2019 ELECTIONS: WHYYAKUBU MUST NOT FAIL (1)

Chima Amadi argues that the INEC Chairman has what it takes to conduct a credible election

This week’s discourse topic presents an instant problem for those familiar with my preferred panacea of an institutional approach to resolving Nigeria’s policy quandary. While I have conceded, that individuals drive policy processes, I had always argued that when institutions are strengthened and made the bedrock of development, the misfits who occasionally find themselves at the driving seat of policy positions will of necessity fall in line. A cursory look at the US elections will foreground this assertion. District Attorneys (DAs) oversee polls at the state level, which also includes those for the president and members of Congress in each state of the Union. These DAs are elected officers of the state who ran for office on the platform of any of the political parties in the US or as independent candidates. Notwithstanding their party affiliations, the DAs oversee the elections to the fullest extent of the law. Americans have not been known to haggle or lose sleep over the party affiliations of DAs who are assisted in the task by thousands of bureaucrats. The reason is simple: the institutions work and are no respecter of persons.

Given my epistemological foundation, therefore, it would seem like a contradiction to be engaging in discourse with an individual rather than the institution as the focus of my analysis. I have deliberately chosen to be a bit nuanced from my epistemic position for two reasons. First, I had in an earlier piece depicted the weak institutional framework and safeguards that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was deliberately deprived of by the political class in constituting the body in 1998. This weakness has been exploited in past elections to ensure that preferred candidates of the establishment and ruling party at any given time gets an unfair advantage at the polls. What has been classified as electoral malpractice or rigging is merely collusion between political parties and individuals within the Election Management Body (EMB) to exploit the weakness to perpetrate electoral fraud, thereby depriving the people of adequate representation. The weakened structure of the INEC is evident from the appointive process recommended by the constitution for National and Resident Electoral Commissioners.

Although on paper, the individuals selected for this responsibility are supposed to be nonpartisan and with unimpeachable character and integrity, there had been verifiable accusations of these criteria being respected in breach. The choice of some of these flawed individuals is not an error of judgment, instead, a deliberate action aimed at getting malleable persons that can exploit the weak structures of the INEC to carry out the bidding of those that influenced or sanctioned their appointments. The confirmation hearings of these commissioners have been known to be flooded with petitions by the opposition questioning the political neutrality and moral character of some of the nominees. The result is the shambolic elections that have been conducted in Nigeria between 1999 and 2015.

Concomitantly, in recognition of the amorphous structure of the INEC, several failed attempts have been made at strengthening its framework. Perhaps, the best opportunity to engineer a far-reaching change was lost with the apathy that the political class approached the proposed reforms of the Uwais Committee. The White Paper on the committee’s report is yet to be made public and is probably caking with dust in some government vaults.

However, government’s inaction is not suggestive of an impervious political class intent on continuing business as usual in the conduct of elections; it was perhaps more amenable to a superficial quick fix that would still allow the political class access and room for manipulation of the process.

This conclusion is reached given that the Jonathan administration spurned a window of opportunity that opened when Maurice Iwu, the incompetent former head of the EMB was eased out of his position. To be fair, former President Goodluck Jonathan understood that poorly conducted elections had become a niggling pain stabbing steadily and dangerously at the heart of the nation’s fledgling democracy. Like his predecessor, the late Umaru ‘Yar’Adua, he was committed to finding a solution to the malaise. Unlike his late boss, he opted for saddling that responsibility on a strong personality rather than entrenching reforms that would strengthen the institutional base of the EMB. Thus, began the search for that one Nigerian that would bring his integrity, credibility, honesty, and strength of character to bear on the legitimacy crisis of the INEC. Enter Attahiru Jega, and the rest is now academic history. If President Buhari was mulling the idea of returning to the old order of lack-lustre leadership for the INEC, the vocal rejection of the stopgap Amina Zakari administration must have given him a dose of the impatience of Nigerians with ineptitude having experienced a little of what purposeful leadership at the helm of authority can accomplish. The six months or thereabouts it took him to announce a replacement for Jega was not altogether a waste. Mahmood Yakubu, an erudite scholar and professor of history, may not have come with the rock star status of Jega. However, his pedigree, strength of character, integrity and neutral competence are loftily acknowledged among administrative and academic circles. We can only rue what would have been if Buhari had stuck to the criteria he used in searching and selecting the INEC boss in other appointive positions.

A little insight into what is known about the INEC boss will reveal that he was indeed a round peg in a round hole. The Jonathan administration did not sanction his second term tenure as Executive Secretary of TETFund for no other reason than his refusal to allow the fund become an Automated Teller Machine of the then ruling party. Even after ASUU took the unprecedented position of writing a letter to the then president calling for his reappointment, it was apparent that he had stepped on powerful toes. He was then appointed as the Assistant Secretary, Finance and Administration, of the last National Conference. Not many would know that in this position, he saved the nation several billions of naira that would have been lost on a white elephant project proposed by the leadership of the conference. The leadership had proposed to award contracts worth over one billion naira for the provision of an Electronic Voting System (EVS) for the conference to a company owned by a family member of a principal officer of the conference. Yakubu staunchly refused to endorse it insisting that the EVS was unnecessary for an ad-hoc assignment that would end under three months. When suffocating pressure was mounted on him he threatened to resign rather than append his signature to that bogus project. I have confirmed the veracity of this narrative from no less a person than the revered former Chairman of the Nigerian Human Rights Commission, Professor Chidi Odinkalu.

This stubborn streak and insistence on respect for process followed Yakubu into his new assignment. As a CSO observer during the Edo governorship elections, this writer is aware that he threatened to resign from his job following the meddlesomeness of the police hierarchy in the infamous postponement of the election and reportedly only rescinded that threat after the president assured him that the Edo debacle would not repeat itself.