By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
Evidence of the scope of the mess created by Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) under the leadership of Mahmood Yakubu began to emerge this past week. It all suggests network egregiousness on a monumental scale that easily rivals the elections of 2007, until now seen as the nadir in Nigeria’s journey of elective governance.
*YakubuAs the National Judicial Council (NJC) released the names of the 257 judges who will sit to consider and decide on elections petitions around the country beginning in May 2023, it emerged this past week that so far 1,044 petitions have been filed against results declared by the INEC in the 2023 elections. That is already more than 70% of the 1,490 seats contested and it appears that these are not the final numbers.
The
relationship between election petitions and acceptability of elections in
Nigeria is one of direct proportionality. Candidates and parties who believe
that the results reflect the will of the people are generally disinclined to
continue the contest and more expenditure through the courts. Those who do not
so believe re-litigate the contest through the courts. The numbers tell the
story.
Some 1,299 petitions, representing about 86.35% of the seats
contested in 2007 ended up before the courts, a fact that prompted The
Economist to describe Nigeria as a “democracy by court order.” With a mere 10
months to prepare and deliver the 2011 elections, Professor Attahiru Jega whom
President Goodluck Jonathan appointed in 2010 to replace the rampant Maurice
Iwu at the leadership of in INEC, cut the number of petitions by nearly 58% to
751 in 2011. In 2015, the last election conducted under Professor Jega, there
were only 677 petitions or 45.4% of the seats on offer.
By contrast, with four years to deliver the 2019 elections,
Professor Mahmood Yakubu managed to grow the number of petitions from the 677
he inherited in 2015 to 811 petitions or 54.4% of the contested seats. Four
years later, the bottom has fallen off the system of electoral administration
under his watch, with the proportion of petitions guaranteed to be much nearer
where they were in 2007. Only a fool will believe that the judiciary can clean
up this mess.
In many ways, the drama that accompanied the Adamawa State
governorship elections embody everything wrong with the INEC under the watch of
Mahmood Yakubu. In that contest, the Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), who
goes under the appellation of “Barrister” Yunusa Hudu Ari, on April 16 and with
full protection from senior officers of the Nigeria Police Force and allied
security services, announced fake results without numbers and without
authority, forcing an INEC hierarchy steeped in electoral scandal to make song
and dance of disowning the declaration.
The
antecedents to this development as well as the aftermath, should detain us.
Like the Chairman of INEC, “Barrister” Hudu Ari is from Bauchi
State; and like the INEC chairman, he came from a supply pipeline that appears
to bear the fingerprints of the Attorney-General of the Federation. In his home
state, Bauchi, Yunusa Ari had worked as a civil servant, before retiring as a
Permanent Secretary. He also previously served as secretary to the Bauchi
Branch of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA).
But these were not what qualified him to be appointed a REC. His
claim to fame is that he was chummy with the Attorney-General of the
Federation. According to Leadership Newspaper, “Yunusa was classmate with the
Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami”,
and “the age-long relationship between Yunusa-Ari and Malami played a crucial
role in his emergence as REC.”
Less than eight months before the 2023 elections, in July 2022,
President Buhari transmitted Yunusa Ari’s name to the Senate for confirmation
as one of a cohort of 19 REC nominees. His identification with the ruling party
was well known. Far from disqualifying him as the applicable laws required,
these credentials of partisan propinquity made his nomination all the more
appealing, guaranteeing his confirmation. Now that the elections are over, INEC
admits that many of these RECs nominated by Buhari in 2022 “were clearly
partisan and, to make matters worse, some were deployed to states where they
had sympathy for the ruling parties.”
After Yunusa Ari’s criminal announcement of a non-existent result,
the INEC headquarters intervened purportedly to disown his conduct and summon
him to the Abuja. From the venue of the announcement, meanwhile, Yunusa Ari
headed to the airport in Yola all the time under high level Police protection,
where he boarded a private jet. He did not turn up in Abuja to answer the
summons of his employers, however. Instead, the same employers went public to
claim that he had vanished and they could not find him. The Police, under whose
protection he acted up to the point of vanishing, suddenly announced an
investigation into what happened.
If this all sounds like co-ordinated institutional
hyperventilation manufactured for a cover-up, it is because it probably is. The
possibility that Yunusa Ari could have acted this script all by himself and
without co-ordination with other agencies or with people higher up the
political and institutional food chain is less than zero. It is equally
impossible that he could have left Yola on a private jet that then vanished from
the airspace. Air Traffic Control had to have cleared the flight and the
manifest had to have been filed with the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority, all
federal agencies. Bringing him to account would entail unmasking this command
chain of complicity and conspiracy.
Hours after Yunusa Ari’s fake declaration, Aishatu Dahiru, the
serving Senator whom he sought to benefit in the Adamawa governorship contest,
went to the Federal High Court in far away Abuja, asking it to affirm her as
winner of the election. She did this by way of an ex-parte application,
essentially asking the court to decide this matter without hearing any of the
other parties in the contest or the INEC whose REC purported to declare her the
winner. The court invited her to show how it had jurisdiction over her claim.
Rather than do that, her lawyers elected to ask the court for permission to
discontinue the case. But, instead of granting her application, the court
dismissed it.
While
he is supposedly a fugitive, meanwhile, Yunusa Ari has apparently been busy
firing off missives to the police, the security services, and suing his
employers. His address is presumably undisclosed and undiscoverable. The
leadership of the Nigerian Bar Association, whose membership he advertises when
he ostentatiously describes himself as a “Barrister”, has studiously averted
its gaze from the peregrinations of this its infamous member despite the demand
of many of its members for the Bar leadership to takes steps to discipline him.
Similarly, the Attorney-General of the Federation does not appear to have taken
notice.
If they were to choose to, the leadership of the Bar as well as
the Attorney-General of the Federation would have remembered that Rule 1 of the
Rules of Professional Conduct in Nigeria’s Legal Profession preclude every
lawyer from “any conduct which is unbecoming of a legal practitioner.”
In a country in which the richest lawyers make their billions from
inventing technicalities to justify crooked election results, it is no surprise
that those who lead the Bar are unwilling and unable to notice that announcing
fake election results and disappearing thereafter into thin air is not
something that should be associated with a lawyer, especially not one who
claims to be a “barrister.”
But then again, anyone who feels a need to be addressed as
“barrister” is probably far from fit for purpose, anyway.
*Odinkalu,
a lawyer and teacher, can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu.
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