“The provision of the law which says only non-partisan persons can be appointed into INEC is in the highest law of the land – the Constitution, is it being obeyed? If not, what makes anyone believe that premature campaigns can be stopped in Nigeria?”
BY TONNIE IREDIA
It is difficult to forget the well-known ideas in political science articulated and advocated by William J. M. Mackenzie, a British born intellectual giant. Although he died some 3 decades ago, his extensive writings on democracy and political systems remain instructive. In particular, a look at his ideas on the “rules of the game” in politics would almost immediately prompt one into thinking he was probably sending an advanced admonition to Nigerian politicians. His main argument in 2 of his books ‘Politics and Social Science’ (1967) and ‘Free elections’ (1958) was that politics must be seen essentially as a regulated struggle for power, adding that the stability of a political system depends on the acceptance of rules that limit how that struggle is conducted.
In the words of Mackenzie, “if the rules limiting the struggle for power are not observed more or less faithfully, the game will disappear amid the wreckage of the whole system.” In paraphrasing the dictum, Humphrey Nwosu, Nigeria’s electoral boss 1989-1993 severally opined that ‘Democracy presupposes the rule of law.’ However, the admonitions of both scholars have for long been lost on Nigerian politicians notwithstanding the clear evidence in recent times in some African countries of the game of politics disappearing amid the wreckage of the whole system. The irritating subsisting premature campaigns in Nigeria establishes beyond reasonable doubt that politicians are the only ones that can determine whether or not they want the current fragile political system in Nigeria to survive over time.
Many analysts appear convinced that the unending electioneering campaigns in Nigeria ought to be blamed on the regulator – the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC but I disagree. There is so much the commission has poorly done to make everyone put every blame at its door steps. INEC’s voter’s register has no doubt remained inaccurate – a problem that could have been tackled using the latest electoral technologies. The level of political dissonance coming out of Warri alone, suggests that INEC has been unable to apply empirical criteria to resolve the nation’s contentious delimitation of electoral constituencies. Lateness of human and material resources to election venues has not ended. Swapping of election results and contrived technical hitches are still there. Most importantly, INEC has been unable to keep to its own rules under certain circumstances.
With all the above, it is not difficult to attribute any political challenge to INEC’s performance. But to blame INEC for the refusal of politicians to listen to Mackenzie is slightly an over kill. INEC in my considered opinion is not the problem as far as premature campaigns in Nigeria are concerned. Luckily, only last week, its chair, Professor Mahmood Yakubu and his predecessor, Professor Attahiru Jega canvassed the obvious fact that our legal framework did not provide sanctions for premature campaigns. In other words, INEC can only make appeals to politicians which would end up as ‘the communication of the deaf.’ In truth, it is a notorious fact that Nigerian politicians are devotees of selective hearing. No matter what much you say to them, they hear only what they want to hear. Indeed, Nigerian politicians from origin have always had ample capacity to hear the direct opposite of what is said to them.
As far as INEC is concerned, the law is to blame for premature campaigns because legal provisions on the subject failed to cover the field. For example, whereas the Electoral Act disallows campaigns before 150 days to elections, it does not provide sanctions for any breach of the provision the way it clearly does for campaigns within 24 hours to voting. Can the omission be taken to mean that the Electoral Act never actually wanted to place a general ban on campaigns? Well, I disagree with INEC that the law is to blame for premature electioneering in Nigeria. My position is that law cannot cover every aspect of life, otherwise the whole issue of freedom which democracy offers will be emasculated. That is why we have different types of law. What the constitution cannot cover can be covered by Acts, delegated legislation, guides, regulations etc., hence the judiciary usually accepts guidelines such as those made by administrative bodies like INEC as binding.
The quest for every aspect of politics to be covered by one law or regulation happens only in developing societies where political actors always take undue advantage of what looks like gaps in a system. In societies where democracy has long been institutionalized, what mostly governs political events and actions are not regulations but conventions. It is indeed unreasonable to clamour for regulations in every situation. So many things in politics are based on conventions because quite a lot of things ought to be decided not only by the letters of the law but also by the spirit of the law. For example, in saner societies, it is inconceivable that a candidate who was elected governor under the banner of a political party with a persuasive manifesto would decamp from the same party to another that the electorate did not vote for.
In such societies therefore, no one would waste valuable time seeking to have a specific law to stop such a governor from decamping. In addition, no one would imagine that the governor of a state that is in dire need of development projects would abandon governance for electioneering after the people had given him their mandate to organize governance for the improvement of their living standards. Interestingly, if the defection of the governor is challenged in court, the Nigerian judiciary would then state that its hands are tied while regretting the absence of a law stopping such defections! Yet the same judiciary is aware of the legal provision that says votes belong to the relevant political party. In other words, because it is about election, we now need a specific law to stop someone from appropriating another person’s property!!
The point to be made therefore is that the problem of society is not necessarily caused by law but by the disposition of societal actors. To illuminate the point, let us attempt to return to the bogus claim at hand that premature campaigns are attributable more to a lacuna in the relevant law. If the democratic process has scheduled governance to come immediately after electioneering and voting, what is an elected official campaigning for during governance instead of concentrating on service delivery? The action is no doubt an aberration which subsists because those doing it are merely satisfying their private agenda making it obvious that their plan is to stretch society into looking for a new device to curb the anti-democratic posture. Unfortunately, any effort to redress the posture would be dead on arrival as those in power are the ones to determine whether or not another law to address the problem will be allowed to succeed.
The best way to understand the issue is to attempt to discover why Nigeria does not ever do anything about an issue on which citizens have a consensus. Every one before and after the Justice Uwais Panel on electoral reforms have all called for the establishment of an election offences commission and tribunal. Yet, it is never implemented; what we keep doing is: organizing seminars, workshops, retreats etc on electoral reforms where the same call is repeated. Besides, there are many laws and even court decisions on certain disputes that are always ignored. For instance, since 1999, no suspension of a law maker by his peers has ever been upheld by the judiciary. Why then are legislators still suspending their colleagues and punishing their respective innocent constituents?
Last week, I was laughing while listening to Attahiru Jega imagining that ‘Nigeria could learn valuable lessons from countries like Australia, Mexico, India and the Philippines, which had effectively sanctioned premature campaigns.’ I am still laughing now because unlike the countries he cited, political authorities in Nigeria, even at local government level, do not sanction any wrong-doing that is of interest to them. We surely remember that the current ruling party once decreed that the sins of any defector to them were forgiven. The provision of the law which says only non-partisan persons can be appointed into INEC is in the highest law of the land – the Constitution, is it being obeyed? If not, what makes anyone believe that premature campaigns can be stopped in Nigeria? The usual trend is that whenever those in opposition now get into office, they would try to enjoy it as part of the dividends of authoritarianism.
