INEC has been compromised-NDP Chairman

Less than two weeks to the much  talked about 2011 General Elections in Nigeria,many Nigerians are sceptical  about  the polls.One of those expressing worry is Prince Chudi Chukwuani,the national chairman of  the National Democratic Party,(NDP).He spoke to some journalists in Abuja,alleging that the Independent National Electoral  Commission ,INEC is already compromised. CHUKS EHIRIM[08033325614] was there .Excerpts:

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Few weeks to the general elections, as the National Chairman of a political party, are you convinced about the elections holding?

From what we are seeing, the elections derive its legitimacy, first and foremost, from due process of law. So, everything leading  to the election, including the elections, must be done in accordance to the relevant provisions of the law. Three weeks to the elections, the legal environment surrounding the elections are greatly uncertain. INEC announced to the whole World that they have one hundred and fifty cases pending in various courts across the length and breadth of this nation and most of these cases are dealing with candidatures.   If that is true, then nobody knows who is a candidate in the election, as of today because of the pendency of those cases. Anybody that is dancing as a candidate, changing uniform, talking do-or-die politics, that person is perverting the cause of justice or trying to undermine the authority of the  courts. Each and every single one of them has a pending case  in the court of law, including the president because there is a case challenging his nomination by his party members. So in that circumstance, the legal environment concerning the elections, is uncertain. Therefore, two weeks to the election, we are yet to determine the right candidates for the elections and I am urging the various courts to threat those cases expeditiously and make pronouncement so that we will know the actual candidates that will vie for the upcoming elections.

Talking about cases in courts, is your party in court?

Yes. We are in court because in the history of the world, no electoral body – this was verified to us by United Nations and European Union – in the modern democracy publishes two time tables for one election, only in Nigeria. In Nigeria, two time tables were published for the upcoming 2011 general elections.  But the two time tables was necessitated by Amendments of the Electoral Acts.  When a responsible society wants to organize election, they will send out signals that we might get to an election 2-3years from now and within that time, all necessary preparatory activities that were required to achieve meaningful elections would have been done and at the conclusion of that they would publish a time table and conduct the election. In Nigeria, there is nothing uncertain about our elections. At the end of 2007 general elections, everybody in the world knew that we will conduct elections in 2011 because it is in our constitution. There is nothing uncertain about another election that will come in 2015 as of today. So, no matter what it is as a responsible member of the International Community, the onus was on INEC o do all the necessary preparatory arrangements that is required for you to conduct your elections. There was no war going on in Nigeria after the 2007 general elections; there was no natural disaster that wiped out INEC  Headquarters or the National Assembly. So, if the government and the political party in power were responsible, they would have done all the necessary preparatory arraignments that were required of them in other to conduct an election.

Okay. Let us look at the issue that was raised by the Inspector General of Police, Hafiz Ringim on who should identify electoral offence at the polling units.  The position of the law is very clear. The police in  Nigeria is not under the Command of INEC. They have a constitution and responsibility. Police being at the poling stations is to observe and apprehend anybody who breaks the law. The police must be properly and completely briefed on the infractions that constitute breaking of laws on voting day. When the police is briefed properly on that and they observe anybody breaking the law, the police will apprehend them. Nobody should command them to do that excerpt a superior officer.  Also, the IGP raised the issue of an electoral offence by stating that only offences committed at the polling units are electoral offences. Do you agree with him?

I don’t agree with the IGP. Anything dealing with elections and anybody interfering with electoral matter or material is an electoral offender. If you have a situation where ballot papers will be taken to state government house and people will sit down and thumb print the ballot papers and stuff the ballot boxes with it and somebody will say that is not an electoral offence. It is an electoral offence because the election is being manipulated. You cannot consider anything that will deny people not to cast there votes otherwise. So any destruction in the electoral process is an electoral offence and that is why the police was made under the law to be there.  

 Looking at the cases INEC is directly or indirectly facing in courts and the party primaries, can they usher in credible elections?

No, because the whole thing about elections starts with party primaries being conducted in accordance with laid down procedures. In the interaction we had with INEC, I told the commission that under the constitution, their primary responsibilities are to make political parties to be bound by their provisions of their party constitutions.   The constitution of Nigeria confers on political parties, the right to have party constitution and it also gave INEC the right to supervise political parties in complying with the provisions of their party constitution. So, you now have a situation in the country where political parties and INEC deliberately refusing to enforce those powers given to them by the constitution in making political parties to be bound by the provisions of their constitution because that is one of the things that gave parties right to organize like minds.  The constitution says after you have organized yourselves do not constitute yourselves into super godfathers to the detriment of other members of that your organization because they subscribed to the provisions of the party constitution. Having subscribed to it, they expect you o respect those provisions and implement it to the latter. And should you deviate, they expect that INEC should call them to

order. That is the whole essence of representative democracy. That is why political party is not a secret cult. It is only in a secret cult that they will have a grand master that can change the rules as he wishes and that is why the federal Republic of Nigerian constitution says that we should not belong to secret cults because it wanted an organized and structured society.

But INEC is saying that the 2010 Electoral Act, as amended ,has taken away some powers from it including forcing parties to recognize candidates that win primaries.?

I am not talking about INEC forcing candidates on political parties. What I am saying is INEC making political parties to be bound by the provisions of their constitutions. If they are bound by the provisions of their constitutions anything that emerged from their congress it will be in accordance with the law. What is happening now is that political parties are manipulating their constitution – like in one of the political parties it is clearly stated in there constitution as confirmed by a law court that there is provision  for zoning. A lot of their members belong to that political party because of that provision. They believe that Nigeria is divided into six geopolitical zones and as such if one particular zone finishes it will one day reach their own zone and that is the reason why they joined the party.  And it is unfortunate for the political party to wake up in the morning without changing that provision in their constitution and decided to discard it, which is a big infraction. INEC has the responsibility under the law to compel that political party to be bound by the provisions of it constitution. If the political party does not respect the provisions of its constitution, INEC under the law has the power to refuse all the candidates that come from that political party. These are the things INEC has refused to do and the only reason why they are refusing to do it is because they have compromised. They are given to favouritism; they are favouring one political party to the detriment of others and favouring the leadership of a political party to the detriment of its members. That is wrong.

