Still stuck in the mud

The 2010 Electoral Act (Amendment) Bill is still stuck in the mud. For the second time in six months, President Muhammadu Buhari has refused to assent to it. In March he turned it down because he said he did not want to sign an illegality into law. The bill went back to the national assembly.

It turned out the main bone of contention then between the president and the national assembly centred on the sequence of elections proposed in the amendment. INEC had issued a schedule for the 2019 general elections to be conducted in two tranches beginning with the presidential and the national assembly elections and ending with the governorship and the state houses of assembly. In the proposed amendment, the lawmakers proposed three tranches beginning with the national assembly followed by governorship and state houses of assembly and ending with the presidency.

This then generated so much fire and fury that this simple matter was turned into a monumental controversy with some of the legislators forming a pressure group called Buhari support group in the national assembly to fight their own colleagues. Buhari was persuaded that the sequence suggested in the bill would adversely affect his electoral fortune. But thank goodness, cooler heads eventually prevailed but the controversy managed to pit the president against the legislators. You would trace everything that has happened between them since then to that fire and fury: the assault on the Senate by some thugs; the invasion of the national assembly by DSS operatives and the mass defections from the ruling party to the opposing party. Too much damage.

But the law-makers went back to the drawing board and in July, submitted a revised version of the bill to the president for his assent. The controversial election sequence clause was deleted. Happy? Apparently not.

This time the president cited some errors in the bill that might place a burden on the electoral commission. Right. If you are the president, you have to be careful about placing a burden on the electoral umpire. I think the commission has enough burden as it is, what with its having to contend with some 73 political parties and possibly some 73 presidential candidates. The president’s special assistant on national assembly matters, Senator Ita Enang, has offered some help here to educate the public on why the president would not put his pen to the paper. In a statement, he pointed out some of the errors that apparently escaped the law-makers. It may all be part of the high wire politics in a relationship between the president and the national assembly now thoroughly poisoned. But he seems quite convincing to me. I find some possible errors of the head from his statement. I do not seek to vouch for his argument; merely to point out that the president’s man is not nit-picking in the continued and

The law-makers went back to the drawing board and in July, submitted a revised version of the bill to the president for his assent. The controversial election sequence clause was deleted. Happy? Apparently not

obnoxious game of humbling the law-makers by the president and his men.

According to Enang, a former law-maker, the problem with the electoral act bill this time centres on the new clause 87 (14) which, if allowed to stand without amending sections 31, 34 and 85 to conform with it, would create much more than a mild confusion in a system that is confused enough as it is. I will quote hereunder Enang’s statement in full, not necessarily to advance his argument but to let my readers judge for themselves which, between the presidency and the legislature, is to blame for the controversy that has elevated this relatively minor matter to a monumental political grandstanding.

According to the president’s man, the act provides in section 31 that “Every political party shall not later 60 days before the date appointed for a general election submit to the commission the list of candidates the party proposes to sponsor.

“Section 34 provides that ‘the commission shall at least 30 days before the day of the election publish a statement of the full names and addresses of all candidates standing nominated.’

“Section 85 (1) states ‘That a political party shall give the commission twenty-one days’ notice of any convention, congress, etc., for electing members of its executive committees for any of the elective offices.’

The lawyers and the law-makers might split hairs over these points made by the president’s man. But it seems to me that these are minor matters that can be swiftly resolved and thus remove this needless controversy from burdening the system and raising the blood pressure of the public further. Errors both of the head and the heart are inevitable in law-making. Amendments to bodies of laws are intended to take care of such errors as well as accommodate changes in the society. Anyone reading the bill would find it quite uninspiring. It reads more like the report of a proof reader in a publishing house than an important piece of legislature on which the conduct of our elections depends. A missing ‘a’ here and the removal of ‘the’ there.

I had expected to see one fundamental amendment to the electoral act. Sometime in 2010, the Senate held a retreat in Enugu. The former chief justice of Nigeria, Justice Muhammadu Uwais, addressed the law-makers. He suggested that the law should be amended to shift the burden of proof in an election dispute from the petitioner to the respondent. He said that a man who claims to have won an election must prove that he won. It is not right to make the petitioner prove that he was cheated and denied victory because the commission would not support him. The advantage of this is that INEC would be compelled to appear before the court to defend itself. As the law stands the commission is not obliged to assist the petitioner prove his case in any way. This was actually one of the fine recommendations of the electoral reform committee set up by the late President Umaru Yar’adua and headed by Uwais. Yes, it is gathering dust.

I knew the senators would not listen to the eminent jurist. No man who is a beneficiary of a legal provision would amend it to his own detriment.