When President Umaru Yar’adua promised to reform our electoral system on the very day he was inaugurated, not a few Nigerians may have been skeptical, if not downright cynical. I mean how do you believe the word of a fence for stolen goods – in this case the votes of Nigerians - when he says he’ll make sure that no one ever steals again?

            Like so many Nigerians I had my doubts about the sincerity of his May 29 2007, but for some inexplicable reason I thought he deserved the benefit of doubt. My little faith shrank further when he appointed the former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Muhammadu Uwais, to head the committee he set up for the reform. Not that the former CJN lacked the experience and competence to lead the reform agenda. Quite the contrary. In any case he was only one in a panel of nearly two dozen eminent Nigerians from all walks of life.

            The problem was that he had become highly controversial for the way his court upheld the return of President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2003 in an election that most observers, local and foreign, said was a travesty of democracy. For this reason few Nigerians believed he could produce a credible blueprint for a free and fair election in the country.

            To his eternal credit, Uwais disappointed the skeptics, including this reporter; his committee produced a report that received near universal acclaim as capable of ushering in genuine democracy.

            Among its key recommendations was that the judiciary should have a hand in the appointment of the chairperson and members of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) as against the current position where the president alone appoints them subject, of course, to Senate confirmation.

            Another was that elections should be held early enough – six months in the case of the president and governors – to allow for elections to be disposed of before the putative winners are sworn in.

            Yet another recommendation was that INEC itself should have its jobs of party registration and constituency delimitation hived off to new institutions.

            None of these key recommendations were xactly revolutionary. Some, like the hiving off of some of INEC’s functions to new institutions, were indeed superfluous. Presumably most Nigerians, therefore, did not expect Yar’adua to have any difficulties accepting them.

            Even that, it has turned out, was expecting too much of a president who was the principal beneficiary of a gravely flawed election. Not only did he reject virtually all the key recommendations, he chose to misrepresent the positions of the Uwais panel on some of them, apparently to justify his decision.

            For example in what was clearly a classis case of building a straw man, the president was quoted as saying the Uwais panel recommended that the National Judicial Council should appoint the chairperson of INEC. In fact the report did no such thing. What it did was to recommend that the NJC should advertise the relevant positions in INEC, short list three and pass them on to the Council of State, of which the president is the chair, to pick one.

            This method is of course a far cry from the current constitutional arrangement, but it does not end the president’s influence in the composition of INEC. In any case, it was somewhat disingenuous for the president and his attorney-general, Mr. Michael Aoondoakaa to say they rejected the recommendation because it was in conflict with the Constitution. Several of the six electoral amendment bills the executive has since sent to the National Assembly are in conflict with the Constitution to the extent that their validity would require constitutional amendment. That did not stop the executive from sending the bills to the National Assembly.

            This was proof enough that the presidency was far from sincere in his promise to end the stealing of votes by our politicians.

            At any rate, the problem with our politics in less that of the defects in our Constitution and in our laws than that of the character of our politicians generally.

            The other day Alhaji Umaru Shinkafi, Marafan Sokoto, for quite a while a regular fixture in our presidential elections, disagreed with our leaders who blame our Constitution and our laws for our woes.

            “In the speeches of our leaders,” he said in an interview in Thisday(May 24), “the emphasis has always been on the Constitution. There is nothing wrong with the Constitution. There is nothing wrong with the electoral law. The problem is the (politicians)…The problem is not the law, it is the politician who cooks up the number of votes he needs to rig elections…”

            Of course there are some things that are wrong with our Constitution and our laws for the simple reason that nothing which is man made is perfect. Even then Shinkafi is right to blame our politicians more than our laws for our political predicament. Even the best laws are only as good as those who interpret and enforce them. With all the defects in our Constitution and in our electoral law, if our politicians had good faith, we would have had free and fair elections all these years.

            Ekiti presented the president with a great opportunity to demonstrate that, unlike your typical Nigerian politician, he was, in a manner of speaking, made of sterner stuff. He lost the opportunity by descending into the fray in a way that showed that, like his great benefactor, he too believed elections are a “do or die” affair.

            Such a great pity.