Reform Character of Leadership Not Electoral Laws

Prince Adewole Adebayo was the presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 presidential election. Adebayo, in an interview with select journalists, including Olaoluwakitan Babatunde disagrees with the planned amendment of the Electoral Act by the National Assembly even as he casts doubt on the likely result. Rather than reviewing the electoral laws, he says the quality of the character of the nation’s political leadership is what should be reformed

What is your take on the resolution of the Senate to amend the electoral act?

One thing we need to know in legislation is that the eyes of the legislators are always at the back of the heads. So, the assumption is that the problem of the next election will be INEC’s Result Viewing (IReV) portal. From what I know, the problems will not be IREV. It will be another thing. Let us say this is the beginning of the conversations of what we can do, legislatively, to improve our electoral system. But the problem we have isn’t shortage of legislation. There are three things I observed. 

The first is that there is nothing in the 2023 elections I participated in that suggested that anything went wrong because of IREV. None of the petitioners has been able to complain that it is because of the problems with IREV that the results that were declared at the polling units were different from the results that were ultimately used. 

When you go through the filings proceedings and judgments of the court, you will find it hard to find one record where they say that in this particular unit, this was the result but because it wasn’t immediately transmitted to INEC website, the result changed. I don’t think you will find anything like that. That isn’t the problem.

Like I said in October 1, 2021 and was widely reported in the media, I said they would just be disturbing you with issues of technology which on the day of the elections, someone might just decide to switch off in INEC and say it didn’t work. Even if it is in the electoral act (assuming it is passed into law) that the result must be immediately transmitted, if on that day, supposing something goes wrong, like for example, there is a nationwide network problem, or VPN isn’t working, or the system is corrupted, and things like that, the constitution would still want you to find out whether you can otherwise establish the actual winner of the election.

I think integrity at the polling station is what we should pay attention to. Things like making sure people don’t buy votes, you cannot commit violence, making sure that the distance between polling booth and the nearest third party isn’t less than about 100 feet so that anybody who is voting is out of sight and out of hearing of the people. So, if a person decides to influence you by giving you money or anything of value, they will not ultimately know what you are doing in the ballot box area. But if you commit fraud, you buy and sell votes, you distort the outcome and electronically transmitted that abomination to IREV, what have we gained? So, I think reform of character is what we are afraid of doing, and we want to be tweaking with technology. 

Yes, no problem if you add the issue of IREV to the solution, but don’t expect that you can go to bed and say you have solved the election of controversy in Nigeria. 

Nigerians have had cause to question the independence of INEC as all members of the board, including chairman, are appointed by the president. Its former chair, professor Attairu Jega, also wants the president to be striped of the appointing power so that it can truly be an independent body. 

There are quite a lot of things to strip the president of. But who do you give it to? Remember that our founding fathers expect that we would look for the best of the best among us and make him president, so that he would think clearly for the country and he would be one of the most honorable men in our midst who is willing to take up the job.

For that reason, even in the other important constitutional positions, for example, the Chief Justice of the Federation, President of Court of Appeal, Justice of the Supreme Court, Justice of Court of Appeal, Chief Judge of the Federal High Court, the president is the appointing authority. If these sensitive positions are left in the hands of the president to select, then what is special about INEC chairman and the commissioners? I think the problem isn’t about taking it from the president. But who do you give it to?

So, if people are living according to good character, and they are worthy of the offices they are occupying and the oath of office they have taken, the system we have now will work. 

The alternative is to say the same Chief Justice of Nigeria should appoint the INEC chairman, but the same Chief Justice is also an appointee of the president anyway. I think we should ask ourselves, what has happened? Why can’t we find any more people of character who are above board?

Is it that our political system is so corrupt that we can’t find people who are above board? That is the question we should be asking because one way or another, the person that is going to appoint INEC commissioners or chairman would have to be a Nigerian. Whether he is the president, chief justice of Nigeria or senator, that person must be a Nigerian. 

