Electoral Act Amendment: The Baby and the bath water
The controversy over whether the National Assembly has the right to amend Section 25 of the Electoral Act 2010 seems to have dwarfed the other good provisions contained in the Electoral Act 2010 Amendment Bill to which President Muhammadu Buhari recently withheld assent.
The controversial amended section seeks to specify the order of elections to be adopted in the 2019 polls and beyond. The issue seems to have set the National Assembly against the Presidency as the former has concluded plans to override the refusal of assent by the President.
What is baffling is the way public commentators have been carrying on as if the Electoral Law 2010 Amendment Bill 2018 is all about its Section 25 or the order of elections. Another confusion on the debate is whether the order of elections is the same as dates of elections. In simple language, order of elections is about which of the elections for the various positions come first and which ones follow. Simply put, order of elections is about whether the Presidential election should be conducted before or after the gubernatorial, the Federal and state legislature elections. However, the dates of elections deal with calendar dates on which each of these elections will take place.
However, with the debate about whether the National Assembly can fix the order of elections or whether what the legislators did in the current Amendment to the 2010 Electoral Act amounted to fixing dates of elections, this country is once again about to throw away the baby with the dirty bath water.
The Electoral Act 2010 Amendment Bill which President Muhammadu Buhari just denied assent contains fundamental provisions which should not be allowed to die on the altar of disagreement about whether one election should come first before the other. And these provisions include:
Instant Electronic (no more manual) Transmission of Results: The overarching objective of this new Electoral Act is to reduce human interference in the electoral process and minimize rigging, electoral fraud and corruption. In this regard, the Electoral Act amendment mandates the immediate transmission of voting results from polling units to collation centers. This will help to give real-time results and updates, reduce the opportunity for manipulation of results significantly and entrench transparency in the electoral process.
Also, Section 15 mandates the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to load the voters’ register online as well as paste the hard-copies at the designated centers 30 days before the polls day. This provision democratizes access to the voters’ register and makes for easy identification of impostors on voting day. This is part of the regime of transparency, free and fair polling that the new Electoral Act seeks to enthrone. This amendment further provides a fair and more level playing ground for all contestants. This will end the manipulation of voter registers. In the case of missing names on the voter register, voters have 30 days to complain to INEC.
Again, a new Section 49 of the Amended Electoral Act provides for full bio-metric accreditation of voters. The Electoral Act amendment gives INEC powers to utilize full biometric accreditation of voters with smart card readers and/or other technological devices, as INEC may introduce for elections from time to time. This provision legalizes the use of card readers and remove the mischief created by the Supreme Court judgement in cases like that of Amaechi Vs Wike where the card reader was declared illegal and unknown to law.
It will be recalled that the introduction of the card reader into the electoral system created the transparent atmosphere which enabled this country to witness the defeat of an incumbent president and the transition from party to party. So, if President Buhari benefited from this card reader on his way to becoming president, how will his presidency now oppose or reject the innovation that made his victory possible? Or is there some other considerations that are not known to the public?
The new Electoral Act amendment ensures that political parties can no longer impose arbitrary qualification criteria on aspirants to various offices. This will encourage younger aspirants to contest, promote competition in the process, and make elections more free and fair. The arbitrariness of party apparatchiks who simply set some hard criteria in order to promote the candidacy of some choice aspirants and knock out some others has now been tamed. This will eliminate a lot of the pre-election matters which clog the political process, even after elections.
The new Electoral Act amendment also sets out a more rigorous process for the determination of candidates, as well as creates dispute resolution mechanisms that will allow those who are aggrieved to petition quickly.
In this new bill exists a Section 87(3) which sets out the maximum expenses that can be incurred by every aspirant who is seeking election, as well as designates the fees that aspirants will be charged by political parties to purchase nomination forms. This means that our elections will no longer be about money and politics, but about competence.
Sections 33 to 38 of the new Electoral Act deals with the issue of substitution, resignation and replacement of candidates for an election. The Electoral Act amendment ensures that the names of candidates must be submitted by political parties not earlier than 90 days before the election, and not later than 60 days before the election. Additionally, names of candidates can only be substituted not later than 30 days before the election. In the case of resignations, the person who is resigning must do so physically (in-person) - and his/her resignation letter will be transmitted to INEC.
The new Sections 33 and 34 of the amended Electoral Act address the issue of death of a candidate while the election results are being expected as it happened in Kogi State in 2016. The Electoral Act amendment specifies that in the case of a death occurring before an election, such election will be suspended for 21 days and a replacement will be done within 14 days (after new primaries) - the remaining seven days will be used for campaigning.
Section 87 of the new amendments to the 2010 Electoral Act Bill will see to the death of imposition of candidates by parties. Under this new section, the procedures imposed for nomination and holding of primaries will ensure that whoever emerges will only do so as a result of the decision of the members of the party not that of a few party chieftains.
All these and other numerous benefits of the amended Electoral Act are what the presidential veto are putting on the line and threatening to throw into the waste basket on account of self preservation and ego. That is why the analysis in the media should focus more on other benefits of the Bill and stop straight-jacketing and profiling the Bill as if all that is in it is the issue of which elections comes first in 2019.
Perhaps, this new Electoral Act is the most ambitious and innovative law aimed at deepening democracy, opening up the political process, making the electoral process transparent and curing the defects that have manifested in the last eight years of the operation of the old law it seeks to replace.
That is why all patriotic Nigerians should appeal to President Buhari and the lawmakers to avoid a situation where the country loses this golden opportunity to reform the electoral process and further put our democracy on a sure, sound footing.