On Monday, Clement Nwankwo, foremost Nigerian constitutional lawyer and Founding Convener of the Civil Society Monitoring Situation Room, was a guest of Prime Time, a current affairs programme on Arise News Television. There, he painted the picture of the stark reality of Nigeria’s parlous electoral system.

Using the outcomes of the offseason elections that took place in Bayelsa, Kogi and Imo States, to assess the situation, the human rights activists, came to the conclusion that the nation’s electoral process has come to a dead-end and therefore could not carry it beyond this stage, not to talk about the general election in 2027. What would result would not be elections, but chaos. Excerpts:      

What is your verdict on the offseason elections in Bayelsa, Kogi and Imo?

The Situation Room has issued a statement on these elections. The verdict is unequivocal, which is it was a huge disappointment. We had thought that given the disappointments in the 2023 general elections that there would been some efforts by INEC to do a better job, but apparently, this is a worse job and for some of us it is extremely sad to see elections conducted this way in this country.

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It brings to question how this democracy will continue and how this democracy will thrive if we cannot give citizens the option of deciding who rules them. The electoral system in this country has collapsed and we have to go back to the drawing board. Certainly we cannot build anything to what is now. The system has been captured and it is delivering incredibly sad results, not in terms of who wins or who doesn’t win, but in terms of the process, in terms of the abuses of the process, in terms of citizens’ lack of confidence in elections as a way of running a referendum on those who have ruled them or given a chance for people to take over.

The country has lost its electoral system and we certainly can only revive it if citizens ask the right questions and make the demands that should be made. When you look at the elections and look at the facts before the elections, those who were given responsibilities for the running of the elections, have been seen to be people who have been compromised, where partisan political elements have been appointed into the electoral commission, where half of the electoral commission and officials of the electoral commission have basically allocated themselves to serve political interests, then I think where we are today is a very sad one and this country’s democracy cannot go any further with the kind of election administration system that we have in place today.

But what do you think are responsible? Is it about bread and butter, poverty, corruption, violence, what are the specifics at the heart of this election?  

Certainly, bread and butter issues relate to who can halt the slide in which the country is descending into. Certainly when you look at people’s condition, you see a worse trend previously and it doesn’t look like there is anything in the horizon that promises a break from the fall. So, I think for people, it is a major issue. But beyond that is that those who are seeking political power are taking advantage of the huge poverty that has descended on the land and now basically taking advantage of the situation – buying elections, paying people off to vote for them – vote-buying is at an unmitigated proportion. So, it’s like people struggle so hard to purchase the election. They struggle so hard to purchase the election. They struggle so hard when they purchase the election, to use the proceeds of being in office to buy the next election.

So, in my view, is that perhaps we’ve come to a dead-end with the present electoral system and we must ask ourselves what lies ahead.

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Is it then a question of incumbency powers because the incumbents won in all the states?

The incumbents won in all the three states which is really not unexpected in normal electoral system, but we don’t have evidence that people voted freely. You set up a process, you decide that people go to vote, you decide election results are calculated, are tabulated, collated at the polling units and then escalated to the different levels of collation, you expect that at the immediate primary unit, you have the polling unit, that immediately the results are counted, the result sheets are uploaded and people can see that real-time. But in this election, we saw results being ready before the election.

We are doing analysis of what has been uploaded and there is a huge discrepancy in what has been uploaded to the IReV. The whole idea of the IReV is that the IReV was supposed to be real-life uploading of results. But now, there is a huge question about the efficiency of the IReV. It is now a tool to upload whatever you feel – not real-time, not real results. So, there is a major question of where we are with elections in this country.

It’s amazing when politicians who are supposed to protect the integrity of these elections and the values of this country, have become the ones who have infiltrated this country and have decimated every institution in it, not the least the ones that have to do with elections. Is that an exaggeration or a fair assessment of how things are?

It’s certainly not an exaggeration. You can see that with what has played out in the elections, you can see that in what has played out with the reports of the election observers. The media, thankfully have been very beautiful in putting out these reports in real time. Everything sacred have been desecrated by the politicians and those given responsibility to uphold their sacredness.

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That is the point that I make. If all of these institutions, if the politicians have found a way of manipulating it, if so much fund is taken out of the public treasury to buy election results – and that’s why you’ll see an incumbent would win because they have access to unparalleled resources – whether an incumbent from an opposition party, an incumbent from the ruling party, it’s the same trait.   

