DAYS after he conducted the 2011 elections, the chairman of the Independent national Electoral Commission (INEC) Prof. Attahiru Jega spoke on his impressions and experience. He spoke in Abuja with Martins Oloja, Abuja Bureau Chief, Madu Onuorah, Deputy Bureau Chief and Mohammed Abubakar, Senior Political Correspondent WHY did you accept this difficult, thankless job of chairman of Independent national Electoral Commission knowing that previous holders of this post did not end wellThis is a difficult question. Well Im a student of Nigerian politics; I have studied Nigerian politics, written about it and I have studied elections and written about them in Nigeria. I was privileged to serve as a member of the Electoral Reform Committee, under Justice Muhammadu Lawal Uwais. When I was invited to be the chairman of INEC, I felt honoured to be given the opportunity to contribute to dealing with one of the challenges associated with Nigerian politics, and that is the issue of conducting credible elections. Many of my friends and relations thought I was crazy to have accepted the job. Looking back, many people came and did their best, and in spite of that, some ended up being rubbished. My attitude was to take the opportunity, contribute to progress and development in the country and if I believe that I have the capacity and competence to do a good job, I should do it.Some people said I should not take it because I have been identified as somebody with integrity and that I would be messed up. But I said what is integrity if it is not tested. I felt it is a challenging job but a do-able one. I accepted the job and I believe we have done our best under very difficult circumstances.Your father, the late Mallam Muhammadu Jega, was a top civil servant known for his integrity in old Sokoto State. What did you take from him especially as he also was relied upon to execute difficult jobs tooI am privileged to have had a good upbringing. I had a disciplined father who trained us as well. He led his life and we saw a lot in his life worthy of emulation and we did our best to follow his footsteps though very difficult to fit into his shoes. But he was Muhammadu Jega and I am Attahiru Muhammadu Jega. God has charted ways for all of us to do our best. He did his own and I am doing mine.How do you react to suggestions by your critics that you are a rigid person and not a team player and that one reason that led to the postponement of the National Assembly election of April 2 was your decision to choose contractors without wide consultationsOne of my attributes is that Im a team player. Anybody you speak with in ASUU will tell you that. However, there are certain teams I play in and there are teams I dont play in. I am not a team player when it comes to fraud, or doing something illegal or insincere. But when it is about doing things with integrity, professionalism, passion and commitment for national progress, then I am a team player. Obviously, everything I have done as a Chairman of INEC is a decision that carried everybody along, particularly at the level of INEC commissioners. There is no decision that I have taken that has not been supported by the commissioners. At some point, people were trying to create red herring by making it appear as if there is some division in INEC, as if the Chairman is an island unto himself or that I was the one who singlehandedly gave out contracts. It is all lies. When the time is right, the truth will come out. Then I will speak openly about these detractors who when they lost out because of their lack of integrity and their failed attempts to corrupt us went round selling stories to newspapers. They even sold it to some people in government, who unfortunately did not realise that they were being fed with lies. I am a team player, because I have not done anything illegal. I have not given any contract to anybody single handedly. We followed due process in the contract for ballot papers, and it was the decision of the Commission, not mine as Jega or INEC Chairman.When you decided to postpone the April 2 National Assembly election, what was going on in your mind before the reportedly stormy security meetingWhat was in my mind was that whatever was worth doing was worth doing well. And it was evident that on April 2 we could not conduct a good election without result sheets. It was unfortunate that one of the contractors disappointed us and did not bring the result sheets. The aircraft landed only around 9 a.m. on that day and there was no way we could have distributed those sheets to the 120,000 polling units nationwide and still to hold a credible election. Once we were confronted with those realities, there was no alternative than to postpone the election. It was a difficult decision. We disappointed so many people nationally and internationally.But I think that Nigerians, even though they were disappointed have come to appreciate that the decision was the right one. And subsequently, we did the job to the best of our abilities even when we knew that there were no other constraints. We signed a contract and the contractor disappointed us; we have held discussions with him and he has given his reasons he couldnt satisfy the provisions of the contract. It was a national embarrassment but we have taken our fair share of the blame for it. It is behind us now. Nobody can doubt the fact that it was the