Professor Maurice Iwu, chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), has been at the centre of controversies on electoral matters since the run up to the2007 general elections. Now he is six months away from the end of his five-year tenure. Will he get a second term or will his experience find a place in the dustbin of history? In this incisive interview during his visit to Media Trust’s head office in Abuja last week, Iwu addressed many of the burning issues he has had to contain with as he weathered the storm to this moment.

Below are excerpts:

Was it in the national interest that INEC became too partisan in favour of Obasanjo including the attempt to exclude Atiku Abubakar in the Presidential election in 2007?

If you had known the process, you wouldn't have come to that conclusion. The former Vice President is somebody we respect a lot. I don't want to go into the personal aspects because I will be surprised if he believes that I would, as a person, prevent him from running. For a country like ours, experience is important. The experience he would have brought to bear in governance should be in our national interest. But we tend to forget that before that election, there was a Court of Appeal judgment that more or less Okayed the exclusion. There were two judgments of the High Court and the Court of Appeal that Okayed the exclusion. So what we did was to make Plan B. The Plan B had all the political parties and not faces of individuals. Now, because there was national mistrust, we asked the Mints to help in the printing. But we were shocked and surprised when Plan B was like Plan A. When the judgment was given by the Supreme Court, it was too late for us to say...I am not the type that will keep giving excuses, so the next possible thing to do was to make sure that the ballot papers were printed. And when the ballot papers were printed, the first set had serial numbers, don't forget that. The second set of ballot papers were done in four days.

The Supreme Court judgement, the final judgment, came on April 16th, five days to the election. There was a lot of clamour for us to postpone the election and start preparation again, but we couldn't take that risk because there was no way to predict what could happen. So we went ahead to conduct the election.

When the ballot papers were delivered, they came in bundles because they were done through the mints. So we now had them in bundles, each bundle in a series. Why I signed that it should be distributed was that it came up the night before the election and there was no way anybody could have gone to print his own. The possibility of duplication was nil. And if there was over voting, it would have been easier for us to cancel the election after it had taken place than not to have the election take place at all. If you make mistakes, it can be remedied but if you throw the country into chaos you cannot pull it back. So there was no plan on our side to exclude the VP or anybody. Remember it was a case that had to do with EFCC. They were driving the issue so strongly that they wrote to us [to exclude Atiku]. But we refused and said we were not going to do that because the law says it has to be government white paper. They now went ahead and produced the government white paper in 10 days. We couldn't believe it. We gave them what we thought was an impossible condition to fulfil, but they came out with the white paper in 10 days. We then read the white paper in between the lines and said well, this white paper isn't a product of a judicial inquiry. Then the Attorney General, the chief law officer of the federation, wrote to us that we swore to uphold the constitution but we are now interpreting the law, which is not our duty. At that point there was nothing we could do. I'm not trying to say that excluding anybody could be justified. What I'm trying to explain is that as far as we are concerned, we thought we had covered all possible corners

Did you anticipate that?

That's why I said we had a Plan B that didn't work. These are human institutions. But instead of putting our heads on the head and say Oh God, we went ahead. We also called the parties to explain that. Our opportunity to have postponed the election couldn't have been the court judgment but the death of Adefarati. That was tempting but the security report was bad. The tension people had generated was so bad that you just didn't want to toy... So if the idea was just simply to postpone election, we could have used that death to buy additional time. That happened a week before the Supreme Court judgment, so we could have used that death but we didn't because it was something we couldn't toy with.

But as I said, if we had our own little press, which we now have, we could have been able to make the sample of the ballot paper and say this is what we want you to print. But then we didn't. It was a question of telling them that we want it done this way or the other way.

If you ask the former Vice President, he will tell you that when he came for screening, some of the moves he made to regularise his position were actually based on my suggestion. At that time he was still, on paper, a PDP member. I was the one that said, sir this thing can be used against you later on since you are still holding membership of the other party. Then he told us that he had already resigned at his ward level. But I asked him, why don't you follow it and process it to the end? So from our point of view there was nothing to benefit from... and nobody instructed us to do anything against our will. If we are convinced that we could get away with it, by law, to still have him at that time, we could have done it. There were many other things we did that went against the then government and with time Nigerians will get to know.

Have you considered resigning in view of the perception of Nigerians that INEC offers no hope of giving Nigerians a credible election?

When you believe you have not done anything wrong and people spend a lot of time and millions of naira persecuting you; people who have never met you; people whom you have no grudge against, there is a tendency to say well, I quit. But if you examine your conscience and you can go to bed, sleep and you are at peace with yourself, then it will be unpatriotic for you to quit. Why I am saying this is that if I had got angry and left, it would be very dangerous and very difficult for anybody who will come after me. I say this because if the only thing it takes to remove an INEC chairman is by mounting a sustained media campaign against the person, it is unfair.

