Nigeria: Revisiting the President's Power to Appoint INEC Chairman, Commissioners

23 August 2015
opinion

Following the expiration of the tenure of Professor Atahiru Jega as INEC's Chairman, on 29th June, 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari swiftly appointed Mrs Amina Bala-Zakari as the Acting Chairman of INEC, thus displacing Ambassador Muhammed Wali, to whom Professor Atahiru Jega, relying on INEC's " internal and independent arrangement", had handed over as his acting successor in office. Since the President made that appointment, controversy has raged on its legality. In this intervention, we propose to discuss the issues of whether the President of Nigeria can appoint any person to occupy the office of the INEC Chairman ( or persons to occupy the offices of INEC Commissioners), in an acting capacity, when the office of INEC Chairman becomes vacant, pending when the office is filled, as prescribed by law; and whether the person that has been appointed in this instance, Mrs. Bala-Zakari, was legally eligible and qualified to be appointed as INEC's Acting Chairman, or to be nominated and appointed as a substantive INEC Chairman. Ordinarily, it would not have been necessary for us to treat the issue of the legal eligibility of Mrs. Amina Bala-Zakari to be appointed as a substantive INEC Chairman, because she has not been nominated for that office, and because a person that is legally qualified and eligible to be appointed to act in an office will probably be legally qualified and eligible to be a substantive occupant of that office.

However, given the tone and intensity of the controversy surrounding the Amina Bala-Zakari's appointment, it does appear to us that those who are vehemently opposed to her appointment are not particularly worried about her acting chairmanship. They are observably apprehensive about the prospect of her likely transition from being an acting chairman to a substantive chairman. In other words, there appears to be a belief that Amina Bala-Zakari's acting chairmanship is probationary, and that if she is able to convincingly demonstrate her capacity for INEC leadership, perhaps by successfully and credibly organizing and delivering any of the forthcoming state elections, (assuming her acting chairmanship subsists for that long), she may succeed in "snatching" the INEC Chairmanship, using her acting status as a stepping stone.

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