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National Assembly Elections without Candidates? By Burtonsville, MD, USA
INTRODUCTION From all indications, the elections into the National Assembly yesterday April 12, 2003 went off largely successfully. The large-scale violence on Election Day predicted did not pan out, for several reasons: the wise decision of INEC to allow the substitution of register’s slips for voter’s card even on election day, since pre-election distribution had been spotty; the large-scale presence of the police and other security agents; the wariness of citizens themselves, following so much being made about such predictions.
So on this Palm Sunday, we thank God for all of that.
We now await the results from various constituencies, with the expectation that reaction to those results will NOT generate any violence that will negate our joy over election-day outcome.
But there might be problems down the road…..
ZERO-CANDIDATES’ ELECTIONS Nevertheless, these elections may have been FREE (of violence and intimidation), but one cannot call these elections FAIR if in fact the NAMES OF CANDIDATES were not displayed on the ballot papers! My full understanding from checking around the country is that only the NAMES OF PARTIES and their SYMBOLS were displayed on these ballot papers, making them elections of PARTIES rather than of CANDIDATES OF PARTIES!
That is a fundamental violation of OUR representative democracy, where it is CANDIDATES that we are expected to vote for in these elections, rather than PARTIES. This is more crucial when in fact INEC did not and could not AUTHORITATIVELY publish the names of candidates ahead of time for all voters to see, so that they could make a one-to-one correspondence between the two. This is in effect NO DIFFERENT from a situation in which the people were asked to vote for Parties first and then candidates for the winning parties were later on decided AFTERWARDS!
Which kin democracy be dat?
Let us give an example of a clearly weird case: Osun State senatorial district. The senatorial candidate for the majority party PDP there is Otunba Iyiola Omisore, the impeached ex-deputy governor of Osun State under the Alliance for Democracy (AD) party. He is currently in detention as the topmost suspect for the murder of late Attorney-General Bola Ige in a government of the majority party. Omisore is of course innocent until proven guilty, and hence technically not disqualified from being a candidate, but in another civilized and conscience-ridden democracy, his new-found party would be completely scandalized for fielding him, and would most probably lose heavily as a result.
There were conflicting reports as to Omisore’s PDP candidature in the days leading to the elections: some said he was the candidate, others not. INEC was fork-tongued, as was PDP’s Audu Ogbeh. This confusion went on until Election Day.
It now however appears that in fact Omisore was a candidate – and surprise, surprise, PDP might have won that senatorial seat!
But Omisore’s name was not on the Osun Senatorial elections ballot, just the name of the party PDP, a situation repeated throughout the country. To the unsuspecting voters, therefore, they were merely voting for PDP in Osun, yes for whatever reason. However, suddenly they might wake up on Monday or Tuesday to find that in Ilesha they have a Senator representing them who is suspected to have killed their top son, Bola Ige!
How do you feel they might take that? Would it not now seem better that Aunty Tinuke Ige would not live to see such an abomination?
Even if Omisore finally does not win the Senate seat, even if it is taken blandly by his constituents if he is the final winning beneficiary, the situation where parties and not candidates are listed is not fair to all the parties and candidates, especially the newer parties that might not have as much name recognition as the older parties.
One more thing: in the South-West, AD is actually the loser for this outcome of zero-candidates events. It has no presidential horse in this race. At a time when there is a desirable and well-publicized OFFICIAL pact of election campaign non-violence between AD and PDP, and rumors of an UNOFFICIAL pact of support for President Obasanjo in next week’s presidential polls, the inattentive South-Western voter would be forgiven if he or she votes "PDP" in these National Assembly elections, particularly if he or she has been "misinformed" that this is part of the pact for Obasanjo.
That particular chicken has come home to roost, leading to what one understands to be massive losses for AD in Ogun State, Osun State and Ondo State even of otherwise popular candidates. The situation is however different in Lagos, Ekiti and Oyo States where apparently the electorate was more – shall we say – knowledgeable?
AD might yet come to rue these "pacts" with the "soldier" OBJ, whose bag of tricks in "defeating" an "enemy" is full.
On the other hand, a backlash of sorts against the PDP party (rather than individual candidates) traceable to this zero-candidate development is also in the offing in the North, where incumbent senators Idris Kuta (of the Kuta Report fame), Idris Mantu (Deputy Senate Speaker), Prof. Iya Abubabar (PDP), Ghali Na'Abba (PDP Speaker of the House), and intending senator Jubril Aminu (ex-US Ambassador), ALL PDP members, are reported to have lost! All the Senatorial candidates in Atiku's Adamawa State (where the otherwise popular and favored-son Jubril Aminu’s loss is particularly surprising) are in the ANPP column.
These are Hobbesian choices to the power-that-be, where it may be of advantage in some places, and a disadvantage elsewhere.
EPILOGUE I have merely taken the prospect of Omisore’s candidature, AD’s South-Western plight and the PDP candidates in the North – not to talk about APGA’s excellent ongoing showing in the East - as exemplars of the problem that we might have: that kind of prospect might be repeated throughout the country! That, my compatriots, is unacceptable, and takes the cheer out of ANY news of lack of violence in the April 12 elections.
These elections therefore FUNDAMENTALLY violate our own constitution, and no Doctrine of Necessity or Substantial Compliance can justify the exclusion of candidates’ names from a ballot paper in a representative democracy. BOTH the names of the candidates AND their parties should have been included to enable the voter to decide whether one or both of them is important to him or her or not. In our relatively illiterate environment, even the pictures of the candidates would have been desirable.
One is truly saddened by this development at a time when one would have been happy that there was indeed no violence. One only hopes that the upcoming presidential, gubernatorial and state assembly elections are not so conducted as zero-candidate elections.
We have one to three weeks to make the corrections, otherwise there might be more trouble ahead.
April 2003
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