right decision at the right time, even though it disappointed so many people.Has the Commission abandoned a legal optionI said we were going to follow the provisions of the contract and that we would not want to do anything that would be contrary to the contractual provisions and we did just that. We followed the provisions of the contract. He violated the contract, he had reasons as to why it happened and some of the reasons are plausible. But that does not detract from the fact that he violated the contract. So we invoked the provisions of the contract, which requires that penalties have to be paid for a breach of the contract and he has paid those penalties and he has written to INEC formally to apologise. So, we did not put it aside, we dealt with it as was required by the provisions of the contracts.Have you addressed the grievances of officials of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), which they thought you should have addressed before declaring that result of the presidential election, regarding Katsina and Kano states where they alleged there was software that was not in compliance with the original INEC softwareEverything I did on that day was in compliance with what is expected of me by both the constitution and the Electoral Act. With what was before us, there was no reason that result should not be declared. On the issue of software, what happened was that we have a software, Excel that we use for administrative convenience. We all know that election results take between three to five days before they are announced because people use manual tabulation. But in this era, we cant afford to be doing manual tabulation. So we used the Excel programme to develop a formula, which would help us tabulate the results in advance to help us minimise the drudgery of having to embark on manual tabulation. The Excel programme was not a substitute for manual forms that are used for the declaration of results. In every state, we sent an officer with a laptop that has the Excel programme, which is logged and all the officer did was to sit where the results were being returned. Every officer would come and read his results. As they are reading the results, the returning officer is taking them manually on the prescribed forms. The person with the Excel was also entering it into the computer. When that process is finished, the most important requirements of the law on the basis of which the return is made is the form that the Collation Officer signs. But the Excel programme was to help us in advance to have information and to also have tabulation. So when the officer who is taking the Excel finishes, he would print it and hand it over to the Returning Officer who will compare what is on the Excel with what he has done manually. If he thinks it is okay he would initial it and the initialed copy of the Excel would be mailed to my secured e-mail account so that I have advanced information with cross tabulation. But we dont make a return until the Collation Officer brings the manual tabulation and the way we set out the centre is that as the Collation Officer brings the manual tabulation, he goes into the secretariat to cross check the manually tabulated sheets that he brought with the advanced copy of the Excel, which he had initialed and sent to ensure that there is no alteration. It is only when he does that and confirms that it is the same that he comes out before he is called upon to read the results. The results they read were manually tabulated and after reading them, he submits to me formally. This system gave an advantage to do tabulations.Kano has 44 local councils while Katsina has about 32 or 34 or thereabouts. The person who did the formula for the Excel used 21 as an average or the baseline, then you take each state and after which you will change the number, depending on the number of councils. But they made a mistake for Kano and Katsina; they used 21 councils, instead of 44. But as soon as he finished the Excel and he gave a copy to the Collation Officer, once the officer in Kano looked at it, he discovered the discrepancy and the person using the Excel had to call and inform us. We had to send the password, which was used to make the correction and entered the 44 councils for Kano, for which once the formula was corrected the Excel spreadsheet was exactly a carbon copy of the manual tabulation. Once that manual tabulation now corresponded with the Excel, the Collation Officer in Kano signed the Excel and the other party agents in Kano endorsed the manual tabulation because they realised that the problems had been solved. The same thing happened in Katsina. By the time these people came to us, there was no problem.So, for some people to start complaining long after the problem had been solved as if there was a deliberate attempt to shortchange them is unfortunate. The problem affected all the parties, it did not affect one party and once it was corrected, everything was fine. When the agents of one of the parties raised that problem, we decided to check the states with more than 21 councils and there was no mistake again for any of those places. As far as we are concerned, there was no problem of formula that anyone could use to say that there was a deliberate attempt to shortchange them. People just wanted to make it appear as if it was a bigger issue. But really, it was not anything of the