Meeting Summary : Planning and Prospects for the 2011 Elections

Okechukwu Ibeanu Chief Technical Adviser, Independent National Electoral Commission, Nigeria Mark Stevens Adviser and Head of the Democracy Section, Commonwealth Secretariat Sola Tayo Associate Fellow, Africa Programme, Chatham House

Chair: Dr Lola Banjoko Nigeria Leadership Initiative

8 October 2010

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Meeting summary: Nigeria – Planning and Prospects for Elections in 2011

Professor Oke Ibeanu: One of the stories which recently captivated Nigerian society was a revelation by the former Governor of Cross River state, Donald Duke, where he laid out how state governors rig elections in Nigeria. INEC is a national body with 12 commissioners and a Chairman at federal level, and 37 state-level agencies each headed by a state-level electoral commissioner. It is said that the national body is irrelevant, and in fact the state-level agencies are key. The scenario in the past has been that the resident electoral commissioner arrives in the state, pays a courtesy visit to the state governor and makes an off-hand remark about the failings of his car. The electoral commissioner will then get a new car, house and spending money. In that way the state electoral commission becomes part of the state ruling party, and this means that elections are basically predetermined.

Duke’s confessions just confirmed what Nigerians already know. What is at fault here is the underlying presumption of a sense of finality; that the falsification of elections in Nigeria is inevitable. This idea is based on three false assumptions:

• That (without opening a sociological debate on agency and structure) there can be a group of INEC staff who can change the situation by their own will. To assume that INEC officials are necessarily corrupt is wrong. Recent studies seem to show that the right leadership will go a long way. At the moment, a major incentive to fraud is politicisation, and the understanding that INEC will just go along with what politicians want;

• There is an assumption that conditions will not change. The lack of vehicles and so on is not necessarily permanent. With better resource management, the situation can be improved;

• The final assumption is that not enough is known about election rigging in Nigeria. The matter has been well-studied, and with the right leadership - combined with technical, administrative and public motivation to make it possible – election rigging and fraud could be stopped in Nigeria.

How can these three strands be addressed?

• By increasing the level of accountability. Professor will go a long way to achieve this. He has a clear accountability

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track record, and his openness has given him such a high standard in the eyes of the Nigerian public that at his appointment President said he was about to appoint somebody that he knew nothing bad about – which is true. In private, the appointment of Jega was seen as a mistake by some voices who were scared of what he might achieve – so in a good way.

• By looking at the conditions in each state. This is linked to the character of leadership. Since the new Commission was appointed in July, they have tried to change things, starting with the allocation of the overhead. Previously the National Commission would receive 60 percent of funding whilst the state agency would get 40 percent. This was immediately reversed in order to insulate state officials from political influence, but how it will be managed it in the future is yet to be seen.

• State agencies are now required to clear meetings and publicise them, in order for national and state commissioners to agree on clear public statements.

A more interesting story is what should be done about election fraud. In July INEC looked at the existing voter register, and it is mind-boggling. There are hundreds of underage registrants and so many unusual names – Mike Tysons and so on. Many records do not have biometric information, fingerprints or pictures. There are names that have been registered at police stations which are clearly inconsistent with the addresses that are given, and so INEC came to the conclusion that the existing register cannot support the kind of election which Nigerians expect in 2011. Rightly or wrongly INEC is compiling a new register.

The recent amendment to the constitution meant that the election would have had to be between 30 December 2010 and 29 January 2011. With the new INEC commission only existing since July, and 70 million voters to be registered, it would have been very difficult to prepare for elections in only five or six months. It is a tight timeframe, but it is what the constitution provided for.

Political parties were up in arms because the election act placed more responsibility on them – particularly concerning how candidates are appointed. The federal government told INEC that if it needed more time it

www.chathamhouse.org.uk 3 Meeting summary: Nigeria – Planning and Prospects for Elections in 2011 would have to say so publicly, but INEC replied that it did not want to join the debate on tenure extension or changing the dates of the election.

This was because, in the past, the majority of Nigerians thought Goodluck Jonathan was looking to extend his tenure and INEC officials did not want to be seen as his cronies. Eventually it became clear to all that it was unfeasible to hold elections at the end of the year, and the consensus helped INEC to demand more time. It is hoped that the relevant amendments will be made and the elections will be held in April, with voter registration taking place in early January.

