INEC: We Need To Examine Leadership Quality, Character, Says Adebayo

Prince Adewole Adebayo, lawyer and businessman, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) presidential candidate in this year’s general elections, disagrees with the proposed amendment of the Electoral Act by the senate, saying instead that it is the quality of the character of our leadership that should be examined.

What is your take on the resolution of the Senate to further amend the Electoral Act to strengthen our elections?
One thing we need to know in legislation is that the eyes of the legislators are always at the back of the heads, as they always like to solve new legislation with the problems of the past. So, the assumption that the problem of the next election would be INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal could be incorrect. From what I know, the problems would not be IREV; it would be another thing.

Let us say this is the beginning of the conversations of what we can do, legislatively, to improve our electoral system. But the problem we have isn’t shortage of legislation.

There are three things I observed. The first is that there was nothing in this year’s elections I participated in that suggested to me that anything went wrong because of IREV. None of the petitioners has been able to complain that it is because of the problem with IREV that results that were declared at the polling units were different from the results that were ultimately used.

When you go through the filings, proceedings and judgments of the courts, you will find it hard to find one record where they say that in this particular unit, this was the result, but because it wasn’t immediately transmitted to INEC website, the result changed. I don’t think you will find anything like that; that isn’t the problem.

I said in October 2021 that they would just be disturbing you with issues of technology, which on the day of the elections, someone might just decide to switch off in INEC and say it didn’t work. Even if it is in the Electoral Act (assuming it is passed into law) that the result must be immediately transmitted, if on that day, there is a nationwide network problem, VPN isn’t working, the system is corrupted and things like that, the constitution would still want you to find out whether you can otherwise establish the actual winner of the election.

I think integrity at the polling station is what we should pay attention to. Things like making sure people don’t buy votes, that you cannot commit violence, that the distance between polling booth and the nearest third party isn’t less than about 100 feet, so that anybody who is voting can be in doubt that they are out of sight and out of hearing of the people.

If a person decides to influence you by giving you money or anything of value, they will not ultimately know what you are doing in the ballot box area. But if you commit fraud by buying and selling votes, you distort the outcome and electronically transmitted that abomination to IREV, what have we gained?
So, I think reform of character is what we are afraid of doing, and we want to be tweaking with technology. Yes, no problem if you add the issue of IREV to the solution, but don’t expect that you can go to bed and say you have solved election of controversy in Nigeria.

Nigerians have had cause to question the independence of INEC and all members of the Board, including chairman. What do you think about the call to strip the President of the power to appoint them?
There are quite a lot of things to strip the President of, but who do you give it to? Remember that our founding fathers expect that we would look for the best of the best among us and make him President and that President is our head of state, so that he/she would think clearly for the country and be one of the most honourable in our midst who is willing to take up the job.

Even in most positions that are more important than INEC, such as the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), President of Court of Appeal, Justices of the Supreme Court, Justices of Court of Appeal, Chief Judge of the Federal High Court, the entire judiciary, the President is the appointing authority.

If more sensitive positions that are even expected to be more independent than INEC are left in the hands of the President to select, then what is special about INEC chairman and the commissioners?
I think the problem isn’t about taking it from the President, but who do you give it to?

Is the nomination of the judiciary officers not different? The NJC, as we know, is empowered in selection process before the President appoints.  Isn’t that another way of checkmating the powers of the President? 
No! Under the presidential constitution, all over the world, the president is advised. Despite your advice, the President can take a good brilliant young lawyer with about 15 years of experience as CJN. Your advice isn’t binding on him. The president has a lot of future appointments to make, and if you want to go into a new system where you don’t trust him/her to make sensitive appointments, then you go across the board and look at the appointments the President makes.

In some countries, for example, the electoral members are chosen from the political parties, thinking that if every political party has someone there, there won’t be any political party that would cheat one another. But in our system, the chairman is chosen by the President.
Even the senate don’t seem to have a role to play. When the President appoints electoral or national commissioners or chairman of the commission, the person doesn’t go straight to the office, he goes to the senate for Nigerians to ask whether this person is a good choice or not. Never in the history of the senate have they rejected the chairman of the INEC or national commissioners, except for Laurieta Onochie.

