An international scholar, one of the frontline human rights lawyer in Africa and former chairman of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Professor Chidi Odinkalu, speaks to DARE ADEKANMBI on the leading presidential candidates, ruling out the presidential candidate of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), Rabiu Kwankwaso to cause any upset, the G-5 governors issue, INEC’s voter register of 93.3m voters, what should be the focus of the next president, among other issues.
In less than 44 days from now, Nigerians will file out in crowded lines across the country to elect a new president and new members of the National Assembly. What is your take on the state of the race?
What do you mean by state of the race? You mean handicapping who will win, who is ahead, who is behind and all of that?
That is part of it
I am not sure that is my place. The politicians have people who are doing that for them. But it seems to me quite clear, only in an alphabetical order and no more, that one of Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi or Bola Tinubu will be our president in May. That seems to me quite clear. I don’t think that Rabiu Kwankwaso, realistically, has a shot, even if he is likely to do well in Kano State. Obviously, Kano has never decided the presidency as such. I believe that one of the three people I mentioned earlier is likely to be the next president. I don’t think it is right for me to venture beyond that. Of course, I have seen lots of people bandying about lots of polls. I don’t put a lot of stock in these polls partly because some of them are push polls and it is easy to see which ones are push polls. For instance, somebody comes up with a poll saying 38 per cent of rural areas are in favour of a particular person and 34 per cent are in favour of another person. That is quite nonsensical because the person does not say what rural areas are. If and when they define rural areas, the poll unravels as being manifestly idiotic. So, I don’t place much stock in most of those polls. The other reason for that is also that even when you look at those polls, even the push polls themselves have got a high proportion of undecided voters. So, it is difficult to then make dispositive judgments based on polls with undecided voters with 30 percentage points out of 100. That does not make sense. But if you are telling me to handicap the race at this time, I am unwilling to do so.
Do you share the view in some quarters that the election is going to be keenly contested and that the possibility of a run-off is very high? INEC has already printed extra ballot papers in case that happens…
INEC, as the Election Management Body (EMB), is obliged to account for all eventualities, including the possibility of a run-off. So printing ballot papers for that kind of eventuality is well-advised. That is the first part of my answer to the question. The second part will be that it is not entirely impossible for people to think that there could be a run-off. That is not in the realm of impossibility. It is easy to see how people could come to that conclusion. That said, if I were a betting person, at this time, despite appearances, I would bet that the election will be decided on one ballot.
In an earlier interview, you asserted that a Southern Muslim as APC presidential candidate will not fly. Do you still hold such a view now, given the fact that that President Muhammadu Buhari has now been campaigning with Tinubu?
I have seen nothing that fundamentally forces or persuades me to change my views. No. Look, the president is campaigning with Tinubu and telling the people ‘don’t vote for a fraudulent person.’ The question for me is: does Tinubu want to continue presenting the president for him to keep saying the kind of things he is saying at the rallies, things that cut both ways and impossibly actually don’t reflect quite well on his candidate, it seems to me. That is up to the candidate to decide. I also don’t see how Buhari necessarily sells Bola Tinubu as a candidate. The only thing that helps the APC candidate is to distance himself from the Buhari record because not even in Buhari’s own state, Katsina, does Buhari come out as very popular at this particular time. The state has been taken over by bandits and people are wondering if they have a president from their state and bandits are overrunning them, then why is he president? Other Nigerians are wondering if this man is president and he cannot even save his state, how can he save us? So, I don’t think that wheeling out President Buhari right now is necessarily a service to the APC presidential candidate. I could, of course, be wrong, but I would like to be persuaded that I am wrong because I don’t see it.
But there is a counter-argument from the Tinubu camp that they are going to re-enact the wonder of 1993 when the defunct SDP fielded candidates who ran on a Muslim-Muslim ticket and were accepted nationally with overwhelming votes across the country. You don’t think so?
‘Back to the Future’ is only the title of a movie and not reality. That was 30 years ago.
