A SEASON FOR SPINELESS PEOPLE IN HIGH PLACES

Foot-dragging to veto-override presidential rejection of the electoral amendment bill shows legislative weakness, writes Bolaji Adebiyi

“I thought Buhari had balls,” fumed Ahmed Mohammed, a political entrepreneur of the All Progressives Congress tribe, “Now I know he is a pretender.”

Mohammed was reacting to the refusal of President Muhammadu Buhari to assent to the 2010 Electoral Act Amendment Bill 2021 at the close of the deadline on Sunday.

He was more pained by the surreptitious way the president declined assent. “He had to run away to far-away Turkey before he could communicate his spineless decision. What was he afraid of?” Mohammed asked.

Perhaps the most popular bill ever endorsed across the broad spectrum of the public and passed by the federal legislature under intense public pressure, the presidential stalling was bound to draw the ire of perennial agitators for electoral reforms that would strip the polity of all the infidelity associated with the system.

The bill features several provisions that promise to move the nation’s electoral process closer to the threshold of fidelity and transparency, which Nigerians have yelled for many years. With the provisions for electronic accreditation, voting, collation and transmission of election results, it takes the wind out of the sail of thieving politicians who arrange for their votes to swell like Ijebu Garri. Another clause allows the electoral umpire to review and withhold the results of an election that is obtained under duress. Then, the direct primaries provision for the selection of political parties’ candidates for elective offices, which many Nigerians think would deepen internal party democracy since it would shift power from a few stalwarts to the generality of the members.

Seeing that it would reduce their influence within their party, APC governors opposed the direct primaries clause and approached the president for help, asking him to decline assent to the bill. The argument for direct primaries has been made severally the most pungent being that it would help reduce the bad influence of the loitering and valueless governors and similar godfathers who have held the parties by the jugular for years. Many analysts had expected that the president, himself a beneficiary of the process, would ignore the governors and stand with the people. As it has happened, that expectation would seem to have been misplaced.

Hints that Buhari would jump ship emerged early enough but the protagonists refused to notice them and rather blamed the president for their unfounded optimism. Shortly after the bill was presented to the president and the contestations over direct primaries began, Femi Adesina, the presidential aide on media, was quoted as saying that his boss’ popularity would not wane if he refused to assent. Then the president started a letter-writing exercise, asking the electoral body and some presumed stakeholders for comments on a bill that had gone through public hearing and had been well debated in the public domain. Finally, Abubakar Malami, the ubiquitous attorney-general of the federation, who had been part of the passage process, wrote to his boss, complaining that the bill would be expensive and difficult to implement.

These signals remained unclear to supporters of the bill until the president’s communication rejecting it was surreptitiously publicised on the dot of the deadline for assent on Sunday. If anyone was in doubt about the president’s cynicism for the bill, his reasons for vetoing it should clear such a doubt. In the main, he complained about its high cost of implementation, implications for security agencies and undemocratic content. These are essentially lame excuses.

The cost argument is mischievous because there are no scientific estimates. In any case, in terms of structure, there is no fundamental difference in the procedure for the indirect and direct primaries safe for the number of persons that would be involved as the processes for both begin from the ward level. Indirect primaries’ delegates begin their journey to state congresses and national conventions from the wards where the direct primaries votes would also be cast. So, where is the additional cost? Meanwhile, it would be interesting to hear from the president on why he thinks parties can find the funds to engage in general elections that are held in all the wards of the federation but cannot find the same to conduct direct primaries for the selection of candidates.

The security argument is as lame as the cost proposition. The president fears that the direct primaries might stretch the security agencies. It is not clear what he meant by this. But it ought to be clear to him that the primary assignment of the security agencies is to implement the law and the nation cannot shy away from making a desirable law on the ground that law enforcement officers might not have the capacity to enforce it. Once a law is made, it is the responsibility of the appropriate agencies to design an enforcement strategy. Again, the security agencies would be required to secure the ward congresses for indirect primaries, would they not? How would this be different from securing direct primaries at the ward levels?

The issue of possible breach of rights of individuals that might be occasioned by direct primaries flies in the face of the constitutional limits to the enjoyment of such rights. The question is whether a bill that seeks to cure the mischief of godfathers in the internal democracy of political parties is reasonably justifiable. If the president was honest enough in his consideration of the matter, he would have answered the question in the affirmative. This is because he was a victim of the excesses of these overbearing governors in the All Nigeria Peoples Party where he was forced to exit in 2009 to hurriedly form the Congress for Progressive Change in order to be able to contest the 2011 presidential election.

Mohammed’s angry outburst that Buhari lacked balls would be been an exaggeration when the president’s action is compared to the response of the federal legislators who had threatened to veto override any presidential veto. Perhaps dazed by the presidential pandering to the governors, Femi Gbajabiamila, speaker of the House of Representatives, demobilised his visibly angry members with a sobering speech then adjourned the session till January next year when tempers must have cooled. In the other chamber, Ahmad Lawan, president of the Senate and a self-confessed lapdog of the president, manoeuvred his colleagues into an executive session and by the time they emerged, senators who had threatened fire and brimstone were speaking tongue in cheek. Compromise rather than decisiveness is now the sermon in both chambers.

“Let’s not throw away the baby with the birth water,” Gbajabiamila told his colleagues in an attempt to pacify them. But is that not a perfect escape route for a spineless legislature that lacks the balls to shrug off the bully of an executive, which has constituted itself into opposition to the popular wish of the people?

So much for spinelessness in the season of Xmas.

Adebiyi, managing editor of THISDAY Newspapers, writes from bolaji.adebiyi@thisdaylive.com