Election holiday and 'Operation Totality'
By Reuben Abati

"The prerogative for violence is in the hands of the government and the taxpayer is paying for it. Anybody who tries it will regret it for the rest of his life" - President Olusegun Obasanjo, April 11, 2007.

NOT many Nigerians are excited about the two-day holiday that has been declared ahead of the first leg of the two-part 2007 elections. It is widely regarded as one more holiday too many. Coming shortly after the Easter holidays which lasted about four days, the holiday to mark the birthday of the Prophet, the Sallah holiday, Christmas and New Year holidays, voters registration holidays, Nigerians had no prior notice of this holiday (work-free days says the Federal Government but where is the difference?). The immediate reaction to it was one of consternation and suspicion.

Vice President Atiku and the Action Congress wasted no time in declaring that the holiday is politically motivated. According to the Atiku Campaign Organisation, it is meant to frustrate the Supreme Court from taking pleadings in the Atiku case before it on the question of whether or not INEC has powers to disqualify candidates without recourse to the courts. But the Federal Government insists that the two-day holiday will allow voters to travel to their places of origin if they so wish so they can exercise their rights to vote. It may be useful to attempt an investigation of the various strands of the politics of this controversy.

First: the Supreme Court. It is a pity that the apex court has now been dragged into murky politics. The courts represent the only arena of sanity in our land but at a time when Nigerians do nothing but play and talk politics, it is inevitable that even the courts will be affected. The Supreme Court has acquitted itself honorably in the last eight years, providing much illumination and leadership where the professional politicians failed. The politicization of this important institution can serve no useful purpose other than the further devaluation of society. The Supreme Court Justices must be thoroughly embarrassed for they have now been placed in a very difficult situation. In many ways, a lot rests on their shoulders, and indeed on the shoulders of the judiciary.

I share the view that the two-day holiday is suspicious and inexpedient. Before the Supreme Court was the matter of INEC's powers to disqualify or not in the light of Section 137 of the 1999 Constitution. A Court of Appeal had ruled that INEC indeed has powers to disqualify candidates and that this power is evidenced in Section 137. Vice President Atiku had then appealed the ruling. The media seeing that an important matter of constitutional interpretation was involved had urged the Supreme Court to consider the case expeditiously. To do so, the Supreme Court needed to ensure that it laid the matter to rest and did not act in vain. If the Supreme Court had taken the matter on Thursday, pleadings and all, it could have chosen to dispose of the case by today or even immediately, and its rulings could have had implications one way or the other for the Gubernatorial and Houses of Assembly elections on Saturday.

All the Supreme Court needed to do was to state its decision and provide reasons later. But whatever the Supreme Court had planned to come up with, an ambush has now being prepared for it, with the tactical delay of its intervention until after the first leg of the elections. The Federal Government cannot purport to know the mind of the Supreme Court, nor can the Atiku camp do so either. But after the elections tomorrow, and the Supreme Court sits on Monday, it will be doing so after the event. If it gives a ruling that favours Vice President Atiku, from which other aggrieved parties may benefit by enforcing their rights, many of the elections tomorrow could be rendered voidable. The Presidential election scheduled for April 21 may also have to be postponed by a week or re-designed in accordance with the rulings of the Court. But should the Supreme Court opine that INEC has the powers to disqualify candidates, then that effectively marks the end of Vice President Atiku's ambition.

The rub of it is this: there are seeds herein for instability, and a long season of nearly endless litigation and the derailment of the April elections. Can the Supreme Court allow itself to be used as a lighting rod for instability? Will the Justices rule in favour of public policy and expediency? Or will they damn the consequences and speak the truth even if the heavens fall? Whatever it is, whatever the Supreme Court says will be dressed in a political garb by analysts on all sides. To bring the apex court or the entire judiciary into such a difficult pass is a comment on the character of the professional politicians. Whoever came up with the idea of a two-day holiday is an evil genius and a master of mischief.

Even if this has nothing to do with Vice President Atiku's case at all as the Presidency has argued, the two-day holiday is still inherently contradictory. At every opportunity, President Obasanjo had personally assured Nigerians that his government will deliver free and fair elections and that the entire process will be smooth and transparent. To achieve this one will expect that all the departments of state will be kept open for the elections to ensure that there is a wholesale focus on the same objectives. But to shut down the entire country two days to the elections is curious. Suppose INEC needs help from a certain Ministry or department of government and the matter is urgent, how will that now happen?

