Again, the Department of State Services ( DSS) is fishing in troubled waters. It always does. Not too long ago, it went into scaremongering over the Presidential inauguration. It claimed that certain persons were plotting to disrupt the May 29 handover. But all that ended up as a hoax.
This time, it has delved into an uncharted territory. It has taken upon itself the job of deciding for the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) the authenticity or otherwise of certificates issued by it. This is what the DSS has just done in the case of Peter Mbah versus the NYSC. Both parties have been embroiled in controversy over the NYSC discharge certificate Mbah presented for the purposes of his election as governor. Whereas the NYSC has disowned Mbah and the certificate he parades, the governor is insisting that it was issued by the NYSC.
So, how is this the business of the DSS? What has the secret service got to do with someone’s NYSC discharge certificate to the point of submitting a report to the Enugu State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal? By its action, the DSS has not just gone political, it has made itself an interested party in the matter. Such partisan disposition is most unbecoming of the service. But should the DSS be taken seriously in this matter especially if we recall that it gave Kemi Adeosun, a former Finance Minister, a clean bill of health over an NYSC exemption certificate that turned out to be fake? This secret service is no longer secret. It is just putting its finger in every pie.
But what is really going on between the NYSC and the Governor of Enugu State, Mr Peter Mbah? We hear that there is a dispute about the authenticity or lack of it of the NYSC discharge certificate presented by Mbah for the purpose of his governorship bid. Until this drama began to unfold, I did not know that someone who has been issued a certificate by a certifying body can lurk horns with that body over who is right or wrong about a certificate that has been issued. But I hear that there are alternate, though illegitimate, agencies that replicate certificates and make them available for sale. This may be good business. But can the one manufactured in some street corners of Lagos or elsewhere in Nigeria be substituted for the real? Certainly not. But let us wait and see who is right or wrong between NYSC and Mbah. The matter does not come under the purview of the DSS.
However, in whatever way the matter is resolved, what it goes to show is that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is just a dumping ground of sorts. It is a place where people who want to stand for election go to with all manner of claims. The commission accepts everything given to it on its face value. It has no way of verifying the authenticity or lack of it of documents brought before it. That is why we had the Salisu Buhari saga in the House of Representatives in 1999. The same thing is true of the ongoing Chicago drama that revolves around Bola Tinubu. INEC is an onlooker in all of this. Where the electoral body has real stake is in the result of elections. Here, the case of Enugu State governorship election naturally pops up for consideration.
The mess the commission made of the 2023 general elections reverberated in Enugu last Sunday. It was the day the governorship candidate of the Labour Party, Hon. Chijioke Edeoga, closed his case at the Enugu State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal sitting in Enugu. At the session, INEC failed to present some of the Biometric Voter Accreditation System ( BVAS) machines for verification of some of the results in the highly disputed Nkanu East Local Government Area, contrary to what was contained in the subpoena earlier issued by the tribunal. Following its failure to present the biometric evidence, the commission asked the tribunal to rely on the certified true copies of documents downloaded from INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) which the Labour Party had tendered to prove its case about over voting in the local government area.
INEC failure in this regard was a demonstration of tardiness and lack of seriousness in an issue that deserves utmost attention and transparency. But here we are, dealing with an electoral commission that is toying relentlessly with the fate of a people. The Enugu scenario is, in a way, a re-enactment of the absurdity that we witnessed at the highest levels of the commission’s activities. We have seen an electoral commission that based its announcement of results on incompleteness. We saw a commission that hurriedly cooked up figures and began to reel them out as results. That INEC acted lame at the resumed hearing of the tribunal last Sunday speaks volumes about the subterfuge that took place in Nkanu East.
Going by the figures from INEC BVAS machines, Nkanu East recorded a total number of 15,000 accredited voters on the day of the election. Curiously, when votes were declared, PDP was allocated 30,350 votes while the Labour Party was credited with a paltry 1,855 votes. In normal climes, this obvious case of over voting should be an embarrassment to the body that conducted the election. But not so in Nigeria. That was why the electoral commission did not do much to correct the anomalous situation when the Labour Party cane up with a complaint brought. Rather than follow the provisions of the Electoral Act as it concerns over voting, INEC set up a strange committee which also acted strangely through and through. Relying on the report of the unlawful committee, INEC merely reduced the humongous figures allocated to the PDP candidate but retained as much as it wanted in order to return him as the winner of the election.
The Enugu scenario is a case of crass absurdity. As was the case with the presidential election, we saw an electoral commission that has developed a thick skin to the extent that propriety does not matter any more. A commission that promised the people transparent and credible polls enacted a scenario where the number of votes returned far outnumbered the number of those accredited to vote. Even when this was discovered and brought to its attention, it adopted the rule of the thumb approach in dealing with the situation.
INEC did not help Mbah’s case when it returned him as elected under that bizarre circumstance. If anything, it compounded his case. In fact, by asking the tribunal to rely on the documents presented by the Labour Party candidate, Edeoga, INEC has, wittingly or unwittingly, strengthened the application with which he is seeking to establish a case against his PDP challenger, Peter Mbah. What will the courts say? Time will tell.