INEC, professors, and analogue elections | Nairalaw

Abimbola Adelakun

One of the indelible memories of the period of Nigeria’s return
to democracy firmly etched in my mind was the 1999 Peoples
Democratic Party primary election in Jos, Plateau State. I still
recall, distinctly, how the votes were counted and broadcast on
live TV. Everyone who stayed awake through the night endured the
voice of the announcer as he picked the ballot paper one after the
other from the ballot boxes and counted, “Obasanjo…. Obasanjo…
Obasanjo… Ekwueme…”

On Monday, that memory came flashing back when we were once
again forced to endure endless hours of viewing the collation of
election results as it was being transmitted on live TV. The tedium
of the process possibly made everyone gnash their teeth at some
point. Come to think of it, 20 years after we first had ballots
hand-counted and read out on live television, we should have
transcended the slow and labourious method of chanting election
scores on TV.

The other rankling part was watching the university vice
chancellors, who served as returning officers, read out the
figures, some of them stumbling in the execution of this rather
banal task. If they could not competently perform the easy chore of
reading out numbers, we should wonder how much diligence and
intelligent oversight they contributed to the mission of the
collation of the results.

After several election cycles, we should have realised now that
the premise of using academics in the electoral process is in
itself inherently flawed. The genius idea started under former INEC
Chairman, Prof Attahiru Jega. It is understandable why Jega, a
reputable academic himself, would imagine that plugging his
colleagues across Nigerian universities into that role would
improve the integrity of the electoral process. Academics are
supposed to be an embodiment of charisma and intellect. We will
like to believe that they will be less susceptible to inducements
by unscrupulous politicians who will try to seduce them to subvert
the will of the electorate. We want to think that they know their
honour and integrity, as elite members of the society, are at
stake, and they will not soil themselves by getting entangled in
partisan murk.

Having been Nigerian long enough, we also know that none of the
above is necessarily true. Academics, either in the classroom or in
administration, are human and therefore corruptible. An arrangement
that uses professors to determine the fate of politicians can
facilitate the exchange of favours between the two. There have been
some problems that show that the plan is an imperfect one. In 2015,
there was the case of Prof. John Etu Efeotor, the Vice-Chancellor
of the Federal University of Petroleum Resources and returning
officer for Rivers State, who was unable to read out the results
before him because, according to him, they were written under
“special circumstances.” A few days ago, INEC apologised over the
conduct of a Prof. Musa Izam, the Collation Officer assigned to
Bokkos Local Government Area of Plateau State, who absconded from
his duty post after he allegedly got drunk on Election Day.

Then, there is what I see as the bigger problem of the use – and
consequently, abuse- of the symbolic capital the professoriate
represents.

Nigerian elections are frequently tainted by all kinds of
statistical manipulations, voter intimidation, all sorts of
electoral frauds that are never redressed, and violence. For
instance, Saturday’s elections, the first set in this electoral
cycle, claimed between 16 to 39 lives, depending on which media
report you go by. From Lagos to Rivers, and to Akwa Ibom states,
politicians who vowed “body bags” delivered on their promises. All
over Nigeria, there were reports of logistics incompetently
mobilised and many voters disenfranchised. The returning officer
for Imo West (Orlu) senatorial zone, one Prof Ibeabuchi Izuchukwu
Innocent of the Federal University of Technology Owerri, made the
shocking allegation that he was held under duress and made to
announce election results in favour of the APC candidate, Governor
Rochas Okorocha. Then, after the election, we were treated to a
menu of videos of blatant rigging; and as we’ve come to expect,
cases of underage voting from the northern region of Nigeria.

In an ideal society, all of these shortcomings of Nigerian
elections would be vigorously challenged by members of the
intelligentsia. This is because, by virtue of their training, they
are equipped with the intellectual resources necessary to carry out
a post-mortem of the elections and insist on reforms. Instead, they
call them up on live television to read out electoral results and
thereby validate a process already fouled by the Nigerian factor.
When we have a situation where some of the most senior members of
the intelligentsia put a stamp of approval over the elections,
which junior academics or even their peers at the rank level will
defy the dynamics of power within that community to speak against
the failures of such elections?

Early January, the President of the Academic Staff Union of
Universities, Prof Biodun Ogunyemi, announced that despite the
ongoing strike action by lecturers, they would release their
members to participate as Returning and Collation Officers in the
general elections. According to Ogunyemi, ASUU members’
participation in the election is part of their “community service.”
While we can all agree with him that working with INEC should
indeed be considered as community service, the third component of
activities expected of academics, we should also question why their
role in elections, particularly for those who have risen to the
status of professors, should not be much more than that of
Returning Officers. Elsewhere, where academics are not working with
civil society groups, they bring vitality to elections through
their other contributions. They study trends, conduct and analyse
polls, develop models to make informed predictions on the
imperatives driving electoral choices, moderate and guide
enlightened discussions with the public, and assess how the
nation’s history might be unfolding from the spate of events.

About a week to the presidential election, The Guardian UK, had
the interesting report about an analysis they had run on the
Nigerian voter register. They observed that the number of new
voters that were registered in Nigeria since January 2018 has gone
up by almost the same percentage in each of the 36 states. They
think that level of consistency is “mathematically impossible”
because the pattern flattens out any idiosyncratic nuance between
individual states. I share their suspicions, and their effort at
making a scientific assessment of registration figures should also
make us ask why it was a foreign organisation that made that
observation. With all the departments of Mathematics and Statistics
that are strewn across the country’s universities, that insight
should not have come from abroad. We should have discovered that by
ourselves.

Even more worrying is this curious coincidence whereby ASUU goes
on extended strike action in an election year. This year too was no
different, except that the strike action was called off shortly
before the elections. However, strike actions by lecturers have
been a feature of an election year. So, we have this awkward
situation whereby universities are shut down because of a stand-off
between a recalcitrant government and an equally obstinate labour
union that has no other bargaining chip other than throwing down
its tools. The government co-opts the labour of this same group of
people while the more critical work that academics are primarily
trained to do – teaching and research- gets sidelined. The
government that will not yield grounds on their requests somehow
uses them to endorse a process that ultimately benefits
politicians. So, for a brief moment that climaxes on live TV, we
are allowed a glimpse of a utopian society where the town and gown
interface. At the end of the day, neither the election process nor
the fortune of universities is necessarily better off as a result
of the interaction.