So, when they offer you money, and you refuse, they take your life, so oftentimes those who want to do the right thing are hurt. It is the same political class and that is because there is no strong political institution to invoke institutional punishment for the offenders. As it is today, if any case comes to INEC, it has to investigate first before responding. To do investigation, INEC has to involve the police in the investigation before stepping in for punishment or making a pronouncement to prosecute. The matter can be killed at the police stage so it underscores the need for INEC to have an independent body that can initiate prosecution, investigation, and others and I will even suggest that such bodies would not be subjected to the powers of the Attorney General both at the state and federal levels to stop criminal prosecution because Section 174 vests the Attorney General with the power to stop or discontinue or take over any criminal prosecution except that of court marshal. The same thing for the states, you can find it in Section 211 and what that means is that if you want to tackle electoral corruption or fraud, you must also provide that the power for the Attorney General to take over should not apply to electoral offenses. To that extent, anyone who is found guilty will go in for it. For example, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission is an agency under the Attorney General’s office, with the appropriate orders from the Attorney General’s office, files can disappear and the chairman of the EFCC would do nothing about it. So, if we want to sanitize the election process, we should punish real infractions of the process. Take for example, it is always the poor that are being arrested, not the actors or what you can call the high and mighty. It is like the spider’s web. What is bigger passes through while the smaller creatures are caught by the web. So we need to build strong institutions, not persons. We don’t have such yet and neither political parties nor individuals have tried to do such. It is only the civil society organizations that are trying to challenge the process actively, but then the political class also infiltrates. Alright, if you put a check on the election observers, many of them are the extensions of the political parties, except very few of them. Even when there is evidence, on that basis, you cannot initiate prosecution. It is only in Nigeria that a citizen of the country does not have the power of arrest. If you observe an election as a citizen, you may have no power to sue any offender unless you are a participant in the election or you have no locus standi. But as a Nigerian, you have no locus to sue anybody for election messes in your own country. It came when they removed the power of anyone to challenge the outcome of elections, and I said these people were heading somewhere to emasculate every process, and it has happened. And even if you belong to the political party the party will suppress it, saying that they would exhaust the internal mechanisms. So you can now see how they kill the process. But we are gradually moving unpredictably because I can tell you that when they cannot no longer find people who will tell them certain things, they will turn around inside and implode. So, the commission needs to avail itself of certain powers, to become better and leaner. This is because INEC can’t even prosecute these offenses. It can’t even regulate the activities of these parties. For me, I don’t have a problem with a multi-party system because the more, the merrier. Some parties are only interested in local elections, and when it comes to nationals, they go into alliance with others, but for you to be eligible to be on the ballot, you must fulfill stringent conditions for your candidate to be on the ballot. That is what the parties need to do.
The ruling APC has been fingered for sponsoring internal crises rocking all the major opposition parties ahead of 2027, especially the Labour Party. Don’t you think APC is coasting home already?
That is the problem, and you know that Nigeria is naturally a two-party system. Nigeria has been; we just want to be giving the picture of a multi-party system of a two-dominant party system. In 1986, the regime of Ibrahim Babangida constituted a political bureau and after extensive research, saw that what would stabilize Nigeria was a two-party system. Based on that, Babangida created two parties, the NRC and the SDP, and it produced the June 12 election. In 1999, there were three political parties registered after the 1998 local government elections used to register political parties. There was APP, AD, and PDP. The presidential election of 1999 was fought by two parties. The APP and AD adopted a common candidate, Chief Olu Falae. The PDP had Olusegun Obasanjo. Then, after that, we saw the progressive parties alliance forming again, so what APC is doing is to create a strong base to face the opposition. The opposition parties need to organize themselves, not the ruling party doing it for you, if you are desirous of rising to the challenge of a behemoth, or the political parties dominating you, the smaller ones need to come together and if they are not able to, they are going to be subsumed by the bigger ones, that is the rule of power. What is preventing them is the possibility of putting aside their ego so they cannot blame it on APC. The smaller ones need to come together. It happened in the Second Republic, and the NPN saw it as a gang- up, but it was not because I can remember that Zik, Awolowo, and others came together and called themselves the Progress Parties Alliance just to give NPN a good fight in 1983, it has been happening. I can tell you one thing based on my research and experience: duopoly, the product of two dominant parties, shells presidential democracy anywhere. But in a parliamentary system, it attracts opposition. Yes, we need that, but we need a coalition because that is what makes the parliamentary system,the Westminster Model grow. After all, you need to bring people together. But in the presidential system, what you need is a two-party system, and that has been helping America where you see the Democrats and the Republicans, and it has been helping them exchange power. You hardly see any member of the other party jumping after two months. In Nigeria, the people cross the carpet because of a lack of ideology and party principles, and it is with this kind of scenario of going where the bread is buttered and eating more butter than the bread that is my concern. No one can have stability just for what he or she eats today, and unfortunately, not even all those who jump get anything. But if you stay, it gives hope and trust to your followers. So APC is not swallowing them they are the ones jumping ship, and one forced them to come. If they offer you a carrot, you can take it and still be where you are. The problem is that the character of the political class is an issue.
Check this story on Part 5
Revealed: How Nigeria’s elections are rigged (5)
