In this interview, Mike Igini, Resident Electoral Commissioner, REC, for Akwa Ibom State, again seeks to explains some thorny issues in the electoral process preparatory to next year’s general election. Iguana believes that whereas it is good to have multiplicity of parties, there is the need to introduce threshold such that the field is not dominated by supporters’ club type of gathering disguised as political parties.
He also speaks about mobilisation of voters, the frustration of local government elections, the schedule of elections and the time table as well as the improvements to come from INEC.
There are legitimate logistics and balloting concerns over Sixty Eight (68) or more political parties on a ballot paper for the 2019 elections? What is your view on this?
Well we always learn from human experience and it is always better that we learn hard lessons from the experience of others so that we do not acquire painful scars needlessly. Regarding the matter of too many political parties, there are benefits and costs. The benefits are that more parties offer more choices, political parties mobilize voters around a common set of interests or ideologies. So more parties do not only help to satisfy the constitutional right of section 40 regarding freedom of association and participation in political activities, it also helps more voters to find political parties that closely match their beliefs and aspirations.
However, too many political parties with different logos and colours present many drawbacks and practical pitfalls for voters and in particular largely rural voters. For instance, voters may be unable to differentiate parties with similar or close names or logos resulting in wrong thumbprinting and invalid votes when they have to search through a ballot paper with 68 names and more. Too many political parties also fragment capable candidates both for the new parties and the older parties from where some people are likely to join the new parties. It will also fragment the votes of existing and new parties because there will be a situation where several political parties will be promoting similar policies, ideologies and agenda.
Excessive fragmentation has drawbacks because as parties subdivide, countries become harder to govern, polarization along ethnic, religious and other fault-lines increases as fringe parties harden along such agenda to gain the support of some large voting bloc, even when such agenda may be counterproductive to national cohesion. Where bigger parties are willing and responsive to public opinion to embark on reform and throw up new set of actors with new ideas and values in tantdem with prevailing public desires and expectations, they may get things done better than a coalition of smaller parties, where discipline may be a tougher challenge, often because it may include strange bedfellows. So instead of increasing real choices, multiplying parties would make room for politicians to hide the fact that what they are actually doing is using the parties as vehicles to gain patronage rather than meeting the policy needs of voters. Certainly, we do not need supporters’ club associations disguising as political parties.
What then is your suggestion to remedy the situation of this increasing numbers of parties?
The right of association under section 40 of the constitution and the right to form a political party is guaranteed but to be on the ballot should be another thing as practiced in other countries. That is why LGAs election which are supposed to be the most important elections where these parties are supposed to start the process of building these many parties should start but tragically, the 774 LGAs are not under democracy as there are practically no properly conducted elections in our council system, otherwise some of these parties would have been controlling some LGAs and would run them differently and the society enjoys the benefits of our so-called multi-party democracy.
So a remedy may be to apply a threshold mechanism which allows all parties to seek ballot access prior to a general election, a statutory threshold mechanism that determines parties that can be on the ballot in the general election and allow parties to form coalitions of common interest, thereby making it easier for voters to make policy voting choices around common interests. A threshold which limits the number of parties participating in general elections without denying them existence. Some countries like Germany, Poland and New Zealand have thresholds of participation in their parliamentary system. South Korea also utilizes a threshold system which allows only two or three parties out of the many parties to qualify to contest in the general elections and thus narrows down fragmentation tendencies as well as streamlines policy choices for voters.
The timetable for the 2019 election has just been released and this is quite early. why ?
Yes the Commission is being proactive to make election scheduling and all other consequential schedules tied to a general election, such as party conventions and nominations less shambolic. The current election activity schedule in addition to the earlier schedules for the state elections for Ekiti and Osun states, which were previously released allows everyone to have a degree of scheduling certainty for the current election cycle that will climax between February and March 2019.
Furthermore, what the Commission has done by fixing all future general elections at federal levels on the 3rd Saturday of February and 2 weeks thereafter for the State elections is in consonance with the provision of the constitution and in line with international best practice wherein dates for the conduct of election in an election year such as 2019 and 2023 and so on are now known well ahead of time. That is, in this country starting from 2019 and beyond, every Presidential and National Assembly elections would always take place every third saturday of election year such as in 16th February 2019 while the election of the governor and members of the state Houses of Assemblies would take place every first Saturday of March in every election year and that means the 2019; governorship and state houses of assemblies would now be on 2nd March 2019.
