An international scholar and former chairman of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Professor Chidi Odinkalu, takes a look at the February 25 polls, giving INEC a thumb down, sees no improvement in INEC’s conduct of next Saturday’s election, tasks the judiciary to dispense justice in the dispute election, among others.
The much awaited presidential and national assembly election has been held, although its conduct is dogged by controversy and this leaves a sour taste in the mouths of some candidates. What is your view on the conduct and outcome of the election?
I am not sure the controversy is as much from the leading opposition parties as from everywhere in the country, quite honestly. I think this is not political controversy. It is civic controversy. Political parties may offer the platforms, but elections are about how to organise your civics. The controversy is very simple. I want to go back to 2015. Whether or not you were PDP or APC, you knew Muhammadu Buhari won fair and square. And even people who did not and could not have voted for Buhari were obliged to recognise that he won the election and people were celebrating spontaneously. I remember where I was when the results officially came out. Every Nigerian at that place we were, when the result came out, stood up and sang the national anthem. I am never a Buhari supporter and I will never vote for him. But I stood up and sang the national anthem on that day in 2015 because I knew something different had happened and Buhari won the election. We all affirmed faith in our country because the average Nigerian is in love with Nigeria. We may not like the way we are treated by our country, but we love our country.
Look at the streets of Nigeria today and show me who is celebrating that Tinubu has won. INEC possibly chose to announce the results at night when only witches and wizards were awake or returning from the coven. So, nobody has deemed it fit to spontaneously celebrate the result. Secondly, the expression ‘go to court’ which is being used as a threat and as hubris is exactly all the evidence you need to understand that something more profound than the opposition’s angst is at play here.
What specifically would you say went wrong with the conduct of the election?
INEC is very crooked. There is no other thing that went down. You can say parties did this and people wanted to get INEC to comply or buy INEC. If INEC is not selling, politicians will not buy, pure and simple. Let us call it what it is. He set the country up and raised people’s hope only to dash the hope of Nigerians. If you remember, you and I spoke and I was pretty much prepared to wager on it that BVAS would not work. For me, the evidence was pretty clear. I did tell you BVAS would not work in this election notwithstanding the assurance of the INEC chairman. I told you I was prepared to be proved wrong. Sadly and tragically, I have been proved right. I don’t feel good about being right on that because the country has spent a lot of money and young people as well as old Nigerians above 60 years who voted for the first time in the election invested a lot of energy, emotion and sentiment in the election. Many of them were disappointed trying to do it, but they invested hope in this process and then somebody, in the name of INEC chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, organised a process through which they stole their votes, stole their lives and stole their dreams and did it with violent arrogance. So, that is the only thing that went down and it is as simple as that.
Against the expectation that the turnout would be massive, it came out that only about 25 million voted in the election. I know you had earlier raised the issue of bloated voter roll…
You and I are Nigerians. Let’s ask ourselves: do you find those figures credible? Those figures are not credible. Just like anyone who relies on the figures from the 2007 elections is stupid, anyone who relies on the figures produced by INEC for this election will be idiotic. What is INEC trying to tell us? In 2019, we had 84 million people on the voter register. Four years later, INEC said it registered over nine million people. So, for this election, we have over 93 million people on the register, which is nearly 10m over and above the 2019 numbers. And of that number, according to INEC, 87 million collected PVCs. That is INEC’s claim.
In 2019, we had about 28 million voters and this year 2023, we have 24.9 million voters. That is three million voters fewer than in 2019, notwithstanding that we added nearly 10 million people to the register. Let INEC explain. What this means is, it is either that INEC has invented the numbers that entirely had no relationship with what transpired on the field or INEC actually failed between 2019 and 2023. INEC has made citizens lose faith in the electoral process. It is either of the two or it could be both. It cannot be that INEC is a credible institution and then people are falling off the cliff and electoral turnout is falling off the cliff. Of course, it is not. INEC invented the numbers and the INEC chairman, who is the chief electoral officer for the presidential election, has got to take personal responsibility.
You don’t seem to buy the view in some quarters that the inability of politicians to get cash to mobilise voters partly accounted for why the turnout was low…
Do you believe that?
That is the view of some people
You and I are Nigerians. Do you believe that is what happened? All the judges who are going to manufacture whatever they are going to manufacture in court to legitimate what they want to legitimate, every consequence will come on top of their heads. This is the thing. When we all enable the things we enable in our respective professional capacity, we do it like it is an out-of-body experience. After judges have manufactured Supreme Court governors and INEC-appointed president, then years down the road, they retire and they will be made to go and queue and are wheeled in wheelbarrows to go and identify themselves in order to be registered for their pensions and then they start complaining. I don’t take any pity on any of the judges who are destituted after they leave office anymore because they have enabled all of these things with criminal jurisprudence. So, when all of us, whether as citizens or lawyers or journalists or doctors enable these things that destroy the Nigerian public space and the capacity of the country to work for us, we pay upfront for the abuse we are going to get and may it visit all of us in Jesus name.
People who are not satisfied with the outcome of the polls have been told to go to court. This is coming against the background of the criticisms of some of the decisions of the Supreme Court over some political matters, sparking a debate over whether justice will be served by the judiciary. Are you confident the judges will do justice?
It is up to the judges to answer the question for themselves. The Nigerian judiciary is now captured. You name major politicians and I will tell you this one’s wife is that judge and that one’s son is that judge and the other one’s mistress is that judge. In the last election [2019], the president of the Court of Appeal was the wife of an APC senatorial candidate. The chief judge, until recently, was the father of an APC senatorial candidate and he had another son who was running as PDP House of Representatives candidate in Bauchi. The current Chief Justice is the cousin to an APC governor. So, how these things work out, I would not know. But the Nigerian judiciary has been captured. At the end of the day, it is the judges who will live with the consequences of everything that they enabled. In the fullness of time, I am sure that some of them at least would think about the consequences of this. It is interesting that when the Supreme Court sat on the review of the Imo State governorship judgment, the only judge who dissented is an Igbo man because he knew the score and what the consequences of that judgment will be and that it was travelling too far. When the Supreme Court recently decided on the Lawan-Machina case for the Yobe North senatorial seat, one of the two judges who dissented is from Gombe State, just next to Yobe State, because he understood the human significance of all of that legal verbiage that they were inventing. Even the judges are not averse to the consequences of what they do for where they come from. Breakfast will be served on all of us very hot. For whatever we enable, all of us will face the consequences together. That is all. Whether we do it as judges or senior advocates or lawyers or police officers, the consequences are upon us and upon our children. That is the most important thing. So, if the judges want to do what they want to do, it is up to them. If they want to do right, it is up to them. If they want to enable wrong, it is up to them. If they want the country to crash, it is up to them. They don’t have another country. It will crash on all of us.
I don’t see INEC tidying up anything. The INEC chairman actually did what it did in the first election deliberately. He killed two birds with one stone. One, he enabled the electoral burglary that took place. Secondly, he disincentivised people from showing up next in the state election so that his party will also win. So, that is essentially what he has done and so a lot of people are now going to be despondent and lose hope and not show up for the next election. My view and counsel will be that as many people as possible should continue to show up. Every citizen who can should continue to show up. Do they want to rule over a graveyard? Let them keep trying to kill as many people as possible if they can. That is fine. The world is also watching and Nigerians are keeping the score. So, these people are deploying ‘go to court’ not as encouragement to remedy, but as an act of hubris, by basically telling the opposition ‘we control the courts and the judges are in our pockets.’ That is not good. But the consequences of trying to rule over a graveyard will catch up with Nigeria this year, not next year, and at a time when they least expect it.
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