By the time of the elections, INEC hopes to have the following in place:

• Official INEC video evidence of what happens in police stations. This will be expensive but INEC will save money by focusing on the more on problematic areas;

• Barcoding on all ballot papers to help INEC check that papers have gone to the right places;

• Colour coded ballot papers so that no two constituencies have the same colour;

• Better security. INEC is hoping that the approach to securing elections can be changed. In the past, INEC would ask the police to provide security to the election venue. It is trying not to dictate to security services. Instead interstate community committees are to produce a work-plan for security.

INEC hopes that all agencies will work together, and there is recognition that not all states have the same security challenges. At the end of the election INEC will have a template by which it can hold the interstate community committees responsible. Security remains a major issue because INEC has little to no control over who provides it.

There is massive involvement of civil society in monitoring of elections. Next week INEC will sign a Memorandum of Understanding with civil society granting one hundred percent access. This MoU is concerned with internal party democracy, and the draft MoU was not sufficient because it focused on election observing. INEC wants civil society to be given additional responsibility by becoming involved in voter registration.

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In Nigeria there is an unfortunate sense that if you do not belong to PDP then there is no chance of winning an election. Some call Nigeria a one-party state although there are sixty political parties – which are all the same only on paper. The law says that if you apply for registration and INEC gives you no response within six months then you officially become a party. One example INEC saw was a party with 24 members which apparently had presence in 36 states – so you can imagine what some of these parties look like. This shows the level of weakness of most parties. Bigger parties often have problems with internal democracy. The election of 2010 put down more stringent rules on how to elect candidates with the agreement of congresses in all parts of the state. Section 87.7 says that no elected officials can vote in these congresses, thus reducing the influence of the state governor.

Mark Stevens: Mark Stevens was in Nigeria for the 2007 elections. Every election has its own dynamic, and tells its own story. The scale of the election in Nigeria means that this applies even more so.

There are some key concerns and challenges from the 2007 election, but there was a massive amount of effort and positive investment by civil society. The level of open acknowledgement subsequently of the real problems that existed with the election was impressive. The Electoral Reforms Committee did an excellent analysis of problems and create a good road map for the future.

Salient points remain however. It is important to insulate institutions responsible for elections from political interference. Even if it is not a problem, it is seen as a problem by ordinary Nigerians. INEC is at the top of the electoral tree, and the modalities by which INEC officials were appointed by the President was seen badly by the Nigerian public. The new INEC has now been instated, and it is important to have a process by which the National Judicial Commission and the Senate can have a role in improving it. There needs to be a process for this.

Voter Registration

61.5 million voters were registered in 2007, and it was a very messy process with technical difficulties and flaws involving massive variation in the quality of election lists and capture of eligible voters. There was the problem of underage voters – some were very young, no more than 8 or 9 years old. To have people queuing up on election day opens up the process to commit

www.chathamhouse.org.uk 5 Meeting summary: Nigeria – Planning and Prospects for Elections in 2011 fraud. INEC has made the only decision it could when it began to redraw the voter register.

Candidate Nomination

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission made a list of people with cases to answer. It led to confusion as to whether people were allowed to stand or should be disqualified. It was not clear whether Vice President Atiku Abubakar could or could not stand as a candidate. INEC went against the court decision, which led to delayed ballot papers. The 2007 election never really recovered from this.

Political Dynamic between President and Ruling Party

By election day there will be half a million election staff recruited, and the challenge of training these is great. There is an interesting strategy to address this, which comes from the mantra of transparency and it will be good if this can be achieved.

In 2007 at the announcement of results, it was not clear where they had come from. Numbers and figures were given but there was no clue as to where they had come from. One third of governorship elections were overturned.

Conduct of the Campaign and Role of the Political Parties

There was a lot of violence and some deaths in 2007. The rhetoric of some senior politicians fuelled tensions further down, and the attitude that the winner takes all and that it was a do-or-die affair was unhelpful, as at a lower level it wound up party activists.

There were however many positive aspects. The polls were competitive, but the consensus was that elections were flawed and lacked credibility. The 2003 polls were seen as taking some steps forward. The challenge now is technical, and there needs to be voter registration. Training of recruits and the need to maintain a transparent process are important.

If there is no political will or engagement, then our experience of Nigeria and elsewhere is that problems will persist if there is a political culture of mistrust. It is a serious challenge to elections and democracy if they are always linked to the abuse of incumbency and of resources of the state. If elections are linked to corruption and a winner-takes-all attitude, they will continue to be violent.

The Commonwealth Secretariat’s recommendations are not party-specific; it is not just the ruling party which needs to improve. The situation now is a product of the politics which Nigeria is engaged in. There needs to be a more www.chathamhouse.org.uk 6 Meeting summary: Nigeria – Planning and Prospects for Elections in 2011 robust rule of law. Change is possible. Stronger and more robust institutions at state and national level will help this along.