The detailed timetable as issued by the commission also provides deadlines for other electoral activities such as fixing the conduct of party primaries including the resolution of disputes arising from primaries for August 18, 2018 to October 7, 2018 for national and state elections while that of the FCT Area Council is slated for between September 4 and October 27, 2018.Although there is a recent effort by the National Assembly to change the order of elections, the Commission is yet to be fully advised of the legal status of this purported change, but its noteworthy to remind political actors that the 2019 election is now a matter of months. By this timetable all party pre-election issues must end in less than 8months from now.
Also going by global conventions, the National Assembly is seriously urged to perfect all matters relating to the amendment of the Electoral Act within January 2019 because globally any amendments to electoral laws must be completed a year to the election in which it is to be used to avoid partisan tinkering with the legislative framework for an election….
There is a pending bill in the National Assembly for a compulsory policy issue debate by all who seek elective public offices. What impact would it make on leadership selection process in the country?
Under part 1 sections 1 and 2 of the electoral Act, we have a statutory duty to educate Nigerians on sound knowledge of democracy and its processes. l have no doubt that a compulsory debate would make a great impact indeed if we can get such law in place before the 2019 election because the strength of democracy and the opportunities it creates depend on the vigor of multi-party politics in terms of policy issues, debates, moral arguments and value formation.
If in the first place politics is about the competition of ideas on how best to influence the course of development in a country, how then we really say we are playing politics of ideas when political competitors have no formalized platforms for canvasing the ideas and so compulsory debates is the most significant platform for doing so. Those debates will also allow the voters to see those around the party and judge them by their public records, their moral and professional attributes; this may even act as a self-censoring social sieve for those who know they fall short of the competencies for the position they are seeking and may have to pull out of the race before actual ballots are cast.
INEC seems to have developed solutions towards having better conducted election given recent election like Anambra but still have challenges in terms of implementation. What is your Commission doing about this towards 2019?
The Anambra election succeeded in many respects and at the same time there is still room for improvements in future elections. This was why Bratton and later Lindberg came up with three widely accepted metrics for measuring the performance of an election namely Legitimacy; whether the election outcome was accepted by stakeholders as an acceptable way of selecting those who emerged as leaders, Participation; that is whether voters and candidates, election managers and other stakeholders had untrammeled ability to play their expected roles before, during and after the elections. And Competition; if all eligible candidates who were willing to compete were freely allowed to compete.
So basically, a good democratic election is one in which stakeholders freely participated, there is competition among political parties, and the process is seen as legitimate. Although the turnout of voters in Anambra was quite low compared to the number of registered voters,however participation of voters did not vary too much from recent historical records.The metric shows that more needs to be done in terms of voter education, mobilization of voters by political actors, and how to sensitize citizens to see the link between political participation and the derivable benefits of leadership selection with development. I want to believe that a race in which there were over 30 political party candidates was truly competitive, and the general acceptance of the outcome even by participants enriches the legitimacy of the election.
One important comment one must not fail to make on the mobilization of voters by political actors is the fact that the biggest mobilizer is when the policies and actions of elected officials affect and improves the welfare and life of the people because ultimately elections are the minimal goal of democracy, the maximal goal of democracy is the development of the people and society, when the people feel they have benefitted from democracy in terms of their development and the maximization of their welfare, it mobilizes voters out of anomie and antipathy.
In the Anambra election, many observer groups, particularly the Civil Society Coalition Situation Room, led by Clement Nwankwo, called attention to a growing trend of massive open vote buying on the day of election. What does this portend for our democracy and 2019?
Its condemnable the growing trend of vote buying during election as correctly noted and that is why the level of poverty and illiteracy have been rightly identified as threats to democracy because the electorates are not really making informed choices which is a basic assumption of democracy. We do not have to go that route that other societies have travelled even though vote buying has a chequered history in the development of democracy and democratic elections globally. It is very important to closely understand the general and contextual contributions of the phenomenon in order to abate and mitigate it.
