Assembly to effectively perform its oversight function. That is largely true, but I think there is more to it. The issue is that there are fundamental weaknesses in the legal regime for campaign financing that most politicians exploit. And unless relevant stakeholders, especially the National Assembly (NASS), work at correcting the existing weaknesses in the laws, the hysteria over armsgate would be tantamount to attacking a skin rash symptom while ignoring leprosy that is its root cause. Also, since there is some connection between misuse of the public treasury and slush funding of election campaigns, as armsgate suggests, the extent to which an incumbent could misapply public funds for campaign purposes under the present legal framework depends heavily on the personal morality of that incumbent. And that is not very helpful in this clime where strong morality is not a common trait of the political class.
It isn’t that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is itself doing enough under existing provisions to regulate political party and campaign financing. The Commission, as I recall, never denied that it needed to do much more to live up to billing under the current provisions of the Nigerian Constitution and the Electoral Act in monitoring political party finances and accounts; and I’ll be shocked if it makes any pretension to the contrary even now. But I was once on the inside in that Commission and I know from experience that its task is not made any easier by effete and nebulous provisions of the laws.
We can’t contemplate highlighting all issues with the laws within the space that we have here, but we will illustrate. Take the provision in both the 1999 Constitution, as Amended (e.g., Section 225) and the Electoral Act 2010, as Amended (Section 89) requiring political parties to file their audited statement of finances with INEC, for instance. The much that INEC is required to do with those statements is to publish them for public information, and also submit a report on same to the NASS. The NASS is, of course, empowered by the Constitution (Section 228) to hold any political party that infringes some of the provisions liable through enactment of relevant laws, or by conferring on the Commission powers to enforce compliance. Another point here is: audited accounts, by their very nature, are after the fact of financial transactions by the political parties; and it is in the course of those transactions that ethical issues arise.
Section 91 of the Electoral Act stipulates caps on election expenses that can be incurred by candidates seeking different political offices. Many analysts have questioned the logic and empirical basis of the expenditure caps, but that is not our interest here. Section 92 of the Act defines election expenses as “expenses incurred by a political party within the period from the date notice is given by the Commission to conduct an election, up to and including the polling day in respect of a particular election.” Also, by Section 30 of the same Act, notice of election must be issued by INEC not later than 90 days before the day of a particular election. Some implications of the foregoing framework are:
(i) The prescribed ceiling exempts expenditure that is incurred by a politician aspiring for elective office before INEC issues the notice of election, and could therefore encourage aspirants to ‘frontload’ their expenses; and
(ii) The expenditure limit seems to exclude expenses incurred by the political party on the candidate, and encourages the transfer of accounted expenses from the candidate to the party so as to beat the stipulated caps.
Sub-section 10 of Section 91 of the Act further outlines penalties for breaches of the expenditure caps that no Nigerian politician, as far as I know, would consider a serious deterrent.
The point being made is that there is much that needs to be done to the legal framework on elections to curtail slush funding of electioneering campaigns, which could encourage abuses of the common treasury by political incumbents at all levels. Armsgate should be an eye-opener to this reality. I also think it is not coincidental that the present scandal, which some have described as unprecedented in Nigerian financials, centres on security funds. The biggest fraud in the Nigerian public finance system is the so-called security vote. Put bluntly, security vote is a cesspit of filthy financing with the public treasury. Yet, nearly all political office holders at different levels have the vote. It will not do to just get outraged over what Dasuki may have done or didn’t do with armsgate; we need to have specific provisions in our laws for due process application of security votes if the fund must exist at all.