If I have my own press, I can respond. But whensomebody doesn't pay for the media war he is unleashing on an institution, then that becomes very difficult. One of the intriguing things in Nigerian polls 2007 is that there is nowhere anybody has claimed that he had won the election other than the man (Umaru Yar'adua) we declared. You see, in Kenya people claimed that they won the election but they had been denied. The opposition in Zimbabwe claimed that they won the election but they had been denied. But in our own case, it is a deliberate attempt to destroy national institutions and individuals you cannot compromise. So if I am not man enough to absolve abuse and insults from people whose motives I know, then I shouldn't be in the position in the first place. If I am condemned by somebody who is good and well meaning, it will pain me. But if somebody who is bad; who is patently evil says that he doesn't like me then I know that I am doing the right thing. These are people who, for want of a better word, are evil. These are people who never like order, anarchists. If somebody who is an atheist starts talking to me about morality, I laugh. How can you, when nothing holds you, condemn me that restrain myself by my faith. Since I know that you are an atheist, nothing holds you, I don't care

There is one such atheist in the west, when he talks I don't even listen because there is nothing between me and him. He is an atheist and I am a believer, so he cannot find anything good in me. I came to this work with a very strong conviction that it is important for institutions to survive; that Nigeria should survive so that we can fix all the problems. If somebody wants the INEC chairman to leave because he wants his tribal person to assume the position, that is so sad and pathetic and no matter how it is coloured, I wouldn't even listen to it.

I read something today in Daily Trust. It was a group talking about what happened in Ghana. It is talking about how bloody the election went and so on. I didn't even know that happened. But nobody called for the dissolution of their country's electoral body. You read what they write about Nigerian economy and so on. What the CBN governor did shook ground but the economy is better after the action he took. The rest of the world is praising us, yet some Nigerians are giving all sorts of coloration to it. So where do we stop? For me I know that when you are doing something good, you have to be prepared to take criticisms.

If anything I have made tremendous sacrifice for my country, which I am proud that I was able to do and then if in anyway there are some problems, when somebody comes, he can make it better. But we don't want it to be contrived. Because somebody has excessive words; has his own media and is targeting it against people; that to me is undemocratic because you are not giving the other person a fair chance.

How is INEC functioning now with only three commissioners, is that in any way hindering your day to day activities?

Yes we have only three commissioners and me. That makes the work difficult. For instance, if something is happening in the North, it is better to send a northerner who will be able to appreciate the bigger dynamics of the issue you are trying to solve. I lost a resident electoral commissioner who is from Kano and serving in Kaduna and I went to Kano. But it would have been good for me to have a national electoral commissioner who is from the north to be part of the prayer. So it will be good to have such a mix which we don't have at the moment. Now I realise that the 12 national commissioners was not in any way by accident. The amount of work to be done is so much that you need them. But I am sure the electoral reform thing must have hindered the process of the reappointment of the commissioners. However, I believe they will be reappointed soon.

Does INEC have a quorum with only three commissioners?

We don't have a problem of quorum. The law specifically says regardless of the vacancies existing.

Is it correct to say that you are scheming to get a second term?

Scheming is a very harsh word. I have six months to the end of my tenure. I have an election that is coming up in Anambra State. With the high tension there, if I allow myself to be distracted, crisis starts at one point. You will be affected even here in Abuja. I have another election coming in FCT, if we blink, it will go up. These two things are enough to keep me busy.

Secondly, I am a child-like Christian. Child-like in the sense that I don't try to rationalise, whatever my God wants to do with me, he does without asking me. I am not even sure I will be alive to the end of the year, not to talk of planning...Anybody that knows me knows that I am not like that, I don't plan like that. I didn't know I was going to be INEC chairman. I didn't know I will be here with you today; it is the way God wants it that he does it. If God wants me to be anything, you can't stop me and I can't even stop myself if I want to, he will drag me and make sure that it happens that way. So I don't want to get involved in that, my major problem now is Anambra and the FCT elections.

Controversy over Uyo Federal Constituency seat in the House of Representatives

When we conducted elections in Anambra State the Supreme Court came down heavily on us. They said we ought not to have done it because there was a case pending. In the case of Obot and Etim, they went through the normal tribunals and they got rulings. But they have a pending case of pre-election matter as to who is candidate. We are not denying PDP of their certificate. PDP has a certificate of return for that seat. If it were a totally different political party that won, we could have issued a certificate of return. We are party to the court case because we were joined. So if we do anything that will be seen as contempt of the Supreme Court, it is very serious.

We also looked at the judgment and there was no court order. If the court had ordered us to issue him a certificate, we would have obeyed, but there is no such court order.

Also look at the Electoral Act; it says that if we do not issue a certificate of return within 30 days, the House of Representatives can swear him in. So we are not preventing him from serving but we fear that we can be held contemptuous of the Supreme Court and the court will really frown at that.

On Bauchi legislators who defected to PDP

INEC does not declare seats vacant. Our job is to conduct elections. Even where there is death of a legislator and we know that the person died and we attended the burial, it is the duty of the Speaker of the House or Senate President as the case may be to write to us informing us that a vacancy exists otherwise we won't do anything. Again that's the law. Vacancy has to be declared for us to do something. In the case of Plateau which you referred to, the seats were declared vacant and within 14 days we filed the place. If we get a similar thing from Bauchi Speaker, we will do a similar thing.

Let me give you a real situation. Somebody died here in the FCT and a member wrote to us notifying us. Before we could act, the chairman of the local government wrote to us to disregard that notice of death. He didn't say that the person didn't die but maybe he tactically didn't need that seat fielded for a while because of quorum and all that, it's his prerogative, we didn't argue with that.

One case also happened in 2003. Somebody was declared death by his party but the man showed up in Abuja and said look I am not dead. So we do not have the authority to declare seats vacant. Our job is to conduct elections where there is vacancy.