In Europe and North America when politicians used to rely on voting machines, when middle men mobilize voters with pecuniary incentives, politicians who contested later found that every election cycle made them more dependent and vulnerable, with less guarantee of assured outcome, the middlemen who bribed voters for them grew greedier and many politicians lost both the votes and huge fortunes. This is not my opinion; you can research about the phenomenon of vote buying. Both the political class and the society will loose in the end if such behavior is not stopped. That was why the use of anonymous ballot papers was introduced because middlemen who bought voter’s votes used confirmations of how they voted to get their payments, even recently in Italy, North Carolina and India, the use of cell phones was banned in polling centers because some voting machine gangs asked voters to send a picture of their ballot from inside the polling unit by MMS messaging to confirm their payments.
After the Anambra election, many newspapers captioned how the President resisted the urge to rig election in favour of his party. Does it mean that an over-bearing President can dictate to INEC and determine the outcome of election?
In Africa countries with weak institutions and attenuated control, electoral outcomes are usually the reflection of the character and disposition of its leaders to allow free, fair and credible elections. We had our experience in this country but President Jonathan is an exception now in the books of remembrance and the current President as rightly captured by the newspapers has also maintained non interference having regards to the elections conducted so far under his leadership and we will leverage on this for 2019. But to say an election could have been rigged is to assume that the umpire is under control and direction and that should not be.
Or it may also imply that an election is at the pleasure of an individual to determine its outcome whenever he pleases. INEC since 2011 has crossed critical thresholds and improving tremedously to earn the confidence of Nigerians for sustained conduct of credible elections that would meet the expectations of Nigerians. Two of the appealing characteristics of democratic elections are certainty of procedure and substantive uncertainty of outcome that can only be determined after the votes cast have been counted. That is why elected people are expected to take every opportunity of their time in elected positions to demonstrate their effectiveness and unelected candidates are encouraged to carefully think through the policy options they are promising before canvassing for votes, because the best guarantee for good electoral outcomes is to satisfy the expectations of the voters.
When the 1993 elections were annulled, the government in power was military, it spent enormous resources to repress the election outcome which was seen as legitimate by many voters, and we all know what followed. Even military diktat could not save the situation. In Ondo we recall the Omoboriowo saga, rigging is a dangerous fantasy no one must speak lightly of it, let us dispense with such notions and concentrate on good elections and good governance when elected, then we won’t need to talk of such aberrations.
What do you make of the growing disaffection of the public to how local governments are run and how elections to local governments are conducted?
It is indeed a very shameful situation. As a one who believes in true federalism and have advocated over time the idea of non interference of federal government in local governments and the need to devolve development decision making to local levels to increase participation of the grassroots, it is a sad reality that Governors in various states of control have hyjacked local government system as conquered territories of the political parties in goverment of respective states. How do you explain a situation in all 36 states controlled by a party would win all councillorship and chairmanship positions of the entire local government in a state but in INEC conducted elections the situation is different as evident with different parties today that won different states.
True and genuine election in the local governments where majority of Nigerians are domiciled should be the building blocks and foundation of our democracy. If true elections are allowed today, many of the 68 parties would win and control some local governments across the country, run the system differently as a basis to win more and build the fortune of the party by attaining a threshold to be able to participate in higher elections. But given the hyjack by Governors of Local Governments, a party that is just registered today wants to field governoship and presidential candidates when it has not won a single council election.
The continuing abuse and rape of democracy in the name of election is quite distressing and has to stop. If the Federal Government interferes with States the way Local government affairs are toyed with by most states, will there not be a social upheavals or revolution in this country? How did we get to this low point where we have completely surrendered our sovereignty in a whole 774 local governments to State Governors? A Governor determines who could be a councillor, chairman, state legislator,commissioner, senator and also wants to nominate a federal minister for a president.
Governors by whim dissolve elected council, determine when Local government tenures should begin and end, I learnt, they are even toying with the idea of dispensing with the use of ballot papers or printing limited numbers in conducting LGA elections, they would rather want result sheets printed and no more casting of votes. All over the world, actual developments that affects the people occurs at the Local Government, if we do not pay attention to this ongoing farce, our society will simply remain socially retarded and whatever we need to do to stop this must be done. My first recommendation is that rather than replace State interference with Federal interference, a better approach is to criminalize certain infractions by Federal and State Chief Executives by listing out in the Constitution, criminal offences which by our experiences tend to make elected executives unaccountable and thereby strip them of immunity against prosecution from such actions; specific Local Government interference including tenure and, elections should be on top of that list.
