Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) has finally signed the Electoral Act Amendment Bill into law as the Electoral Act 2022. However, he granted assent to the bill in protest and with a caveat. He had boxed himself into a corner after about five refusals to grant assent to electoral reforms. There were no more cards and games to play as it became clear that the president’s refusal to grant assent had all along been an ingrained position against electoral reforms. This discourse reviews the president’s request for further amendment of the Electoral Act and concludes that it is not in the interest of democracy and development.
First, there is the need to clear some cobwebs that have arisen following the presidential assent. It is a fact that many social, cultural and political groups are congratulating the president for granting assent to the bill to become law. The central poser is: congratulating the president for what? Here is a man who has taken undisguised steps to frustrate electoral reforms. He has never produced any executive bill for electoral reform but has made it a point of duty to defeat attempts to reform elections. This is a case of a bull in a chinaware shop. It had just been cajoled, begged and guided out of the shop and we were busy clapping for the bull. Pray, the authors and sponsors of the bill in the National Assembly, what are we doing to them? Applauding, congratulating or forgetting them? What value did the president add by granting assent? So, we have reached a situation where Nigerians define the task of the highest office in the land in terms of its capacity to obstruct reforms rather than initiate reforms? So many questions that should be answered consciously have now become subject to our subservient genuflections to abuse of power.
There is the need to interrogate section 84 (12) which the president found objectionable and called for its amendment. The section states that no political appointee at any level shall be a voting delegate or be voted for at the convention or congress of any political party for the purpose of the nomination of candidates for any election. The president is of the opinion that this disenfranchises political appointees in a way and manner that is outside the contemplation of the constitution. He states: “It is imperative to note that the only constitutional expectation placed on serving political office holders that qualify by extension as public officers within the context of the constitution is resignation, withdrawal or retirement at least 30 days before the date of the election. It will be stretching things beyond the constitutional limit to import extraneous restrictions into the constitution on account of the practical application of section 84 (12) of the bill where political parties’ conventions and congresses were to hold earlier than 30 days to the election”.
Notwithstanding the president’s position, there are obvious challenges and mischief in the existing electoral law, which the said section seeks to cure by suppressing the mischief while advancing a remedy. We have a situation where the head of the executive arm either at the presidential or gubernatorial level exploits the right to appoint aides and heads of agencies who will eventually be among the delegates to nominate candidates to fly the flag of a party. Tens and hundreds of these appointees will constitute a sizable portion of the automatic delegates who will vote to the extent that the results are known before the contest – wherever and whoever the chief executive tilts will automatically become the winner. These automatic delegates do not need to be validated by party members or through popular suffrage but the fact of their appointment. There is no even ground or proper competition because one the parties is already unduly privileged and advantaged before the contest. This cannot be the position in a proper democratic set up. The idea of a level playing ground and one person one vote is defeated from the outset.
Two things are at stake—the right, better stated, the unmerited feeling of entitlement of political office holders versus the ideals of democracy and the rights of hundreds of millions of Nigerians to be led by a leadership of their choice. These two values are on a scale and the poser is: which of them should trump the other? It makes no sense for any one to argue in favour of the status quo because there is no right to subvert the will of the majority which is the basis and foundation of democracy. This kind of argument based on vacuous positivism which seeks to defeat democratic and developmental norms are part of why we have remained underdeveloped. You will recall that the initial disagreement between the president and the National Assembly was about direct primaries which NASS sought to introduce as the foundation of nominating party flag bearers while the president and his team of entitled Nigerians insisted on the status quo of manipulation and a forced consensus where persons who have been deemed to have built a consensus still come out to complain and grumble. So, we have reached the stage of legalising and legitimising gunpoint consensus and consensus built of threats, fraud and deception?
This sense of entitlement encourages impunity and this informs the public anointing, as happened in Akwa Ibom State, of a successor by a sitting governor so many months before primaries. It also informs the fact that many presidential candidates in the ruling party are jostling to get the nod of the incumbent president as against selling their governance ideas to the members of the party and eventually to Nigerians. This is not the way of democracy but dictatorship under the guise of democracy.
This is a contest between darkness and light and the National Assembly is advised to allow the law to remain as assented to. If anyone is not happy with its provisions, s/he should approach the courts for interpretation and the matter should get up to the Supreme Court for a final resolution. If the highest court in the land decides on the side of dry constitutionalism, NASS can as well initiate an amendment of the relevant provisions of the constitution. If the appointees resign before the conventions and primaries in obedience to the law, there is nothing stopping the president from reappointing them immediately after the primaries.
Let the present custodians of power stop this attempt to be clever by half and subvert the will of the people with the imposition of a few. Time is of the essence and the Independent National Electoral Commission should be given the opportunity to plan ahead for the 2023 elections within the certainty of an Electoral Act whose provisions are acceptable to the majority of Nigerians.
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