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May 29th is the date for the handover of power in Nigeria from one leader to the other, from one party to the other, from one regime to the other, depending on what the sovereign will of the people be. Sovereignty in a democracy belongs to the people. In Nigeria, it is not a choice, it’s mandatory. Section 14(1)(2)(a) of the 1999 Constitution, as amended, states that “The Federal Republic of Nigeria shall be a State based on the principles of democracy and social justice.; It is hereby, accordingly, declared that sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria from whom government through this Constitution derives all its powers and authority. The people therefore should be the custodians of power and authority in a democracy. This is why the most cherished definition of democracy is the government of the people by the people and for the people, according to the former President of America, Abraham Lincoln. It then means that any government not brought in by the will of the people is brought in, in subversion of the will of the people, even if there’s a pretence at democracy. The will of the people is established through free, fair and credible elections which is the greatest pillar of democracy.
Democracy returned to Nigeria in 1999 on the 29th of May, after about 16 years of military rule. It is the fourth republic. Nigeria has gone through a lot of instability, not necessarily because of bad governance, but because of the inability of the people to change bad governance, peacefully, through free and fair elections, organised by an independent and impartial umpire. In Nigeria, the umpire is called the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The better the process of election, the better the governance to the people. Ghana started conducting free and fair elections from the regime of Jerry Rawlings and their fortunes changed. United States of America, France, Britain and India are world class democracies with free, fair and credible elections and this reflects in the level of development of their countries. Any government which understands that the only source of its existence and sustenance is from the people’s will have no other alternative than to make the good of the people its primary objective. Indeed, the good of the people is a constitutional requirement for the existence of any government. Section 14(2)(b) states that “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government”. It is submitted, therefore, that if a country wants security and welfare for their people, it must ensure that its government comes by the will of the people.
Nigeria as a country has not been able to have security and good governance because the people’s will has been consistently subverted through brutal and senseless rigging and manipulation of election results. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that our best elections so far from 1999, with all their flaws, are the 2011 and 2015 elections. The journey started with the introduction of the card reader in 2011 to determine the number of people who came out to vote called accredited voters. This limited the outright inflation and allocation of election results. It’s not surprising that Nigeria witnessed appreciable growth in the economy and stability within that period compared with what we have now.
Enemies of free and fair elections fought the relevance of the card reader by getting a declaration from court that made its usage discretionary and people who were not captured by the card reader were allowed to vote by filling the incidence forms. Over voting was also calculated based on the manual register, rather than the number of accredited voters. This rendered the potency of the card reader useless, and made the stoppage of election rigging impossible. It was in a bid to restore the potency of the card reader that Nigerians yearned for the amendment of the Electoral Act to mandate INEC to embrace the use of technology in our elections in order to eliminate the mischiefs of manual collation of results that often led to inflation and manipulation of results. This led to the amendment of the Electoral Act that legalized the use of the card reader or any other preferred electronic gadget by INEC to accredit voters on the day of election. INEC in its wisdom acquired and approved the use of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for the accreditation of voters. The law also approved electronic transmission and transfer of election results from the polling units and collation centres to the National Electronic Register of Election Results from where the certified true copy of all the results shall be given to any person or political party that requests for them.
INEC in its wisdom, even before the law mandated electronic transfer of election results from the polling units, had invented the INEC Results Viewing (IREV) Portal, where the scanned copies of all the polling units hard copy results are uploaded for the viewing pleasure of all Nigerians from the polling units, immediately after the announcement of the results in the polling units. INEC had practised this innovation in Anambra, Edo, Ondo and Ekiti States and it worked. After the legalisation of the use of BVAS for accreditation, over voting was computed, not on the basis of the manual register, but on the basis of the accredited voters, which of course makes sense or how can the number of votes exceed the number of the voters who came out to vote?
With all these improvements and the assurances given to Nigerians by Prof Mahmood Yakubu, the INEC Chairman, and Festus Okoye, the INEC Federal Commissioner in charge of voter education, Nigerians relaxed and believed that there will be free, fair and credible elections by INEC. Unfortunately, on the said day of the presidential election, Nigerians who would not vote for the ruling party were forcefully bullied not to vote. Ballot boxes and papers were snatched and carted away. INEC Officials were told not to transmit presidential results to the INEC Electronic Register of Election Results. Some were denied the code to do it, while some that did it were blocked from reaching the Electronic Register. Election results scanned by BVAS were not uploaded on the IREV Portal in real time for Nigerians to observe and follow the process as performed by INEC. In effect, Nigerians were cut off from participating in the process and were blinded to observe the process. Eventually, INEC purportedly announced a winner through manual collation of results only, in the dead of the night, without the participation of Nigerians and agents of the parties in many places. Mutilated and fake results were smuggled into the collation centres and announced as results. The provisions of the Electoral Act, which provide that you cannot collate results, except you have the electronically transferred results and number of accredited voters in the BVAS beside you was jettisoned. INEC compiled its own results, collated its results, not the results of the Nigerian voters and announced its winner, not the winner of the election.
To buttress this assertion, INEC Chairman came out publicly to announce that the election was marred by technical glitches. They admitted not transmitting the election results electronically from the polling units in real time on that day. Till the 17th of May, 2023, almost about three months after the presidential election, 70% of the evidence showing what transpired on the day of the presidential election could not be given to the Petitioners. The entire international observers condemned the election as falling short of international standards. Most domestic observers described the election as the worst election in the history of Nigeria. All in all, there was a deliberate attempt by INEC to truncate the will of the Nigerian people. This is in addition to the fact that the declaration and return of the purported winner was done without fulfilling the mandatory requirement of 25% in the Federal Capital Territory, as postulated by major legal practitioners and INEC former officials, like Mike Igini, and some decided cases.
It’s safe to conclude that the deliberate circumventing of the Constitution, Electoral Act, INEC rules and regulations in the declaration of INEC’s winner was deliberately done to subvert the will of the people. History has shown that any government that did not derive its powers from the will of the people will not get the support of the people in its administration. If on May 29, a government is installed, without an open and transparent evidence adduced by INEC to support its claim on its declaration, then one can submit that whoever is sworn in is an INEC declared winner, not a Nigerian elected President.
Looking at the future, there should be an immediate amendment of the Constitution to ensure that every petition instituted against an election is determined before swearing in the declared winner. The Supreme Court should assume original jurisdiction in the matter of the presidential election petition, after the amendment, to guarantee the speedy dispensation of the petition before swearing in the declared winner. If the Supreme Court can assume original jurisdiction in the naira redesign policy claiming that it’s a policy making court, with respect, the election of the President is the most important policy of any government because the security and welfare of all the citizens depend on it. This will ensure that the sovereign will of the Nigerian people is respected and established. Above all, eternal vigilance must replace complacency in the guarding of our democracy, to prevent electoral bandits from springing up another surprise in future elections. Whoever that participated in the officiating of the presidential election as an INEC Commissioner should be enstopped from participating in future elections as they are the subverters of the sovereign will of the Nigerian people. The Courts should also ensure that the truth about the election be told publicly to the whole world by upholding the justice of the case without due regard to technicality.