Let’s flip to the other side. The G-5 governors’ face off with the PDP presidential candidate appears to be a big minus for the hope of the biggest opposition party in terms of the cohesion and coherence needed to confront and displace the seeming behemoth APC…
Everything is possible and I would like to remind you that I am not a babalawo and therefore not in a position to foresee a lot of things or indeed anything. So, what you have said is one possibility. It is also possible that the G-5 governors are good just for noise making and frankly, for wearing aso ebi. Let’s try and break it down. I will give Governor Nyesom Wike credit for his performance as a political actor, particularly in Rivers State. He is on the ground there and that has been to his credit, since he was Chief of Staff to Governor Rotimi Amaechi in 2007 and 2008 before he became a minister. So, I give him a lot of credit for his knowledge of the political grass roots in the state. That said, Governor Wike is not going to decide in Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa or indeed in Delta or Imo states of all which are neighbouring states to Rivers how the votes will go. One state where he may have some sway is Cross River where part of the party structure is dependent on his patronage. Outside that and with due respect quite frankly, Ikpeazu is not a political factor in Abia State. He is running, by the way, to be a senator for Abia South on the ticket of the PDP. That means, on the same date with Atiku Abubakar, he is on the ballot and he wants to tell people to vote for one party for the top of the ticket and then vote for him at the bottom of the ticket. It will not work because that is just confusion. So, he will be shooting himself in the foot if he does that. That is very clear, quite apart from the fact that he has been abysmal as a governor. So, as a political force, Ikpeazu is not really anything to write home about, Governor Ugwuanyi is running for the Senate in Enugu North on the ticket of PDP and he wants to tell the same people they should vote for him and not vote for the other person in a ballot that takes place on the same day and he has not been a spectacularly successful so that his record can stand him out. He needs his party to do it for him. So, again, that will fail. You go to Oyo State where Governor Seyi Makinde may be a little bit better than these other guys in terms of performance. But he is up against a former Senate Majority leader, three-term senator as the candidate of the APC in the governorship in the South-West where he could be eaten up and lose his office and he is not going to be saved by the governor of Rivers State. So, that means he needs his party’s supporters in the state to shop up for him because he is not going to rely on the supporters of an adverse party to save him. Or are you talking of Governor Samuel Ortom who has been a bloody waste of time quite honestly and who is probably going to be losing in his effort at getting a senatorial seat in Benue North-West. He is in the same senatorial zone as the PDP national chairman, Iyorchia Ayu, who he is traducing. None of this has not been particularly well-thought-out by the so-called gang of five PDP governors. Politics is not a game of aso ebi and though aso ebi may be important, when you get down to the fundamentals the so-called G-5 governors, if you take away Governor Wike, in my view, these other guys have caused themselves much more trouble. I am not at all surprised that now they are trying to walk both sides of the road so that they are in bed with Wike in the daytime and then trying to hobnob with Atiku at night. Of course that does pose all manner of challenges because if they spend all their day time and night time doing romance, what energy will they save up for their nighttime proclivity? This is really the problem they have got and these guys may actually have created more problems for themselves than they have created for Atiku. I am not at all suggesting that the governors don’t present Atiku with issues. But the issues they present to Atiku are much less than they present for themselves. I don’t think that they actually fundamentally cost Atiku too much. Peter Obi, of course, does damage. But Obi is an equal opportunity damage. Obi is going to cost PDP votes in the South-East, but he is also a factor in Lagos State and nobody is claiming that PDP is likely to win Lagos State because it is Tinubu’s home state and Tinubu is likely to win Lagos State. But Peter Obi is a factor in Lagos State, but if Tinubu chooses to manage Obi through voter suppression, Tinubu will lose votes and if he chooses to also manage Obi by head-to-head, Tinubu will still lose votes. So, Obi does not just damage PDP’s natural constituency, he also eats into APC’s too. That is just what it is in this election. It is a slightly different and unique election.
What do you make of the complaint from INEC that insecurity might warrant a postponement of the elections, even though the Federal Government has come out to say the polls would go on as scheduled…
That is a fact. Look, I have said this for so long and I have been called unpatriotic and APC warlords have descended on me for so long. But the fact of the matter is that the insecurity situation is quite bad and I think INEC has been slow to go public about it. No matter how much they want to dampen it, the situation is very bad. This week [last week], Vanguard reported that there are at least 14 states where there are wards in which elections may not take place. Two months ago, ThisDay reported there are 690 wards out of 8,000 and a few wards where elections may not take place because of insecurity, according to the assessment of the security services and these numbers are not invented. You go to Imo State in places like Oru West or Orsu Local Government Area, it is difficult to organise elections without casualties in these places. Go to Ihiala in Anambra State, it is problematic. Birnin Gwari in Kaduna is also problematic. Jema’a in Southern Kaduna is problematic. I could go on and indeed according to the report, up to 10 wards in Ondo State, as a matter of fact, do have some of these challenges. So, this is the reality. According to the reports, there are over 300 wards in the North-West, over 270 wards in the North-East, over 50 wards in the South-East and the least is in the South-West which has about 10 wards where there are these challenges that could preclude electioneering and balloting. All these wards add up to about eight per cent of the number of wards in the country. The big challenge is that in many of these places, it is difficult for INEC to deploy election workers with safety. And if you can’t deploy them with safety, you will not be able to organise elections in those areas. That is a reality that cannot be wished away with propaganda. The other thing is that voters need to feel safe enough to come out in the day and if voters don’t feel safe enough to come out in the day, you will have diminished turn out or no turn out at all and that is really where we are.