sort. So as far as we are concerned, we have not done anything to shortchange anybody or party. There was an honest and genuine mistake in doing the formula in the two states, but that mistake affected all the parties in those states and it was corrected.There was a response of some people from a section of the country, including where your area to the outcome of the elections. There are reports that you dont feel safe and that your family is at the moment in Saudi Arabia.My family is with me in Nigeria. I have done this job honestly with the highest level of integrity. I have nothing to fear. If I have done something wrong, I will start feeling worried. If I have been paid to do this job, then I will start feeling worried. I have said this a long time ago that Im not for sale; nobody could buy me and get me to do things against my conscience. I know that when there is a heated electoral contest, there will be winners and losers and the losers may feel aggrieved and when people are aggrieved, they can do all sorts of things. They can abuse, insult and even intimidate; these things are bound to happen. But that cannot make me to be afraid because I have not done anything wrong. It is unfortunate that people felt so aggrieved as to commit murder, arson and embark on such a massive destruction. There is no basis for it. This is our country; we still have a lot to do and hopefully with time, people will begin to know that there are better ways of doing things than just destroying lives and property.You taught politics in the classroom and now you are in the thick of it. What lessons have you learnt from politicians from your seat in INECThere are a lot of lessons from my interactions with them, especially as a professor of Political Science who has read about elections and is now managing elections. I underestimated the need for voter education, public enlightenment and the need to have an enlightened voter, who can separate the grains from the chaff. But unfortunately, I think there is still a lot of misunderstanding or lack of proper understanding of the electoral process and the accusations and complaints following the presidential elections are attributable to lack of proper understanding of the requirements of the law and Electoral Act on the role of the Returning Officer or even the role of the Chief Electoral Officer. It will take time for us to continue to do more extensive voter education, public enlightenment for people to appreciate the right from the wrong as defined by our electoral laws.As a Commission, we have learnt a lot of lessons. We have been lucky that we designed a system that is transparent and that has received commendation even internationally. There are lessons on how we can continue to improve upon things. Obviously crowd control is still a major issue. Protecting electoral materials between the polling units and the collation centre is also an important lesson and we should have to find ways of addressing it.There are allegations that results have been changed between the polling units and the collation centres. The good thing is that as far as we are concerned, if any result has been changed, it will be easy to prove it because results have been declared in the polling units. They were even pasted and posted and many people have records of them. If there is any difference between what came to the collation centre and what was pasted in the polling units, it is easy for any diligent party to approve it. But beyond that, we need to pay attention, because wherever there is smoke, there may be fire. If people are making complaints about a particular aspect of the process, we will look at it carefully and see the areas of improvements in the future. We probably had the best security arrangements for elections ever. But that did not mean that there were not lapses. There were challenges and I think that some of the lessons we have learnt from this exercise will also be factored into further improvements.We have a credible voters register now. We have a transparent accreditation and voting system and we have good logistics arrangement. From the first election there were improvements in terms of arrival of materials and personnel to the polling units. This time, we got tremendous support and cooperation from governments and inter-governmental agencies, such as the army, air force and navy in terms of reaching difficult areas. We feel there is a lot we can do to keep on improving the system.The data capturing machines were not useful during the elections. What happened to the biometric featuresCertainly in everything we do, there is room for improvement. There is continuous voter registration, there is continuous aggregation and running of e-face, even though we have done our best and we believe we have eliminated multiple registrations. We are not resting on our oars. We will continuously be running the software to check multiple registrations. We understand that there is now a software that can help check under age registration. We are told that there is software that will look at the iris of the eye and determine the age of the individual. We will look it because it will help us to eliminate problems of under age registration. But the problem of underage registration has to do with the initial lapse on the part of our ad-hoc staff that carried out the registration. The manual that we produced