Apparently, the absence of laws to deal squarely with the conundrum is not the issue, but the lack of political will by the state or its institutions to carry out prosecutions effectively.
Each electoral cycle throws up its poignant concerns, which the Nigerian state tries, or fails, to grapple with. The just concluded 2023 general elections did not depart from this trajectory. The Inspector-General of Police, Usman Alkali Baba, confirmed this much with the disclosure that 781 suspected electoral offenders had been arrested in respect of the 25 February, and 18 March elections. But more heart-rending is the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) report that drew attention to 109 deaths in election-related violence, which occurred between January and 10 March. The foibles impose a duty on the authorities to bring to book individuals or agencies that tried to subvert the electoral process for their selfish ends.
As the police chronicled, 185 infractions took place during the presidential and National Assembly polls, leading to the arrest of 203 persons. Thereafter, in the 18 March governorship and state Houses of Assembly elections, the malevolence aggravated. A total of 304 electoral breaches are on record, for which 578 persons were apprehended.
Abuses committed by these suspects fall under about 62 offences in the Electoral Act, with specific sanctions, ranging from fines of N500,000 to N50 million, alongside six-month to 10-year jail terms, depending on the degrees of offence committed. According to the law, destruction of ballot boxes, snatching of result sheets or unauthorised access to electoral materials, buying of voter-cards, bribery, impersonation and forgery attract various jail terms, fines, or a combination of these punishments. Other electoral transgressions include possession of offensive weapons and false result declaration by an electoral official. A Returning Officer or Collation Officer who makes a false return, could face a maximum of three years in prison.
For those arrested to face the law, the Inspector-General has directed police commissioners to swiftly conclude all cases of violations of the 2022 Electoral Act during electioneering, and on the days of voting, and forward them to the Police headquarters for processing and transmission of the case files to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Unfortunately, this is a ritual the country had undergone before without making any success of it.
In more civilised societies, an election is a civic engagement, whereby people freely exercise their franchise in choosing those to represent or lead them. It is certainly not warfare. Sadly, self-seeking and accessing the privileges of public office have supplanted the higher ideal of providing service to the people. These have invariably propelled Nigerian politicians to indulge in desperate acts by engaging thugs; procuring arms and ammunition for them to kill, maim and intimidate political opponents; and to snatch or destroy thumb-printed ballots in strongholds of their opponents. These politicians also capture state institutions in order to win elections. Undoubtedly, the killing of 109 persons as documented in the CDD report is a staggering and horrific evidence of an electoral landscape badly in need of redemption.
The National Human Rights Commission's insights into the conduct of the 2023 polls, documented voter suppression in Lagos, Rivers, Imo, Bayelsa and Ebonyi States; violation of the rights of individuals to participate in elections in Rivers, Lagos and Oyo states; just as it recorded killings in Lagos, Kano, Ebonyi, and Borno states. According to the Commission, INEC facilities equally suffered 75 violent attacks in the build-up to the past elections. With media reports of electoral breaches in Abia, Anambra, Enugu and others states, the infamies, as captured in the police and NHRC reports, are not by any stretch of imagination comprehensive.
One of those killed in the 18 March polls was Chiosom Lennard, the only child of his parents, who served as a polling official in one of the units at Ubeta Community Primary School, in Rivers State. He was billed to defend his PhD thesis on 23 March at Rivers State University, Port Harcourt. For daring some hoodlums in police uniform who stormed his polling unit to snatch the ballot-box and other electoral materials, he was shot point blank, along with two party agents he had drawn their attention to the unfolding evil.
Killings and other brazen electoral perversions in this year's elections are direct upshots of Nigeria's lip service to punishing culprits of misdemeanours involved in our polls. Electoral observers reported that 160 people were killed in 2015, in election-related violence from January to the time of polling in February. And in the 2011 post-election violence in 12 states in the North, 800 persons were killed, according to Human Rights Watch. What is more, 800,000 persons arrested during the 2011 polls for violations of the electoral law went unpunished, except for the paltry number of 200 persons that INEC was able to prosecute. The body cited the lack of capacity as the reason for its failure in putting more offenders on trial and for possible sanctions.
Apparently, the absence of laws to deal squarely with the conundrum is not the issue, but the lack of political will by the state or its institutions to carry out prosecutions effectively. Presently, Nigeria has to break this jinx in relation to the recent elections by ensuring that the badly needed result of prosecutions does not elude the country by putting those arrested to trial, while sparing their sponsors. The arrested do not act in isolation. So far, the outgoing Buhari regime has failed Nigeria woefully in this regard. As a victim of the system in his serial attempts to become elected as president, he was taken seriously when he charged Professor Mahmood Yakubu, in November 2015, as he was being sworn in, to change the narrative: He said it was not enough to cancel elections and "Unless our system stops covering up all forms of electoral malpractices, we can hardly get it right. No system endures with impunity." This has turned out as sheer rhetoric. Regrettably, President Buhari could not lead the charge.
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However, synergy is required among state actors - the police, INEC and the judiciary - for the diligent and clinical prosecution of suspects. Otherwise, Nigeria's electoral process will snap irredeemably, sooner than later. Already, kidnapping that has become a national dilemma is a heavy price Nigeria is paying for tolerating the use of thugs in the 2003 elections in a state in the South-South; these miscreants were abandoned thereafter to fend for themselves. The Boko Haram insurgency had a similar provenance in a North-Eastern state.
The INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, had raised some concerns a few years ago about the shortcomings in the extant mechanism for bringing electoral offenders to book. He said, "These cases are prosecuted in the states where the alleged offences are committed. Some cases were dismissed for want of diligent prosecution, while in some states, the Attorneys-General entered nolle prosequi to get (let) the alleged offenders off the hook." This is a big problem. It was also unclear to him how many of the 40 persons convicted for breaches in the 2016 by-elections in Kano, served their jail terms.
Given Mahmood Yakubu and Attahiru Jega's wealth of experience on the INEC chair, their persistent clamour for an Electoral Offences Commission, with its own Tribunal, as a way of biting the bullet in the handling of electoral offences, remains a proposal that merits attention. It was one of Justice Mohammed Uwais panel's recommendations on electoral reforms in the wake of the massive electoral heist of 2007.