A lot of confidence is being reposed in the technology that INEC is deploying for the elections with a view to sanitising the system. Do you share in people’s optimism about tech?
INEC has decided to set its stall by that technology and let’s hope it works because there is no walking back from it. My understanding is first of all that the current design or specification of BVAS is that the gadget for each polling unit has been pre-configured with the voters for that unit. That means that the machine will not require bandwidth to be able to do accreditation because the names are already in the device. Secondly, I am made to understand that each machine will also have satellite uplink capability so that if it were required and if there is no digital bandwidth, they can, by means of satellite technology be able to upload whatever information they have got in their system. INEC appears to be quite confident about the digital security of the machines. I don’t know what the operating temperature range is because February is a high temperature month with a lot of dust around many places in the country. So, you want to be confident that the machines have the capability to operate in the kind of temperature range we have in the country. Under theatre circumstances, as in operating circumstances, I do expect there will be glitches. Whether the glitches will be catastrophic, I don’t know and I hope not. Nobody should pray for that. But the challenge is that the machines don’t appear to have been tested under operating conditions in most parts of the country. BVAS showed up in Anambra for the governorship election as it did in Ekiti and Osun states. But if you were to add up the three states, they are probably about just a little over the size of the territory of Kano State, which is the third smallest state in terms of landmass in Northern Nigeria. I don’t want to go too far, but I also don’t want to be too pessimistic. I just hope that on that day, any glitches will not be so serious as to undermine the effectiveness of election administration because that will be catastrophic. But will people put so much confidence in BVAS if they are aware that the contract for the BVAS and most other election procurements are held by a senator from Niger State who is running again on the platform of APC and is beholden to a presidential candidate? This is not a guarantor of credible electoral process.
The question is being asked by those who are jostling to be president, what is the traction for them when there is already a big hole of debts with revenue not enough to service interests of loans. They say if the next president is an angel in human form, not much should be expected from him in terms of deliverables…
What do you want, for Nigeria not to have a president?
We should have a new president, but Nigerians want the redemption of the economy to start immediately, but will the humongous debts, that may not be realised in the short term…
Nigeria does not need a magician because there is no magic fix to Nigeria’s problems. Nigeria needs a leader who is present and who can preside, which are two things that President Muhammadu Buhari has been unwilling and unable to do. He has been neither present nor has he been willing to preside over the country. That requires taking difficult decisions. Buhari was supposed to undertake fiscal consolidation, rationalize public agencies and bring down the cost of government. He has refused to do that. Rather, he and his cronies planted their people into the major public institutions and they have grown the size of the public service rather than shrink or reduce it. That has been one major failing of the Buhari administration. Secondly, Buhari claimed that fuel subsidy was fraudulent and that there was a racket under President [Goodluck] Jonathan, fuel subsidy was calculated on the basis of 35-40m litres consumption per day. Even then, most reasonable people knew that, that on its own was fraudulent. Under President Buhari, it rose to over 91m litres per day. If 40m litres per day was fraudulent, what is 91m litres per day? It is criminal. Rather than diminish corruption and its cost, Buhari has grown it. This is where the challenge is. If Buhari had been serious, in its six months, he would have taken major decisions that would have set Nigeria to right. But he chose not to do it and was too indolent and clueless to do it. I am not using cluelessness in the same way that most of Buhari’s opponents use it to suggest that he did not have ideas or a mind of his own. Buhari has clarity as to what he wants to do. So, when he wanted to shoot the #EndSARS protesters, nobody could stop him. He got them shot. It is just that most of those things that he wanted to do were only about one thing: keeping him in power and precluding the mistakes of 1985 when he was sacked from power from occurring again. So, it is all about regime security and that is why he has created a spectacular mess.