I think it is the quality of the character of our leadership we need to examine. It shouldn’t be a difficult role to fill if everyone is playing their roles.

I will be more inclined if the senate says whoever the president chooses, we would open that person to Nigerians and we are not going to approve that person except the person proves to be a thoroughly vetted Nigerian that has the highest esteem. For example, if you pass such a law that you want to remove appointing power from the president, supposing the president refuses to sign, and he says ‘no, you cannot take my power from me. I will not sign it into law.’ What do you do? Let the senate look at itself as a chamber and ask itself an honest question. Have we in the senate done our best in vetting the nominees to INEC?

National Assembly has the power to oversee INEC. It had the constitutional power to oversee INEC. It has the power to approve INEC emoluments and budget, including conducting a hearing to remove an INEC commissioners or national chairman that is not leaving up to his performance. So, I think the system is robust enough if we can have men and women of character to come and run the system.

The economic team of the president is in full swing. In your view, have they lived up to expectations? 

They are on top of the situation they created for themselves. There isn’t anything happening in the economy presently that I haven’t predicted. What they are facing now is what is called factor cost stabilisation. If they can deal with that, then they would have reduced most of the crises they have on their hands. The trajectory of the economic choices they have made cannot change anyone from where they are today. I predicted this. There are many options. Economics is about choices. And the choices they have taken would naturally lead to this. Whoever is the president, if you take the choices they have made, you will have the same result. Economics does not discriminate against your politics. It looks at the facts. What is the state of affairs? What are the options? What are the alternatives you want to forgo? So, you have to live with the consequences of your decision.

Now, the price of money is not stable. The exchange rates are not stable. The price of commodities will not be stable. The price of factors of production will not be stable. The only way to sustain is to plan ahead for that instability. 

Are you insinuating there would be a reversal or change of policies? 

That would be the best, but they have ideological commitments. This was part of what we were trying to tell the voters about these major political parties, APC, PDP and LP, that they have ideological commitments to IMF and World Bank prescriptions. You could see it in their language. What they are doing now is essentially what they said they would do. The result you have now is essentially the result you have if you take these measures. The best thing is to change but I don’t see them changing because they are committed to this ideology and it has been like that since 1986 when General Babangida had this understanding with World Bank and IMF that we are going to go this way of Structural Adjustment Programme.

It is the various versions of it that we have been doing. The late Abacha tried to run a two-tier system with it with the help of late professor Sam Aluko. The end result of it is that we are looking for a free market where there would be ingress and egress of capital across national boundaries and the price of the Naira will be determined by what happens in Washington or New York and other commodity exchange houses all over the world.

But I don’t see them change from their standpoint at the moment. The time they would have adjusted would be from the day they came in because we have been saying it will not work, but they believe it would work.

Federal government’s Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) says we are expected to borrow about N26 trillion. It appears there isn’t different between the Buhari administration and this present government? 

I tweeted on this. When I tweet, I see hundreds of thousands of views and comments, but when it comes to the economy, like the medium-term expenditure frame work, less than 2000 people bother to look at it. It looks like our people find it too esoteric to understand. President Tinubu was right when he said he would continue from where President Buhari stopped. He said it on many occasions, and people thought he was joking. From the ongoing, you will see that President Tinubu doesn’t talk a lot. Each time he talks, people should listen because he tends to do what he says he would do, whether they are good or bad, but he ends up doing them. 

I have my concern with the MTEF. I thought he was blinded in terms of his creativity. I also think may be they want to complete some of the obligations contained in the MTEF which are legally binding. If, for example, they award some contracts and they need to fund it, they will need to borrow because, in the short term, you are not able to generate enough revenue to offset the borrowing. 

I want to look at a situation where actual performance is above MTEF such that the borrowing figures will be less, the revenue figures will be higher than projections. Whoever wants to change the destiny of Nigeria now for the better must aim for a GDP that is $1.5 trillion. It is achievable because it will radically change the behaviour of everybody, starting with the government.