So how can Nigeria get out of this explosion of irregularities, corruption and violence in elections?

I think in 2007 when an incredibly horrible election was conducted in this country, when President Yar’Adua of blessed memory came into office, he came into office and said, I’m really sorry Nigerians, this election result that brought me into office, lack credibility, now let us see how we can pull ourselves from where we were. That was how the election reform committee was set up, headed by Justice Muhammed Lawal Uwais, which had so many members including Prof. Attahiru Jega, who later became the chairman of the electoral commission.

That President understood what went wrong, admitted it and called people to a conversation. So, that was one way and I think that we in the civil society, we are citizens of this country, we must raise our voices to say that these electoral system has collapsed. We can’t trust those you have appointed into office. You have appointed your political acolytes and put them into the management of elections. So, we don’t trust the electoral system anymore. We don’t trust the officials, we don’t trust the commission and we don’t trust that this process will help us save our democracy.

To save this democracy, this administration must come to the realization that citizens have no more confidence.

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But do you detect the will in President Bola Tinubu towards cleaning up the electoral process? If he does, can he or anyone fix such an overwhelmingly corrupt system?

There were recent nominations of state Resident Electoral Commissioners. And these were approved within a few minutes by the plenary at the National Assembly. Now, those nominations, several of them should never have been made because of the political taints of some of those who were in that list. For me, that’s a very sad signal.

But whether the administration likes it or not, whether the President likes it or not, I think it is important that he listens to what Nigerians are saying, which is that this system has failed. If this system has failed and you still have a couple of offseason elections, about four or five, leading up to 2027, it is only going to get worse and in 2027, I don’t know whether it can be called elections. It certainly won’t be if this trajectory continues.

At that stage, it will become clear even to the President that this country’s democracy is on its tatters and will drop and collapse, because certainly what we have today, cannot take us to the next general elections.

So, outside the Justice Uwais recommendations, what other steps do you recommend to maintain the sanctity of the elections?

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I think there have been several recommendations made. One is with the electoral commission itself. I think what we have today as electoral commission needs to be set aside in a legal way. The National Assembly needs to be brought into this conversation and the President needs to go back to several of the reports and set up a committee that has people, stakeholders who will sit down and decide which aspects of these recommendations need now to be implemented.

The most important is the method of the appointment of the election management team. I think we have to go back to the drawing board to start this process. I do not think that the electoral management team as it exists today can take this country to the next election. By this I mean INEC. We need to have a new system that creates a new electoral commission, that creates a new election management team and follows the process that has been outlined in various recommendations that have been made, especially in the Uwais Committee reports that have indicated how you can appoint the INEC chairman, how you can appoint INEC National Commissioners.

Indeed, we have to back to the question of whether indeed we need Resident Electoral Commissioners, because when governors send names of nominees to be appointed RECs or where political parties send names, what it does is destroy the system. That’s why you have the Resident Electoral Commissioner acting with arbitrariness without responsibility and without accountability.

We have to do this even before the next off-circle elections. Certainly we can’t go on with this king of electoral management body and we can’t go on with this kind of abused electoral process. This democracy will collapse very soon if we don’t check the type of electoral management system we have in this country, because citizens have lost faith totally in elections in this country.

But are those policies in themselves going to be enough or will government have to go back to social policies, because we know that corruption and electoral malpractices thrive when there is poverty?

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But you know you cannot solve poverty quite quickly but you can fix the election system quite quickly. When people understand that they can vote without the process being abused, then you begin to see better electoral officials respond to citizens’ demands. But if you blame the abuses entirely on citizens and refuse to do what we need to do in terms of policy changes, in terms of legal changes in terms of constitutional changes, then we would have to pray that this democracy survives.

What optimistic note can you sound from your observation and analysis of this election?

I think it is difficult to be very optimistic about this election. I think what surprised a few people even though there was a low turnout, what surprised quite a lot of people is that the turnout was as much as it was even though it was low, which means that citizens still have some interest. There are still people saying, look, we could still have confidence in elections if we fix it. So, in some ways, people have not totally given up on the electoral system. But it won’t go on for too long. In fact, it won’t go on till 2027. It won’t.

These points that you made, which are very poignant, which are very important and very pointed remarks, were they incorporated in the situation room report in stark terms?

It is incorporated in very stark terms. The Situation Room report today during a press conference addressed by the Convener Yinousa Y’Au, which basically made the point that these elections represent a huge disappointment and this country cannot continue on this trajectory. That’s very clear.

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