Janus was the Roman mythological god that had two faces,
front and back. One looked backwards into the past, with the other gazing
forward into the future. Heaven help you if you lost your way and ran into Janus
at a crossroads. He would blight your plight. For, his mien would indicate two
directions, when all you required was one to lead you to your destination. But
alas the ancient Romans celebrated this god of guile, elevating him as inspirer
of ‘’auspicious beginnings.’’ That’s how the month of January was imposed on us
in honour of Janus.
And that is what the European Union Election Observer
Mission, EU EOM, that came for Nigeria’s 2019 poll has given the nation: a
report with two deceptive sides. The document has been hailed and contemned by
the country’s two major political parties, All Progressives Congress, APC, and
Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, suggesting that there are two angles, each
suiting or damning one side or the other. You go home with what gratifies you
and drop that which offends. Yet it’s one report.
But the ideal is to have a presentation that gives a
definitive conclusion where none of the parties would have cause to celebrate.
We looked for a report that would roundly blame the ballot umpire, Independent
National Electoral Commission, INEC, and the sitting government for their poll
misdeeds that disenfranchised tens of millions of Nigerians in February and
March. True, the EU monitors did refer to these, but only timidly, in my view. It’s
what has given room to the double face of the document. A place for the
opposition to laud itself; and a corner for the ruling government and INEC to
extol their prowess. All due to the half-way work of the EU observers.
An aide of the President, Festus Keyamo, appeared to have
also perceived these deficiencies. Speaking shortly after the EU team briefed
the world on the election, Keyamo faulted the observers for not ‘’coming to a
conclusion’’ in their report. He said ‘’… if you are an observer you should
come to a definitive conclusion, don’t be dodgy about it, don’t run away from
that fact…It is not enough for you to discuss the anomalies, they must discuss
the overall results coming from the entire country and whether it did reflect
the wishes of the people.’’
The expectation is that such a report, where the credible
monitors spoke of widespread ‘’systemic failures’ during the ballot, would lead
to grief and remorse, not to blame game or to laudatory remarks by the players.
What’s there to be proud of? The report, even with its shortcomings, makes it
clear we failed, both at the macro-system level and at all the outer ripple
fallout phases of the poll conduct.
The government lost a golden opportunity to give the
nation a 21st century ballot by not assenting to the progressive new
Electoral Bill. The security paraphernalia was porous as to allow grave
security breaches that led to violence and deaths, despite a controversial and
draconian pre-poll order from President Muhammadu Buhari that ballot snatchers
should be dealt with mercilessly. Voter apathy plagued the process. There was
massive underage voting in several places, such that as you stood watching the
throng you would wonder if it was a centre for the enrollment for admission to
primary schools. How about monetary vote-inducement? Observers saw it in
action. Outright cancellations of votes, postponements and undercounting and
over-counting of ballot were also on display to blemish the exercise. A
concerned Wole Soyinka has been speaking of witnessing body count and not vote count. The summary: the 2019 elections were
dragged into dishonor by ‘’operational and transparency shortcomings ‘’. EU EOM
says the last time it conducted this mission in 2015, it recommended some measures
to steer us from repeating our errors. But we didn’t take note of the warning,
and here we are four years after falling into a deeper ditch.
The response of others to the EU verdict has been to call
for the resignation of Yakubu Mahmood, Chairman of INEC. A civil society group,
Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, HURIWA, asks: "What is Yakubu
Mahmood still doing as chairman when the shoddy and shabby electoral heist he
supervised has been discredited locally and globally?’’
Our normally tardy
Presidency in times of reactions to integrity issues has not given any signal
it would do away with the election body boss. But it has promised to study EU’s
post-poll ruling and come with something better than what it gave Nigerians in
February and March, 2019.
Apart from an immediate implementation of the new
Electoral Bill, the government must go the way of late President Umar Yar’Adua.
He admitted in his inaugural speech: ‘’We acknowledge that our elections have
shortcomings. I…believe that our experiences represent an opportunity to learn
from our mistakes. Accordingly, I will set up a panel to examine the entire
electoral process with a view to ensuring that we raise the quality and
standard of our general elections, and thereby deepen our democracy.’’ He did
in 2007 shortly after being sworn in and by December the following year he gave
Nigerians the 297-page document commonly called Justice Uwais Report.
Yar’Adua didn’t live long enough to see to realizing the
mission of the work he commissioned. More than ten years after the report was
prepared and submitted to the government, it’s still gathering dust. Yet, it
addresses demons we have grappled with over the ages: ‘’Nigeria as the arena of
electoral contests, weak democratic institutions, negative political culture,
weak constitution/legal framework and lack of independence and capacity of the
electoral management bodies’’.
I have no doubt EU EOM’s report is Janus-faced in giving
room for complaisant sentiments from the poll gladiators. But its moral verdict
isn't double-edged. It is crystal clear: it is asking us to go back to what we
neglected in Uwais which could have spared us this crushing cudgel of the EU.
*Ojewale, a veteran journalist, writer and regular contributor to this blog resides in Ogun State (bmrtbo@yahoo.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment