Mr. Olusegun Agbaje is the new Resident Electoral Commissioner, REC, for Lagos State. Before his last posting to Ogun State where he moved to Lagos, he served in Osun where a governorship election is holding on Saturday. In this interview, Agbaje shares his experience in Osun during the 2018 election and also speaks on why Nigerians should support the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to achieve credible elections in 2023 among other issues. Excerpts:
How do you describe the rush for voters’ registration in Lagos?
I would not refer to it as a mad rush but a usual way of doing things in Nigeria. It is usual that almost at the 12th hour you see people rushing out en mass. For instance, you would observe that because of the little extension, people are not coming again. Before the little extension, all the seats in our offices were occupied. For the past two weeks we captured about 450 persons to about 480 per day. But since Friday, it has reduced to 150 to 200 per day.
In total how many has INEC captured?
In Lagos State, those who have done the online registration are about 640,774 while those who have done the physical capturing and completed the registration exercise and are eligible for the Permanent Voter Cards, PVC, are 416,079.
What do you then make of the insinuation that the Igbo in Lagos are being denied the right to register?
I have asked them to show me the centre or local government for me to personally do my findings but nobody came with proof. There is no where Igbo people in Lagos would be denied registration under my watch. When we were sensitizing people to register, we didn’t say Yoruba and Hausa were the only tribes that could register and Igbo are excluded. We said all Nigerians and wherever they reside. They (Igbo) can register there and collect their PVCs in any of the LGAs in Lagos State.
But their claim was that they had to shut down their markets to compel Igbo people to register…
Shutting down markets to register for PVCs was a wrong decision the head of the market took. Incidentally, I met the President of Alaba International Market two weeks ago, and I told him that he did the wrong thing. We had been doing the registration since June last year, and we were to close last month of June, you then got up one day, closed the market, ordered everybody to go get their PVCs, that if they didn’t they won’t be allowed to open their shops. I told him it was wrong. He would have rather come to our head office, meet officials in charge and arrange how they would be attended to. If there are many, we would do it procedurally, not that they just shut down markets, and march to our office. It was not a good idea.
Is it legally permissible for candidates to change their running mate after primaries?
There is a procedure in the Electoral Act whereby candidates can do what we call substitution. The deadline for presidential candidates to substitute their running mates is July 15, but then there is also a procedure to go about it. The person’s name on the list must write formally to INEC through the Chairman of the party on maybe health reasons or whatever that he would not be able to cope with and, therefore, he is stepping down. Based on that, the candidate will then be allowed to select another running mate. But if the man refuses to go, there is nothing anybody can do!
But does it have any effect on the electoral process as it is being interpreted in some quarters?
It does not. The election is going to take place in February 2023. So it has no effect at all as is being misinterpreted by some people.
You recently disclosed that over one million PVCs are yet to be collected in Lagos…
Absolutely. That was PVCs of 2019 that have been with us because at that time the total registered voters in Lagos State was 6, 570, 291. Out of these, we had a total uncollected PVCs of 1, 101,557. Since we started this program last June, we took them along, and over 10, 000 have been collected. So, we still have over one million PVCs with us that are yet to be collected. Precisely, we have 1, 090, 439 people that are still yet to collect. With these, some may have been transferred out of Lagos, some students may have passed out before the PVCs came, some Corps members who served in Lagos have also left, several workers may have also been transferred, so we do not expect them to come back and collect the PVCs. But we expect that if we can still get 300, 000 to 400, 000 to come up for their PVCs, that would be a good number for us.
But with the staggering insecurity, burning of INEC offices, the Kuje Prison attack, do you still foresee free, fair and credible elections come 2023?
You have to take a close look at the percentages of INEC offices burnt, at least in this year, maybe just one or two; One somewhere in Imo and another in Enugu. So it’s just two INEC offices out of 774 local government areas. To me that is not significant enough not to have credible elections. We expect that people should be happy about what INEC is doing. What is the essence of attacking INEC offices, what offence has INEC committed? If people are annoyed and agitated we can understand, but in a process where what we are doing is registering people, what have we done wrong to justify setting our offices ablaze? Maybe after the Osun election, the Commission would get back again and take a decision, within three to four months the burnt offices would be revamped again. The only thing is that we are wasting our money. Whatever problems the agitators have, they should channel their agitation through the proper channel so that the government can know what their challenges are and find a way of addressing them. The prison attack in Kuje is a very serious national security calamity but I know appropriate government agencies are working on it. We still have about nine months until the elections, I believe security agencies will get even and we would have peaceful elections. We have an Inter-agency Consultative Committee on Election Security, ICCES, in place at the national, state and local government levels and, all the agencies, we are going to meet ahead of the elections to discuss security threats and what we can do to mitigate such threats from disturbing the elections.
You vowed in 2018 to resign if elections under your watch were compromised by INEC. Are you reassuring Nigerians of free and fair elections under your watch in Lagos?
That was in Osun. INEC is not happy when we repeat elections because they would have had sleepless nights before the repeated election holds. Like I told people in Osun, I conducted election in Ondo State in 2016 without litigations. In 2014, in the same Osun, I also conducted the election and there was no litigation; in fact the former Chairman of the Commission, Professor Attahiru Jega Attahiru, wrote me a special letter to specially appreciate us. The same thing happened in the 2018 election. The first one, the international community was very happy, but when the issue of collation started, we warned people not to carry ballot boxes but election in seven polling units out of three thousand polling units gave us more headache than the remaining election. But then, INEC did its best.
Do we still expect credible elections under your watch in Lagos State?
By the grace of God… Like I said, I did credible election in Osun, so Lagos will not be an exemption. I am not a new person in Lagos; in 1993 I was Chief Director of SSS now known as the Department of State Services, DSS, when we had the June 12 election.
What would be your charge to the electorate ahead of the election?
Nigerians should believe in INEC, work for us and ensure that we are transparent in whatever we do. If you see anywhere we are going wrong, let us know and we will correct any mistake. To us, all parties are the same; our position is like a father having 18 children. Once other parties see that you love one more than the others, you are in trouble as a father. So, we love all the parties and encourage all of them to do well, particularly now when we expect the campaign to kick off in September. Our appeal to them is to make their campaigns less rancorous and issue based, not attacking one another. As far as INEC is concerned, we are prepared to have credible elections next year. Continue Reading