There also needs to be constructive and fair engagement of security bodies. Voter registration means that citizens are more aware of what the correct process is and what their rights are. This is about political leadership. The will needs to be there in order to move forward.

Sola Tayo: To speak of the failings of 2007 is unavoidable, but it is not fair to hold Professor Ibeanu responsible for the failings of his predecessors. The point today is to highlight that for INEC to succeed in its quest to ensure the 2011 elections run as smoothly as possible and produce the most credible result, the impact that current events will have on the process should not be ignored.

By the time the British people went out to vote in May of this year, things were not well within the Labour Party. For a while it had been fighting an internal war. The party now admits that it was consumed in a battle of egos and personalities at the expense of the electorate. This accusation can be thrown at any ruling party in most countries in the world. The key difference here is that the internal squabbles of political parties tend to not result in violence and human rights abuses on polling day in the way that they have in Nigeria. No UK voter had his or her human rights abused. In Nigeria, the climate during elections is tense and there is rhetoric from senior politicians who should know better, creating a nasty environment where people feel that their vote counts for nothing and they cannot vote in peace.

INEC cannot act in isolation and the behaviour of the dominant parties – in particular, the ruling PDP – will play a very large role in guiding the direction and outcome of the elections. The actions of the parties in previous elections have influenced the atmosphere and climate of the election season.

The 2003 elections were bad. The honeymoon was over for President Obasanjo and the elections were heavily rigged. A very senior Minister who served in that cabinet told me that the issue wasn’t that the PDP rigged the elections. They were rigged by everybody. The PDP just rigged it better. Such is the power of incumbency that those who want to remain in power may do whatever they think necessary to hold on to their position.

Moving on to 2007 and the ruling party was at war with itself. Internal personality-based squabbles between the PDP leadership had reached

www.chathamhouse.org.uk 7 Meeting summary: Nigeria – Planning and Prospects for Elections in 2011 boiling point and the result was the Vice President leaving in order to contest the candidacy for an opposition party.

Former INEC chair, Professor Maurice Iwu came to Chatham House and delivered a presentation detailing the advances made by INEC ahead of the elections. He spoke at length of the investment in technology and training to make the elections go as smoothly and fairly as possible. Most people here know what happened next, with the situation remaining quite shambolic, cars blowing up governors’ offices, people being forced to vote PDP and underage voters. Professor Jega, Professor Ibeanu and their team face a mountainous task to prove the credibility of INEC. They have inherited an albatross of negativity. Despite Professor Jega's popularity and the goodwill displayed towards him, INEC suffers a serious credibility problem.

The media will be scrutinising every request, every piece of information leaked about the commissions’ performance in the run up to the elections. If INEC asks for more time they will claim bias, but if it goes for a January date will be accused of rushing. Politicians will complain and yell foul play every time INEC points to a flaw that might harm the credibility of the poll.

INEC feel that Nigeria will be denied a credible result by having January elections. This is true. Looking at the current political turmoil, an extension can only be a good thing. Aside from the crucial administrative needs of INEC, what is happening within the parties and the effect this will most certainly have on elections should not be ignored.

The tragic events of October 1 st have given a possible taster of what may happen over the coming months. Security should be a very grave concern and should be addressed immediately. With tensions running high, it is likely that there will be similar attacks - during election rallies as well. If car bombs can be detonated within such close proximity to the President and senior dignitaries, what hope for the civilian going to cast his vote in a hotly contested seat?

The ruling party is again at war with itself and confidence in the president is low. The bombing once again exposes the weaknesses in Nigeria’s security. To try and separate that from the electoral process is dangerous.

There are growing voices of dissent calling for Goodluck Jonathan to be prohibited from contesting the presidency. Much of this is due to the crisis over zoning that the PDP is getting bogged down with. Whatever the arguments for regional rotation of the presidency, the fact that serious questions are being asked about Goodluck Jonathan’s handling of the bombings and high profile arrests and allegations that have followed, it should www.chathamhouse.org.uk 8 Meeting summary: Nigeria – Planning and Prospects for Elections in 2011 not go unchecked that this could have a massively destabilising effect on the elections.

Potential voters may weigh up the pros and cons of going out to vote if there is a real risk they may not return from the polling station. Voters in some parts of Nigeria frequently complain of harassment at polling stations. Even in so called calm areas, it can be intimidating casting your vote in full view in a clear plastic box under the presence of armed guards.