INEC has been left more or less alone without the critical support that other sections of government can make available to it in its last minute preparations. In the newspapers yesterday, it was reported that a group of armed robbers waylaid three INEC trucks which were bearing election materials and made away with those materials. I doubt if these were armed robbers. The INEC Chairman says the elections will not be affected by this incident. Did the INEC print excess materials? And where was the police? If the police cannot protect election materials in transit, or even arrest fake policemen, what is the guarantee that they will be able to ensure the security of men and materials on election day? And just in case INEC needs to produce more ballot papers to make up for stolen ones (more materials may still be stolen), what can it do if its printers are now on holidays and some of them have even travelled out of town?

When the Federal Government was confronted with the fact that its decision to declare two days as work-free will cause so much hardship for many Nigerians who may not have enough money in their pockets to cover another stretch of holidays, it quickly announced that financial institutions had been exempted because they offer essential services. The courts should have been exempted too. They have more urgent matters to attend to. In fact, the Electoral Act 2006 is very clear about the role of the courts in the electoral process. One more point: are bankers officially excluded from the elections since they alone have been prevented from travelling to their home states for the elections? And the other Nigerians who are being encouraged to travel: is the Federal Government aware of how much danger it is asking people to expose themselves to because of the elections?

The Secretary to the Government of the Federation says people are expected to travel to their villages to enable them vote. Is someone suffering from amnesia? During the voters' registration exercise last year, the same Federal Government had pleaded that nobody should travel out of their states of residence to register for the coming elections. Nigerians were expected and enjoined to register where they live and work. How can the same government now ask people to embark on a long journey before they can vote? What has been offered is a further confirmation of the indigene-settler dichotomy which is a major problem in Nigerian politics. This raises the question of citizenship. However, as an aside, the Lagos State Government may find here a good illustration of its earlier claim that the Census 2006 figures do not represent the true population of Lagos because people travelled out of the state during the Census exercise!

A third point is that there are too many holidays in the Nigerian calendar. Every year, we spend close to 64 days as holidays, when you add the weekends, so much time is wasted doing nothing. In a country where irregular power supply, traffic hold ups, and ethnic violence rob many people of valuable hours, the result is that very little time is spent on productive ventures. Serious nations encourage a culture of productivity. Nigeria must learn to put its people to work. Leisure as a factor of productivity is useful only when the latter is promoted in a constructive and real sense.

The problem with the elections is to be traced in part to the weakness of the opposition, brow-beaten over the years by the ruling government into a state of limited functionality. There are about 50 political parties, but these are mostly weak structures with no firm roots on the ground. The PDP has refused to yield any ground by embarking on what has been termed "Operation Totality". The phrase belongs to Chief Olabode George, the National Vice Chairman of the PDP, who allegedly used it to describe his party's plans in the South West, but which indeed can be taken as an apt definition of the PDP's psychological conditioning as it goes into an electoral contest that is a referendum on its performance in the last eight years, and a test of the strength of the opposition.

"Operation Totality" refers to the attempt by the ruling party to gain total victory by any means possible or the imposition of its will. A key element in this is the "Obasanjo factor". Soldiers are being deployed to the streets even when the courts have ruled that it is unconstitutional to use the army during elections (Yusuf vs Obasanjo). There is also the Ifeanyi Araraume case. The fellow had gone to the Supreme Court to challenge the PDP's decision to drop him as the party's flag bearer in Imo state. The Supreme Court ruled in his favour and INEC was willing to put his name on the ballot. But to show that it is bigger than the Supreme Court of Nigeria, the PDP withdrew Araraume's platform, and decided to opt out of the gubernatorial elections in Imo state. We have in this instance, the first application of the PDP Oath of Allegiance which all the office seekers under the party's umbrella were required to sign, the substance of which is unquestioning submission to the supreme will of the party, which is a totally undemocratic proposition.

There should be no totalitarianism in an election which ought to reflect the free will of the people. Their Lordships, the Justices of the Supreme Court, should find the wisdom and courage to walk the tightrope that is evidently before them. Their foremost duty is to the Nigerian people. And there should be no country shut down, next week. Let the people vote where they live, work and pay taxes.

Robot  # 1 | 13.04.2007 01:23

NOT many Nigerians are excited about the two-day holiday t...Read the full article.