Another infraction some people are pointing out against INEC is the expenditure of money by some political parties and politicians. What is your take on this?  

It is part of the conspiracy showing that INEC has been thoroughly compromised. We all have reports that at the last convention of PDP the delegates themselves were saying that they were each given $7, 000. $7, 000 multiplied by 5, 000 delegates constitute $35 million and $35 million converted into our local naira at the rate of N150. 00to a dollar, is in excess of N4.5 billion.  What is the comparism of that with the N 100 million? That was just for the convention.

Are you saying that President Goodluck Jonathan spent over N4.5 billion to get the Presidential ticket of PDP?

I said the delegates to PDP convention came out and told the whole world that they were given $7, 000 each. All I did is to convert it and give you the real figure in naira. The person that spent the money is for INEC to determine.

You said  earlier, that the signing of the political parties code of conduct was to please the EU and IRI. Why did you say so?

You were there at the signing ceremony when INEC said they have invited IRI and that EU has committed so much resources and they didn’t tell us how much resources were committed on our behalf. So, to me it is not really to the interest of Nigeria. It is for the benefit of these people and they all throughout the election time that it is marked with violence and nobody has come to tell us what is the cause of the violence.

For all you have said so far, how would you rate Jega’s relationship with the political parties since he came on board?  

In my sincere opinion, I think Dan Nwanyanwu of Labour Party raised a very fundamental issue and Jega never responded to it. Dan Nwanyanwu told him we have three weeks to the elections we don’t even know the mode of this election; we don’t even know how the ballot papers will be; we don’t even know how the elections would be conducted. Jega has not interacted with the political parties.   The only time he interacted with political parties is through a third party, a foreigner. Do you know that it was IRI that invited political parties for the signing of the political parties Code of Conduct, not INEC. Please tell me will Transition Monitoring Group, [TMG] in Nigeria go to America and invite the Democratic and Republican parties to a meeting concerning elections in America?. Or any of our civil society groups will travel to London and invite the Labour Party and the Conservatives for meeting over general elections in London in the UK?. So it is very odd arrangements. So, INEC under Prof. Jega, I don’t know where he thinks his constituency is.

He is to supervise political parties. His constituency is only political parties. The earlier he realizes this, the better for him. He is to meet with us, discuss with us and rob minds with us. If he had done it, he wouldn’t have made the numerous mistakes he is making. Even before he published the first time table he did, some of us told him that we don’t see that he had time to do a voter registration he was fighting with us that he had time, only two weeks later he came around and said sorry I don’t have time. Come and change the law. That is the style of his administration. So I believe you pressmen, deliberately through manipulations, over rated him and now it is coming down to reality. There is no one single thing he did that can be said to be done on time without any hiccups. If there is, name one. Look at how the voter registration exercise started, through frustration. Up till today there are controversies on numbers of people registered. Most states are complaining that he under registered them or he under reported their number.

You have highlighted many factors that necessitate electoral fraud in Nigeria and on the strength of the above also, a Presidential candidate has told his supporters to lynch anybody who tries to committee electoral fraud in the up coming election. His views have attracted much attention from the ruling party. How do you think we should handle this electoral fraud?

Vigilance. Nigerians have to be vigilant; Nigerians must protect their votes. I don’t subscribe to the one of taking the laws into your hands – lynching. I don’t believe in public lynching because that is a banana republic. If you see somebody that is manipulating try and apprehend him and hand him over to the police and then follow through with the police making sure that the police prosecute the person and holding the police responsible. That is what I will subscribe to.

 Going by past history that those who were probably caught in electoral fraud in the past have not been prosecuted, do you still have faith in the ability of the police prosecuting anybody this time around?.

 The thing is that we must hold the police to account. Just like the people of Egypt held their police and Army to account. Just like it is happening in Libya now and the people of Algeria. We must hold them to account. They are not the owners of Nigeria. All of us collectively are the owners of Nigeria. You see the electoral process manipulation starts when there is no transparency. We met with the IGP and he told us that all the security services have been meeting under the chairmanship of the National Security Adviser, NSA. In the same breadth the IGP told us that they made a special provision in the Electoral Act for the responsibilities and duties of the police on election.  You can see contradictions. There is no where in the Electoral Act that the said anything about the National Security Adviser. So, why will the police be holding meetings under the chairmanship of the NSA when he has no constitutional role or legal authority on anything dealing with election matters? The second issue that leads to this manipulation, the IGP told us that government – the PDP government – has made adequate arrangements for their welfare and logistics. Everybody knows what logistics is in Nigeria. If you ask an average Nigerian what is logistics, he will tell you that its ‘egunje’. That is the way we understand logistics.   The IGP never defined what is in this logistics; he never said this is how much that was allocated. This money he is talking about is it part of the federal budget or is  it an extra-ordinary budget because whatever the police use must come out from the federal budget. So, it will not be a question of government, what we expected the IGP to tell us is that in the 2010 budget, the national Assembly made a provision of this amount for the police use for supervising election in 2011. That is what he should have come out to tell us; that is what is called transparency because our interpretation of what IGP said is that the police have been bought over by the government in power.  That is our interpretation. Whatever the police do must be contained in our national Assembly so he should refer us to that section of our national budget where the national Assembly had made adequate provision for the monitoring of election and provision of security by the Nigeria Police on the day of election.

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