Resident Electoral Commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Cross River State, Mr Mike Igini, spoke with reporters on a range of issues in Calabar. NICHOLAS KALU was there. Excerpts
If you were to suggest improvements that will strengthen our electoral system prior to the imminent elections, which will you prioritize?
My suggestions will not be different from the suggestions of my chairman, Professor Jega, to the National Assembly for improving the electoral system. Those suggestions are in the public domain. However, in prioritizing, from experience, I will put three key things as priorities, namely; the establishment of an Electoral Offences Commission with an investigating arm, manned by experienced police and security officers independent of the mainstream security agencies, police force and criminologist adept in electoral forensic, a judicial arm made up of credible and experienced judicial officers adept in the legislative framework for elections; second is the need to improve the process of party nominations to make the party guidelines transparent and susceptible to unequivocal administrative understanding by INEC and judicial interpretation by the courts if necessary; and thirdly, the need for all eligible Nigerians to collect their Permanent Voters Card in the on-going distribution of PVC exercise nationwide until the nation is able to institute a credible National Identity Card mainframe database, which will be used as the key reference for voter eligibility.
Is INEC prepared for the 2015 General Election then?
It is work in progressive since after the 2011 election. We are prepared for the expected and preparing for the uncertain. We have rational plans for the expected as statutory duties while there are emergency plans where necessary for the uncertain. But based on our current institutional memory, we are better prepared than in 2011 as evident in a number of elections conducted after the 2011 elections.
Would you say the National Conference is worth the trouble?
Yes indeed it was well worth it. Their key mandate was to define a Nigerian ideology. That is asking the question, who are we and where do we want to go? And they responded by consensus that, “we are a federal democracy that should domesticate its democratic practices by ensuring rotation of power in democratic offices at all levels to ensure inclusion and integration”. That we will be better off as a country if we allow local government to be more functional and effective as matters of spheres of federating states that should determine their establishment, desired numbers and funding of same and other suggested ways of ensuring their independence and effectiveness. They affirmed that we will be more secured if we devolve policing to federating units and allow this level of policing to collaborate and share cognate but differentiated responsibilities of jurisdiction with the federal policing services. They consensually agreed that derivation is important to generate incentives for developing wider pools of revenue for the national sustainability and hence accepted in principle an increase of derivation to not less than 18%, but they had dissensus on whether an additional 5% should be reserved as a national or regional reconstruction and rehabilitation allocation, a matter that they left to the executive to resolve based on informed decisions, from technocracts rather than emotive combustions from group interests. Given that after nine years, by these and many other innovative suggestions, they have largely affirmed the position of the 2005 conference, I will say that it was well worth it. Now we know who we are, and what we want to become, the next step is to find out if all stakeholders have the courage to live by these convictions by putting this consensus to a referendum of the Nigerian people. Good enough, INEC under part 1 section 2(c) of the Act has the sole statutory duty to carry out a referendum pursuant to any act of the National Assembly as it relates to the outcome of the national conference.
What about their suggestion for 18 new states after creating 1 state for the South East Zone, would you also call this a worthwhile endeavour?
I believe their suggestion/resolution is rooted in the yearning for development to as many areas of the country as possible, while I am in agreement with the motivation for the resolution, I only agree with the suggestion for a state from the South-East on the basis of historical and administrative equity, it does not necessarily rob any current state of anything, if it is viewed from a revenue generation perception rather than a revenue sharing perception because it will not be created from a new geographical space but rather from currently existing states.
The security situation is proving intractable, why do you think the issue of the kidnapped Chibok girls is so difficult to resolve?
It is difficult, mainly because the belligerent groups have very polar differences. What Boko Haram wants are not things you negotiate in a democracy. In a democracy you can have rights to worship whatever way you chose as long as you respect the right of others to do the same. You see the federal government will be at fault if the government was persecuting Boko Haram and preventing them from worshipping peacefully, but in this case, it is Boko Haram which is actually “persecuting” people, demanding territorial control with absolute powers to dictate modes of worship, social interaction and so forth in Nigeria, this makes it difficult for the federal government to be seen to accommodate such a goal.
The Nigerian government has shown its willingness to protect its citizens by committing men and materials in combat against Boko Haram. It has even accepted international assistance, even where its international reputation may be sullied by doing so, just to show that the girls and other victims of Boko Haram insurgency are to be protected by any means necessary. The government also gave support to a former president, a distinguished international personality, to talk with the insurgents, instead of talking, they killed the purported member of their groups’ relative who was willing to talk, then a committee was set up to explore ways of talking. In response you have had more killings, bombing of innocent people who are trying to eke a living, destruction of public and private property, and more recently, recruitment of innocent girls to kill themselves and others for a vaguely defined mission.
To find negotiable remedies, what a group wants should be clear and achievable, what Boko Haram wants, from my position as an interested Nigerian, appears to me to be nothing other than chaos. Recently, we heard they aligned themselves with the Iraqi ISIS, in other words, they want a global caliphate, which means that ultimately in return for the Chibok girls, even if they exchange prisoners with them, the war is only just beginning until Nigeria as a nation is under absolute regime of sharia. How do you negotiate with that? The government is having to try to understand what they really want, who they really are and how to deal with them, the world also wants to know, but as it is, we can only understand them from their actions which bears many semblances with the actions of zealots in Mali, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Chechnya and so forth; if this is what we are dealing with, then the outcome, whether we negotiate or not is bleak, because in all these places they have not shown that they are amenable to reasonable compromise or are willing to share society in which religion is an optional choice with others, Chechnyan rebels killed almost 175 children when Russia tried to free school children from them in Beslan, in Russia, and were willing to die in a theatre than to surrender their hostages in Moscow. Islamic zealots in Iran held 52 American diplomats in Iran for 444 days and America lost 8 servicemen in a botched attempt to free them; given such a choice, they are telling the world that you either destroy me or fall under our subjection, which is a very Hobbesian choice. What reasonable choices can you make with someone who straps a bomb on a ten year old, or shoots at you from a house in which his children and wife are staying, knowing you are better armed as we saw in the case from Kaduna, we are not dealing with normality here and this needs time to process, our soldiers are trained to respect the Geneva Convention, on warfare, these guys don’t have such cares. We need to wrap our heads around that and develop unconventional and epistemic responses.
