FOURS before polling booths opened last Saturday, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) announced the rescheduling of the 2019 elections to new dates.
The presidential and National Assembly polls are probably taking place right now as you read this piece, while the governorship and state legislative polls have been rescheduled for March 9, 2019. There was nothing, not even a suspicion, as this piece was being written on Thursday to indicate that the polls could once again be aborted. The electoral body spoke confidently and convincingly on Wednesday and Thursday that the polls would hold as rescheduled. Nigerians, however, remember that a few days before the polls were originally scheduled to hold, INEC also spoke confidently and soothingly about their readiness for the polls.
The electoral body is committed to conducting the polls, starting from today. The country wishes them well. But until the polls open and close, no one can pass any judgement on how well they were organised. When they failed the first time on February 16, 2019, not only was harsh judgement passed on them, their failure released a lot of pent-up feelings about politics, power and leadership in the country, with some of those feelings reverberating on tangential issues like due process, rule of law, the role of the military in elections, and policing of elections. The electoral body did its best early this week to dispel as many bad and false notions about their readiness and impartiality, but there is nothing to suggest that the parties and voters repose as much confidence in them as they did before the postponement. Certainly, and surprisingly, the presidency has been the most vociferous against INEC in ways that are far more unprecedented than has ever been witnessed in these parts.
At a stakeholders’ meeting convened by INEC immediately after the postponement, agents of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), including their chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, were unsparing of the electoral body, which they described as incompetent and compromised. The APC representatives sensed that the public would refuse to believe their claims that the government knew nothing about the postponement, especially going by the example of the previous government of Goodluck Jonathan which seemed to have schemed for a postponement of the 2015 polls in order to secure an advantage over the then opposition APC. The APC agents even briefly called for the resignation of the INEC chairman.
But when the ruling party convened an urgent national caucus meeting in Abuja on Monday, party leaders seemed to have done more than enough to convince a sceptical electorate and the rest of the country that they knew nothing about the postponement. Indeed, going by their body language and what they thought they sensed from the opposition, APC leaders gave the impression that they were the last to know of the impending postponement. President Muhammadu Buhari was particularly incensed, even allowing himself some incendiary remarks and innuendoes about the electoral body, and making very provocative and unconstitutional remarks about voters and the voting process. Taking a cue from the president’s injured pride, the Department of State Service (DSS) briefly but unwisely and tempestuously waded into the fray by inviting some principal officers of INEC for investigation and interrogation, not minding the disruptive effects of such invitations.
While the DSS has mollified its irritation, at least for now, there is nothing to suggest that the president has calmed down, his feathers probably ruffled by the fact that he was among the last to know of the decision to postpone the polls. He was very hurt, it seems, but he probably glossed over the fact that INEC might be trying to protect him from allegations of collusion or, at best, connivance. INEC was wrong to have left till very late on Friday the decision to postpone the election, but whether by design or by coincidence, they were right to have insulated the president, indeed the presidency and particularly the APC, from dangerous and unfair barbs. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), either individually or collectively, might have got hint of the postponement of the polls ahead of the APC, but it is hard to see how that confers any advantage on them beyond perhaps the conservation of financial resources.
The electoral body should have handled the setback far better than they did, and should never have allowed themselves to panic or be overwhelmed by the logistical nightmare that rushed upon them in the dying hours before the opening of the polls; but they were smart and quick enough to have shifted the polls by nothing more than a week. They must now hope that they can deliver on a credible and smooth poll that would confound their detractors and pleasantly surprise their friends and confidants. There are indications that officials of the electoral body have not worked together with the seamlessness expected of them, their ranks having been bifurcated by politics and politicians, and by ethnic and other petty considerations, however, Mahmood Yakubu, the INEC chairman and a professor of political history and international studies, has the gargantuan task of dispelling whatever misgivings still exist about the capacity and cohesiveness of INEC to deliver on a fair election.
The president may be justified in his rage against INEC — who would not, given the reassurances INEC gave shortly before the polls opened? — but he has not altogether handled his anger with the gravitas and presidential panache expected of him and his office. He was undoubtedly under pressure to convince Nigerians that he did not know anything about the postponement, but he ought to be circumspect about his reaction and careful in weighing his words. In the circumstance, he has unleashed a firestorm of protest among the political class and leader writers of the republic over the measures he announced his government was prepared to take to safeguard a free and fair poll. It is not clear what worried him the more: the postponement of the polls by a week, which is tolerable despite the cost to investors and voters, or achieving peaceful polling, which was not really and overwhelmingly an issue at the time of the postponement.
By insinuating that poll riggers and disturbers of peaceful polling be shot, the president was both overdramatising the problem and deliberately subverting the laws of the country. No anger and no provocation must ever justify impunity or self-help. The president’s order to the military and the police to deal ruthlessly with electoral offenders virtually gives the security agents licence to use disproportionate force in excess of what the law recommends. No one, not least the president, must ever be allowed to take liberty with interpreting the law far beyond its intendments, simply because they have conjured the threat to the republic in such a manner as to alarm the public and give justifications for extralegal measures.
The president’s aides have of course doubled down on the president’s order, and consequently there will be no walking back the extraordinary and defeatist measures enunciated at the APC caucus meeting. It is a tragedy for any society to distrust and undermine its own capacity and wisdom to deal with malfeasance by constantly embracing excesses unknown to its own laws. Happily, the electoral body has contradistinctively sworn not to go outside the ambits of the law in policing the elections or interdicting poll offenders. That is how it should be, and the presidency is encouraged to follow this example rather than needlessly dispute the semantics of the controversial order given to the security forces. It is time the country matured and wised up in handling unusual and prickly situations.
Indeed, rather than vent its spleen so publicly and a little recklessly, the APC should be thankful for the postponement of the polls in the light of reports about the subterranean efforts allegedly made by their chief opponent in the poll to probably subvert popular will. In any case it hardly matters now whether the APC knew about the postponement or not. The elections will hopefully hold, starting from today, and a winner will emerge. If the APC is to win, it should hope that its victory will not be anchored on strong-arming the electorate and alarming the public, but on convincing them that it had done enough in about four years to earn their respect and confidence.
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