ELECTORAL OFFENCES COMMISSION, TO BE OR NOT TO BE?
Josef Omorotionmwan argues the desirability of the commission
Today, we shall examine the desirability or otherwise of a commission to deal with electoral offences in Nigeria. We shall try to restrict ourselves to modern history, without returning to the dark days when different political parties at an election were assigned separate ballot boxes with their symbols. This separation made ballot box snatching easy. And in some cases, thugs of one political party could pour acid into opponents’ boxes and destroy the ballot papers therein.
Nothing here vitiates the fact that the Nigerian politics of the Fourth Republic has not been any better. If anything, it has become most brutal. Politicians have developed bigger bags of election rigging techniques. There has been a near-total return to atavism – where only the fittest have survived. Thuggery and cultism have reigned supreme.
We have shown in numerous articles in the past that every election has become war. Politicians behaved as if there was no life after the election.
Of all the wars we have fought in Edo State, the 2007 Gubernatorial War remains the most brutal. Our political opponents had planned to eliminate us if we dared come to the voting centre on Election Day. This plan leaked to some of us. Not only did this writer stay away from the voting arena, he also hid in the pit latrine for the entire voting period. To be safe is to assume unsafe. Our counterparts who resisted them in Oredo and Ikpoba Okha local government areas did not live to tell their stories. It was that bad! This ordeal has been sufficiently documented in our past write-ups.
War is bad. If you have come face to face with war, you would not hesitate to approve of any measure aimed at preventing war. To be or not to be, that’s the question hanging on the attempt to establish a separate Commission to handle electoral offences in Nigeria.
Some have argued against the idea, maintaining that since elections are seasonal, the Commission would have nothing to do when there are no elections.
This is a very narrow view of election offences. It presupposes that election offences are committed only on election day. Election offences are committed before, during and after elections. They go far beyond the snatching of ballot boxes and falsification of election results.
The question is relevant, what type of election reforms do we want? Do we just want to scratch on the surface, or do we want to clean up all the rots in our elections? If the latter is our choice, we must be prepared to dig deep.
As society develops, more and more of our elections will be staggered. Elections will no longer be just once in four years, as we shall have many off-season elections.
We make good laws in Nigeria, but we hate to implement them. The Electoral Act, 2022 amply sets out limits of expenditure permitted for candidates to the various offices in the land. Yet, we open our eyes and watch presidential aspirants spend ten times the limits allowed for an entire election in one night of the primaries. We simply applaud them.
We watch candidates raise funds for their elections. We care less how amounts realised from such fundraising is spent.
In other climes, funds raised for an election must be spent for the election. If you realise a fund-raising for an election and you one day forget your wallet at home; and you dip your hands to take US$100 for lunch that day, you are a candidate for prison. Under a good system, these are the type of things that a standing Commission, not an ad-hoc body, should be doing.
Shall we look briefly at the issue of definitions. Many do not have a full grip of the exact meaning of vote buying. Here, we have an administration that is at war with itself. In one breath, it decries vote buying; and in another, it is the principal culprit in vote buying. It suddenly remembers its social Intervention programmes, so-called. Under the guise of Social Intervention, on the eve of an election, it moves to the marketplace and begins to distribute N5,000.00 to traders; and this is also the cost of one vote near the polling centres! If what you are doing is not vote buying, what is it; and what is? Are we no longer calling a spade a spade?
He who comes to equity must come with clean hands. Our fight against electoral malpractices must be comprehensive, not ad-hoc. Such a war requires a strong army, not a rag-tag one.
Those who say that the law is coming too little, too late; and too close to the 2023 election miss the point. Good laws are made for all occasions, not for a particular event. If properly arranged, we are looking at a Commission that will be busy all year round – in and off election seasons. It may even turn out the cash cow we have been waiting for in the face of dwindling resources. It may even turn out the best legacy that President Muhammadu Buhari will be bequeathing to Nigerians.
Shall we then return to Victor Hugo (1948 –1994)? “Nothing beats an idea whose time has come”. The Electoral Offences Commission is one such idea. So, let it be!
· Omorotionmwan writes from Canada