So, if people are living according to good character and they are worthy of the offices they are occupying and the oath of office they have taken, the system we have now will work. The alternative is to say the same the CJN should appoint the INEC chairman, but the same CJN is also an appointee of the President anyways.

But if you say the CJN should appoint the chairman of INEC, there would be instances where litigants complain even about the empanelling of Justices to hear their matter.

I think more importantly is what has happened. Why can’t we find any more people of character who are above board? Is it that our political system is so corrupt that we cannot find people who are above board? That is the question we should be asking, because one way or another, the person that is going to appoint INEC commissioners or chairman would have to be a Nigerian.

Whether he is the President, CJN or senators, that person must be a Nigerian. I think the quality of the character of our leadership is what we need to examine. It shouldn’t be a difficult role to fill if everyone is playing their roles. I will be more inclined if the senate says whoever the President chooses, we would open that person to Nigerians and we are not going to approve that person except that person proves to be a thoroughly vetted Nigerian that has the highest esteem, not the one they are trying deprive someone from the other arm.

For example, if you pass such a law that you want to remove appointing power from the President, supposing the President refuses to sign and says you can not take my power from me, what do you do?
Let the senators look at themselves as a chamber and ask themselves an honest question if they are doing their best in vetting the nominees to INEC. The National Assembly has the power to oversee INEC, in terms of power to approve its emoluments and budget, including conducting a hearing to remove INEC commissioners or national chairman that is not leaving up to his performance.
So, I think the system is robust enough if we can have men and women of character to run the system.

What’s your reaction to the Supreme Court judgment affirming the election of Tinubu?
The courts are not to blame. Exactly as I had predicted to the letter, the Supreme Court has upheld its well-established precedents and done justice according to the laws of Nigeria.
Kudos to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, and his Labour Party (LP) counterpart, Peter Obi. We shall vie again in 2027.

Once again, as I did when INEC declared Tinubu duly elected as President of Nigeria, I warmly congratulate the President on his Supreme Court victory upholding the Court of Appeal. I pray that neither the President nor Nigerians regret this day.
As stated in my X (Twitter) handle earlier in the week, after October 26, all hangovers of 2023 presidential elections should come to a mature end for us to face monumental tasks of macroeconomic dislocations, multidimensional poverty and frightening insecurity in Nigeria.
The judiciary has humoured the political class enough already.

Talking about the economy, do you think the President’s economic team has so far lived up to expectations? 
They are on top of the situation they created for themselves. There isn’t anything happening in the economy presently that I haven’t predicted. What they are facing now is what is called factor cost stabilisation. If they can deal with that, then they would have reduced most of the crises they have on their hands.

The trajectory of the economic choices they have made cannot change anyone from where they are today. There are many options; economics is about choices, and the choices they have taken would naturally lead to this.
Whoever is the President, if you take the choices they have made, you will have the same result. Economics does not discriminate against your politics; it looks at the facts, the state of affairs, the options and the alternatives you want to forgo. So, you have to live with the consequences of your decision.

Now the price of money, the exchange rates, commodities and factors of production will not be stable. The only way to sustain is to plan ahead for that instability.

Are you insinuating there would be a reversal or change of policies? 
That would be the best, but they have ideological commitment. This was part of what we were trying to tell the voters about these major political parties, APC, PDP and LP, that they have ideological commitment to Brettonwood prescriptions. You could see it in their language.

What they are doing now is essentially what they said they would do. The result you have now is essentially the result you have if you take these measures. The best thing is to change, but I don’t see them changing, because they are committed to this ideology and it’s been like that since 1986 when Gen. Ibrahim Babangida had this understanding with World Bank and IMF, that we were going to go this way of Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP).

It is the various versions of it that we have been doing. The late Gen. Sani Abacha tried to run a two-tier system with it with the help of the late Prof. Sam Aluko. The end result of it was that we were looking for a free market where there would be ingress and egress of capital across national boundaries and the price of the naira would be determined by what happens in Washington or New York and other commodity exchange houses all over the world.

But I don’t see them changing from their stand point at the moment. The time they would have adjusted would be from the day they came in, because we have been saying it will not work, but they believe it would work. There are some people in the international community who have made promises to Tinubu, and there have been a lot of discussions with the Brettonwood institutions and the Finance Minister, Mr. Wale Edun.