and circulated as well as the training that we did was very clear that nobody below the age 18 should be registered and it was very clear that our staff were required to look for an identification, either a passport or National Civic Identification Card if they had any doubt about the age of any person who came forward for registration. But unfortunately, there were lapses in some places may be because of community connivance. Our officers were either intimidated or harassed to register under age voters. Sometimes, there is also a difficult area, of which if somebody presents himself as 18 year old, but he or she may look younger. And then how then do you distinguish a 17 year old from 18 year old just by looking But clearly a 12 year old cannot pass for an 18 year old. So, wherever happened obviously, it was a big lapse and some of the steps we are taking in as we do continuous voter registration are to ensure that these problems do not repeat themselves.What is the difference between the situations in Bauchi, Borno and Imo states The Electoral Act has a provision that states that when you cancel from a particular place whether local council or ward or unit, what you do whether you declare the results or not depends on whether the cancellation will affect the entire results. For example, in very tight contests, where the difference between one contestant or the other is about 10,000 votes and the areas that you have cancelled has about 15,000, it means that the difference in the areas that you have cancelled will make a difference in the elections. So, you cannot declare somebody winner even though he has 10,000 more votes because if you do, the election in the areas where there are 15,000 votes can change the equation. That was the case in Imo. But in Bauchi, there is difference of about 300,000 votes between the leading candidate and the second candidate and the area that we cancelled, even if you added it up and gave all of the votes to the runner-up, he would not come near the leading candidate; so you cant declare the polls inconclusive.The provisions of the Electoral Act in Imo guided the Returning Officer. Four councils in the state were affected. There was a council where no election took place at all, there were three councils where election had to be cancelled and there is a particular ward where results were not declared. We added all these and we knew that they would make a difference in closing the gap between the Peoples Democratic party (PDP) and All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA) candidates. It was the right thing to declare it inconclusive and hold another election and then you add up and decide on the winner. We did it in the case of Anambra Central Senatorial District. The margin there was so small and since there were areas that were cancelled so we had to conduct the election again before we declared a winner.Was the supplementary election concept designed to beat the prescribed 30-day provision in the Act for elections to be conductedIn Kaduna we relied on the advice of lawyers. And they say, the law is an ass. They have so many interpretations of the law. We have to have lawyers that we have confidence in to advise and I believe we have some of the best legal minds advising us at the moment. They have explained the difference between Kaduna and Bauchi, which we had to try to do before May 29, and Imo. In Kaduna and Bauchi, no elections had taken place at all, so if we had left Kaduna and Bauchi beyond April 29, it meant that we cannot do any election in those places until after May 29 and that will also mean that a State of emergency will be declared as after May 29 no legal governments will be in those states. We knew there was a crisis, so we felt that if we allowed a few days things would stabilise for us to be able to conduct the elections. And in Kaduna even though there are still accusations and allegations, at least we did it, because on the balance, the cost of not doing the elections in those two states far outweighs the benefits. So, that is why we thought that it was better we did it. But in the case of Imo, the elections had started and it was inconclusive and when it is inconclusive you have to do a supplementary election to conclude it. Assuming for the sake of argument that there was need for a re-run of any of the elections, we still needed to have done it before the May 29 because the law allows that. But we have met the requirements of doing that before April 29. It was the advice of our lawyers. I understand some people even went to court asking that the election in Imo should not be held, describing it as unconstitutional. I dont know what purpose that would have served.Do you have an idea of how much is required to conduct an election in Nigeria Is there a sense in which we can say that the money (about N90 billion) you first asked for was too much or too littlePeople should separate these costs. A lot of the money that we got when we came is the money to help us do the voter registration. The N87.7 billion people are talking about is the money to help us procure equipment, arrange logistics to do the biometrics voter registration. But the benefit has outweighed the costs because we now have the best voter register ever. It is a national asset. There is not a single database in this country where you have over 73 million people with