It is hard to see how we can avoid a repeat of 2007. It could be argued that the stakes are much higher this time around as the issue of north south divisions weren’t a major factor last time round. Issues of fraud and political intimidation are being addressed.

So, what can INEC do?

INEC is in a good position. If the political elite put their vanities aside and think of the greater good, then the actual will of the Nigerian people will be acknowledged and noted.

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Q&A SESSION Q: Issue of time constraints and impunity: will it be difficult to bring justice to people committing electoral fraud?

Q: On the timetable question, how is INEC’s timetable for voter registration progressing?

Q: Are there things that can’t be done in the medium-term process of institutionalising?

Q: What has been the role of the Commonwealth in election monitoring and security? I ask as Commonwealth police observers played an important role in monitoring the national police.

A – Mark Stevens : The Commonwealth will engage in a more regular way. If invited we will observe. Some colleagues in Abuja were discussing how to do this. The Secretary-General has spoken to the President on Nigeria’s political climate, and a public statement was issued recently to confirm this. The Commonwealth did have a presence at the South African elections in 1994 but this was a special case.

A – Prof Ibeanu : The burden of good will is that you are expected to do too much at the same time. It is as if the future of Nigeria is suddenly entirely resting on INEC. This is why the Commission has taken a conscious decision not to be involved in the bickering of political parties instead of referring to the task. What is crucial for the Commission is to maintain focus as judge of elections and a level playing field, and that votes are counted and will count. Part of our job is bringing people involved in fraud in the past to account.

INEC has tenure of five years, but there is this sense that it must settle everything within 6 months, before the next election. The Electoral Reform Committee recommended a special tribunal on the election, and we are now looking at sending a bill back to the National Assembly. There is a limit as to how far the National Assembly can be pushed to take more seriously the question of prosecuting electoral fraudsters. In fact we had to replace the lawyer handling one of the cases, because we found out that he had run for election, and was therefore not suitable.

There has been a lack of cooperation from parts of the police, and these are things to sort out in the medium term. In the short term, the single most important concern is voter registration.

On the question of procurement, we have made the largest IT contract in the world with 132,000 laptops, fingerprint scanners, printers and so on. There

www.chathamhouse.org.uk 10 Meeting summary: Nigeria – Planning and Prospects for Elections in 2011 are a range of challenges, particularly if dealing with a country like Nigeria. If we fail to focus on getting registration for the elections, anything that happens beyond the election becomes irrelevant. The nation is very often only focused on voter registration and casting ballots. No one is talking about the economy. Nigerians should be aware that free, fair and credible elections can also produce a bad government which cannot run the country well.

Procurement remains a major challenge. We have been working with only original equipment manufacturers, and two companies made it through the ten-page criteria for selection. At the beginning of next month we should be able to sign a contract. We should have the equipment by December.

We have developed our own registration software because in 2006 to 2007, INEC was held hostage to all sorts – data was encrypted, could not be integrated and so on. From a technical point of view it was easy to see how things went wrong. One of the reasons we are asking for more time is because of the 360,000 registration officers that must be recruited and trained.

Q: What are your plans to make sure that votes will count on a local level?

A: We are combining public participation with administrative measures on the part of the INEC, and using technical measures. This is how I think the INEC is hoping to judge itself. The people will say, it was not perfect but it was good enough. We want to see a response from the public which encourages us to go on in confidence. This is extremely important. We want to carefully maintain public opinion without being held hostage to it.

Q: How will civil society be involved and what opportunities are there for organisations to draw attention to problems?

A: There is a big role for civil society. It is not there just to get information or to micro-analyse, but they have not been able to organise themselves. The worry is that civil society will prove itself to be strong in urban areas, but not in rural areas. We need election observers in all of the regions.

Q: Does the INEC have red lines to hold politicians to account – a way of showing them that if they perform in a certain way they will not get your endorsement?

A: Part of the problem in the past was the sense among politicians that whatever happens within the states, the INEC central body will accept it. The national head of INEC had been working with a specific political party. The appointment of Professor Jega partly removes that issue.

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We are hoping that the returning officers for the election will not be INEC staff. This way, the Commissioner cannot be pushed about. We are setting up a way for the situation to be headed by the chairman himself.

Q: What are the challenges of security for INEC staff at a state level?

A: Security is one area over which INEC does not have total control. The security services give us a plan to secure ballots and staff. In Rivers state, National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members were kidnapped, so how can we encourage young people to go into rural areas and promise they will be looked after? We are trying to make sure that conditions improve.

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