Can Nigeria be saved? Yes, of course it can be saved. It requires somebody who is less divisive and who has a sense of mission, who has a presence of mind and is willing to assemble the right team and set them to work. I think that is possible. But it is not going to be easy and the country needs to give the person space. It also requires, above all in my view, a person who is not driven by any need to do more than one term because the decision that will be taken will have political toxicities and the earlier the person takes the decisions, the better. The person will have to take those decisions within the first three to six months of their administration and get done with them one way or the other. Fuel subsidy will have to be addressed; the person will have to do some serious thinking about insecurity. The person will have to make some decisions about fiscal consolidation and cutting down the cost of governance. All of these require very unpopular decisions. The next president will not have any honeymoon at all.
What’s your assessment of the campaign so far?
About three factors have defined the campaign so far. One is that the campaigns have been very long, six months or more to campaign. Nobody has the money, resources and attention span required to sustain an active campaign for that long. So, you can see that the country is not as agog as it was during the 2019 elections because the candidates and the parties have been careful to shepherd their energy, enthusiasm, attention span and even their money because throwing money at campaigns now in a spectacular fashion will come back to cost them in election operations. The second issue is insecurity. In a lot of parts of the country, putting up election posters can cost you your life. So, you don’t have a lot of volunteers who are actively canvassing for the parties or putting up posters for them in different parts of the country. The top ticket candidates are most campaigning in urban areas or having events like town hall meetings. There have not been major events in non-urban areas. The down ballot candidates—Senate and House of Representatives candidates—have not really been visible in that sense. Indeed in Oyo State, Governor Makinde only just began his own campaign. He has been doing aso ebi stuff with Wike and others for a long time. The impact of these factors cumulatively has made it a somewhat disembodied campaign. I do expect that in the last month preceding the campaign, we are going to see a lot more intensity as the candidates begin to roll out things.
Mike Igini, in an interview, projected that the turn out for this election will surpass previous elections held because of the socioeconomic conditions of Nigerians, though some people have also raised the issue of prevalent poverty as a causative factor if the turnout is huge. Or will the CBN policy impact negatively on the evil of vote buying? Help us make sense out of this.
I don’t know what you mean by negatively, but anybody who is going to be buying votes in this election will almost invariably be breaching the rules and regulations that the CBN has brought out on cash for obvious reasons. You are not going to have enough cash to go round and so the only way you can do that in this election cycle is by hoarding cash in a way that violates the regulations on cash transactions.
I don’t think we are going to witness a higher turnout for the election this time than in previous elections. In 1999, we had about 54 per cent or thereabout turnout and in 2003, Obasanjo manufactured 61 per cent which reduced to 57 per cent in 2007. The 2003 turnout was made up. It was fictional. The Uwais panel also said the 2007 elections were the worst in Nigeria’s history. The numbers were all made up. As you and I speak, we still don’t have a state by state breakdown for the 2007 elections because none came out. So, a lot of those numbers for the 2003 and 2007 elections were made up. In 1983, Shagari’s turn-out of 47 per cent was viewed as fictional and this was what led to the military takeover at the end of 1983. I think we have got to have a sense of perspective here. INEC has just announced a voters’ roll of 93.3 million and when I look at those numbers, what strikes me is that somewhere close to 25 per cent of the notional voters roll does not exist. It is fictional. The voters’ roll started from 2011, which was when the first baseline took place. INEC registered under 74m people. INEC did not AFIS that voters’ roll. By the time INEC AFIS-ed it in 2015, we had a situation in which it fell from under 74m to about 68m, falling by about 4.7m between two elections because many of the double registrants were and all of that removed. It grew to 84m in 2019 and now it is 93.3m.
Now, Nigeria’s annual death rate is about 34 per 100. INEC says it cannot remove dead people from the voters’ roll. Do you know the number of people who have died since 2011 but who are on the roll? Adult death rate in Nigeria is over 30 per 100. That means every year, we have about 2 million people dying whose names should be struck off the voters’ roll, but INEC says it can’t do so because Nigeria does not have credible birth and death records. Millions of dead people are on the voters’ roll. If you counted from 2011 and you work with the average number of adult deaths, you have somewhere between 15m and 20m dead people in the voters’ register. Number two, you have people who have japa-ed and are on the register. Number three, you have people who are displaced and are on the register. I am not even keying in inertia now. By the time you have put in all of these variables, you are looking at somewhere between 20m and 25m people who should not be on the register but who are there.
So, when we talk about turnout, if you don’t manufacture or invent numbers, the turn out for 2023 elections may well beat that of 2019 which was about 34%, that is not a very high bar to beat, I don’t think we are going to be hitting the turnout of 2015 or 2011, since 2003 and 2007 are totally out of place. For 2023, I don’t think we can make the 2011 numbers because our election system was not working properly then. The only turnout number I think we may be able to beat will be 2019.
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