photographs, fingerprints, telephone numbers with addresses. We are under estimating what we have achieved through that voter registration exercise.It is difficult for me to tell what the cost of an election is in this country. If we did this election without the need for a fresh voter registration exercise, people would have understood it better. But we set out to do a credible election so we needed a credible voter register and a credible voter register is costly, particularly given the little time frame we had. I had explained once that if we chose to do a fresh voter registration in eight months, we would have spent a fraction of the N87.7 billion. But if we wanted to do it in two weeks, it means the methodology would be costly. The question of whether the biometrics we captured were good enough should not even arise because we have the best biometric capture that has ever been done in this country. Many countries in African continent are inquiring on how we did it; they want to learn from us. They want to partner with us so that we can help them move in the direction of biometric data registration.We did not use the capacity that we have in this election and some of the reason is that there are legal constraints. There are also logistic constraints. We have the capacity now in future to deploy the DDC machines to the polling units to be able to do verifications with back-up readers. With back-up readers, you can just read all the information that would appear on the screen but remember we were doing a new accreditation system, if we wanted to that, first of all Nigerians will raise hell if we said we needed more money to buy back-up readers because it was not part of our original budget. Secondly, if you said that you want to accredit people using the DDC machines, it would take longer time than what we had done using the alphabetically listed register.The Electoral Act provided clearly that we should not do any electronic voting. So, if we had brought the DDC machines and said that we were going to do verification electronically, some people may interpret is as a part of electronic voting system, they would have taken us to court. But today, we have gone through a phase, we have dealt with the first phase, in future we can explore the capacities that we have to move to another stage. Maybe by then, who knows the Electoral Act would have been amended to remove the barriers on electronic voting.Are you going to engage the National Assembly on the talks about an allegedly smuggled clause into the 2010 Electoral Act, which limits the powers of INEC over party primariesI dont know whether you are referring to Section 31 of the Electoral Act, certainly that section has a provision, which is very ambiguous and which many parties tried to explore. The provision says that once a party submits a candidate to INEC, the commission cannot reject that candidate for any reason. Now some parties interpreted this provision to mean that they can send us any name, whether they have gone through the primaries or not and that once they give us a name, then we cant do anything about. Initially, what we tried to do was to look at the definition of a candidate. Section 87 of Electoral Act defines a candidate is someone who might have emerged from the primaries. So, if you send us the name of somebody who lost at the primaries and you said he is a candidate and we monitored the primary and we knew that he did not emerge as a candidate, we cant take your definition of a candidate. We tried that, but again, the problem was that if we remove a candidate that a party has submitted to us, it would amount to INEC doing a substitution for the party. What we did was to write letters to them to say that the names they have given us from our monitoring did not merge from primaries and are not therefore the candidates. Many of the parties ignored that, and the candidates went to court and that created a lot of confusion, because even on the eve of the elections, courts were still removing certain candidates and replacing them with others. Frankly that provision needs to be looked at and if there is any lesson we have learnt in this election, it is that this provision is one of the issues that we need to engage the National Assembly on. It needs to be further clarified; we have evidence that some parties used it as a license to give names that did not even go through primaries and so violated the internal party democracy and other requirements of the Electoral Act. It has to be looked at if we are to sanitise the electoral process.And what is the commission going to do to the parties that couldnt win any election and those that didnt contestI believe it is for Nigerians to decide and I would not want to pre-empt what Nigerians would decide in that regard. The practice worldwide is that any party that does not have electoral fortunes is denied formal recognition. In our case, it is not straightforward. It will require an engagement with the National Assembly. I believe it is something that Nigerians, as stakeholders should engage the National Assembly on. Our job is to manage the elections as per the provisions of the Electoral Act. My concern is that a party that does not win any election, there is a question mark as to whether if the law allows, whether such a party should receive funding. But for now, that is even a non-issue because the Electoral