Nigeria ripe enough for independent electoral candidates – Mimiko

May 31, 2014

Mimiko

Vice-Chancellor, Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko, and one of the Ondo State delegates in the ongoing National Conference, Prof. Femi Mimiko, speaks to FRIDAY OLOKOR on the recommendations of the Committee on Political Parties and Electoral Matters, among others

As a member of the National Conference Committee on Political Parties and Electoral Matters and the chairman of its sub-committee on report writing, what are the recommendations of the committee generally?

Democracy is as good as the electoral process, and if the electoral process is not appropriately organised, you can only talk of democracy in theoretical terms. So, we took our assignment from that perspective and we identified those things that we thought we needed to do. We took the assignment from three dimensions – political parties, the election management bodies and the electoral process. These were the compass with which we allowed ourselves to be guided. On political parties, we identified a number of key issues that, over the years, have tended to undermine the basis of party politics in the country. We talked about the need to, for instance, have party democracy to allow members of the political parties to be the movers and the drivers of decisions. We frowned at the situation in which political office holders will seem to be the ones pocketing the political parties and thereby constraining their growth. We endorsed the code of conduct for political parties and a number of other issues. But the most important area that we dilated upon was in terms of election management bodies, that is INEC and the state electoral commissions. Again, you will agree with me that if you don’t have an election management body that, above all, has integrity, the outcome of its election will be disputed. That is the type of things that we saw in the elections of 2007, when we had hundreds of election petitions all over the place, because INEC then headed by Prof. Maurice Iwu, did a horrible job. It was an election that was generally acclaimed to have fallen below not just international, but also local standard. So, we felt we needed to also focus on that issue. I remember the question that came up was why was it possible for Prof. Maurice Iwu to have that type of opportunity to bastardise everything that we knew as elections. So we felt we needed a way to strengthen INEC, and we therefore made certain recommendations to strengthen the autonomy of INEC. I remember for instance, we said that clearance for whoever gets nominated to chair INEC should be much more rigorous. We had this long debate on whether the President should be divested of the authority to appoint the chairman and there were those who fell in line with what the Justice Muhammed Uwais Panel recommended that the National Judicial Council should be made to do the appointment, but at the end of the day, we felt there was no basis for that. Number one, you need to insulate the NJC itself from partisan pressures, there is no end to it, and if you say the President should not appoint the chairman of INEC, what happens to the Justices of the Supreme Court and the rest. So we felt that in a presidential system of government, the President should go ahead to appoint, especially in the contest in which the law provides that he consults with the National Council of States before doing the appointments. But the lacuna that we saw was in the process of clearance, the process of screening in the Senate, and we felt that has not been thorough, not just in relation to INEC chief but several other appointments. We, therefore, recommended that before the Senate concludes the clearing process, it must set aside at least two weeks for the public to make objections if any, so that if there are things people know about the nominee that will not make him be a good electoral chief, they will bring it to the attention of the Senate and the Senate will be guided thereby.

What other recommendations did you make on election management bodies?

Another issue we looked at to strengthen what is in existence actually is that INEC is now on first line charge and so its expenditures must not depend on the whims and caprices of a particular chief executive of the nation. That again, we saw as a very important tool. So we moved in that direction to take decisions that are directed to strengthening the electoral body. We also took a look at the State Independent Electoral Commissions, and I am sure you know that many Nigerians have found it difficult to understand the way elections of local governments are conducted. A situation in every state where you have such an election and it is the ruling party that goes home with all the prizes remains surprising to many Nigerians. But we did not succumb to the suggestion that because of such a limitation, that we should scrap the State Independent Electoral Commissions as recommended by the Uwais Committee because we felt that in a federal system, that in a true federal republic, local governments should be in the purview of the states. They should appropriately be residual matters because they are not federating units. The states are the federating units, so you cannot import local governments and begin to pretend that they should be an arm of government that should be independent and be autonomous. So we said the state independent electoral commissions should remain, but we worked out specific framework for strengthening them and making them more effective. In relation to the electoral process, we then took a look at independent candidacy, for instance, and we agreed that it should come on board; Nigeria is ripe enough to have that. The idea behind it is that there are individuals who are just not willing or ready to be part of organisational politics and yet they may be people who have strong linkage with the grassroots and are able to persuade their people to vote them into political offices. But we were also conversant with the need to make the procedure rigorous enough such that you don’t open a Pandora box of independent candidates so that at the end of the day, you don’t have a million presidential candidates.

What about the participation of Nigerians in the Diaspora in the country’s elections?

We also looked at the issue of Diaspora voting and we came to the conclusion that given the present constitution, there is a major constraint that if you do not belong or reside in a particular constituency in Nigeria, you do not qualify to be registered to vote and therefore, we eliminated that element that gives the impression that Nigerians living abroad cannot participate in the process. We, however, recognised the enormous logistic challenges that will attend trying to get Nigerians across the world cast their votes during the nation’s elections. These are some of the things we did and we are convinced that if we are able to persuade plenary, they are things that will help in strengthening the electoral process in this country.

If these recommendations sail through at the plenary, when are they likely to take off, is it before 2015?

We were careful not to make timelines. Indeed, we made a point that some of the recommendations, if they are eventually accepted by plenary, may not come into effect for the elections of 2015 and the reasons are fairly obvious. For instance, we have suggested that biometric registration should be done for the purpose of elections. Nobody is saying that it has to be concluded before the next elections coming up in February next year (2015). But it is something we are looking at that should be put in the relevant legal books and we are also saying that at all times, INEC should endeavour to deploy the most current technology of voting with a view to ensuring that voting process has much more credibility. We are not suggesting that all these recommendations should be in place before the next elections.

What is your position on the removal of immunity clause from the constitution given that two different committees at the ongoing National Conference have so recommended?

I don’t support it. I don’t think it is a well thought out position because if you don’t give some forms of protection to these chief executives, you bring them down and they may probably not have time to concentrate on governance because Nigerians will rush to court at the slightest excuses and you have judges summoning the President on a daily basis. The most that the President can spend in office is eight years. The long arm of the law can still catch up with the President who misapplies himself during those eight years; you don’t need to put in place a framework that will make the judges to be calling the President everyday and even be asking that the President be detained. How many people are we talking about here? The President, his vice, 36 state governors and their deputies; these are all the people affected and I think to the extent that post-tenure era offers enough time; they can be called upon to give account. I think that system is fair enough for me.

Some delegates have suggested that due to the high cost of legislating in the country, Nigeria should adopt a system where lawmakers will work on a part-time basis, do you subscribe do this?

My take is that if we are going to have a bicameral legislature, I would suggest that one of them should be part-time. The one that is bigger should be part-time and in that instance, it should be the House of Representatives. I think we need the concentration of mind that comes with full-time legislative activity for this type of fledgling democracy that we have and considering that the Senate is just an assemblage of 109 people, we can afford to allow them run on full-time basis. But if the bigger body, being the House of Representatives, goes into part-time, for me, that will be good.