Recent Efforts at Electoral Reform
During the General Ibrahim Babangida’s wasteful transition to democracy program, government identified the problems of the electoral process in Nigeria as a major setback for enthroning a viable and functional democracy. The government, as part of efforts to improve the conduct of elections during the transition, based on a proper understanding of the dynamics of the electoral process in the country, established the Political Bureau in 1986 to collate information from Nigerians on the ways and means of finding solutions to our myriad of political problems. After canvassing for information throughout the length and breadth of Nigeria, the Political Bureau listed four basic conditions for the conduct of free and fair elections as follows:
a) An honest, competent, non-partisan administration to run elections;
b) A general acceptance throughout the political community of certain rather vague rules of the game which limit the struggle for power because of some unspoken sentiment that if the rules are not observed more or less faithfully the game itself will disappear amid the wreckage of the whole system;
c) A developed system of political parties, traditions and teams of candidates before the electors as alternatives between (which) to choose; and
d) An independent judiciary to interpret electoral laws.
The first condition saw to the establishment of the National Electoral Commission in August 1987. The present Independent National Electoral Commission is a successor to this electoral body. For the second condition, the Directorate of Social Mobilisation (MAMSER) was inaugurated in 1987 to undertake among others, the task of bringing about a cultural revolution through political education and public enlightenment in which the second condition would be achieved. The third condition informed the Political Bureau’s recommendation of a two-party system and ultimately helped the military junta under General Babangida to decree by military fiat the birth of the Social Democratic Party and National Republican Convention. The fourth condition led to the establishment of the Transition to Civil Rule Tribunal to adjudicate cases arising from the various elections. Unfortunately, all these efforts came to naught as the entire Transition to Civil Rule Program hit a brick wall and the country had to start afresh.
The Abdul Salam Military regime that midwifed the Transition Program to the third republic that ushered in the present democracy did not deem it proper to start off from where the former transition program had left off or even to learn a few lessons from that program; rather, it hurriedly put together a new constitution, defined a new electoral process for the country and inserted the word “Independent” into the name of the electoral body and renamed it Independent National Electoral Commission, granting the Commission powers to register political parties and conduct elections. The rest they say is history as the performance of the Independent National Electoral Commission has shown that it is everything but independent. Electoral mayhem, violence, polling irregularities and various forms of inconsistencies have again brought pressure on the Nigerian government and its political class to offer remedial action to our electoral problems.
After his election, President Umaru Yar’Adua succumbed to popular pressure and “conceded that a robbery had indeed taken place” with the elections that brought him to power. In a recent commentary on the Niger Delta situation titled “Between Amnesia and Amnesty,” Professor Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate and one of the seven founding fathers of the Pyrates Confraternity which metamorphosed into the National Association of Seadogs, describes the electoral process which brought President Yar’Adua to power as “gba’ju e tactics of the last incumbent,” a Yoruba word depicting fraudulent circumstances. To help reconcile himself to the people, whose political will he had stolen, President Umaru Yar’Adua promised electoral reform during his inaugural address and on August 28, 2007, inaugurated a 22-member Electoral Reform Committee, headed by Honorable Justice Muhammadu Lawal Uwais GCON, former Chief Justice of the Federation. Top on the President’s laundry list to the Committee was his desire to undertake the reform of Nigeria’s electoral process with a view to raising the standard and quality of general elections to acceptable international standards.