Act has removed funding of parties. So if a party loses an election under the present circumstances, so long as they are not taking public money, may be they can just go and keep on trying and see if they can win again.You once advised a female REC to step aside when she was receiving bashing following an earlier misconduct. Will you have cause to pursue that line again, given allegations of corruption that trailed the conduct of the electionsIf I have evidence to warrant doing so, I will do that. I will even do more if I have sufficient evidence to prosecute anybody who has done anything wrong. It is a commitment that we have and we feel things have to be done right. If the circumstances present themselves, I will do more than I have done before in terms of ensuring integrity of the process. As a Commission we will not cover up anybody, so wherever we have evidence, we will deal with them.We did it in Imo where we asked the REC to proceed on leave and we brought somebody for the supplementary election. We feel it is necessary to do so to create a level-playing field and ensure that all the accusations being leveled are allayed to restore peace to the situation.There were reported cases of corruption in the INEC bureaucracy before you arrived. Have you addressed these alleged corruption cases or did you push them asideWhen a new person comes on board, we have the handing over notes. We take the matters arising then you draw the line as to when you will do. I did not get any such matters arising in the handing over notes. So any issue of allegations of corruption are not issues that affected me. But I know that INEC had a terrible reputation, rightly or wrongly, of corruption, inefficiency, and there were allegations of INEC staff taking money and selling results to police to politicians. We said that we have to cleanse ourselves of that image. We introduced reforms to ensure that everything is done transparently and to ensure that any corrupt person can easily be prosecuted. I believe it has worked and we will keep on improving.The greatest challenge before INEC is to strengthen the capacity of INEC to be more effective as an election management body. We just came into this business; we have been busy preparing for either voter registration or election. We did not have time to sit back and say how can we re-organise INEC. My vision is to make this INEC one of the best election management bodies in the world. It is not an empty rhetoric. We have the human resources with the skills and competence to be the best in anything we do and we can do that for INEC. Now that we have a breathing space before the next major elections, we are going to begin to restructure.How did you get these NYSC members and the Vice Chancellors as Returning OfficersWith my background when I was the Chairman of the Governing Council of the NYSC, I knew the potential that the NYSC has. They are passionate and committed young men and women, well trained who are ready to showcase their best for the country. We had no hesitation in engaging them. So we established a bilateral committee between NYSC and INEC, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the NYSC and we were able to develop a more structured way of engaging the NYSC both for voter registration and the election. They did well in the voter registration exercise. But there were problems with the training as it involves computer efficiency, but they did well under the circumstances. We had no difficulty in deciding we should use them for the elections. And here again, they did well as many people have attested to.So there were a number of people who unfortunately have done things to either harass or scare away the corps members. It is very unfortunate what happened after the presidential elections. But I hope and pray that this will not in any way destabilise them to the extent of wanting to give up and withdraw from making crucial national service.On the vice chancellors, we realised that we needed competent people, who are credible to help us do the collation and do the return for governors. Looking at our electoral history, there was a time when Vice chancellors were used to do exactly what we asked them to do now and they did it competently. But along the line they were dropped. But we want to do things right and we decided to bring them back, and we can see they have done well under difficult circumstances. I am very proud of my colleagues. It was not a matter of giving ASUU people jobs. As Returning Officers for Governorship election, they did not get more than N40,000 or thereabouts. They did it with passion because they believed it is one way to contribute to the development of the electoral process. But it is not just the vice chancellors because we used senior lecturers.Will INEC again appeal the judgment in respect of the tenure elongation for five governors where election did not take place on 26 AprilOn whether we are going to appeal the judgment, we have asked our team of lawyers to advise us as to what is the best line of action to take. Until they do that, we may not be in a position to make a categorical comment on that.What is the name of the contractor or the firm that failed to supply the ballot papers and result sheets that caused the postponement of the April 2 electionsI wont tell you on record. It is not fair as we have executed the contractual agreement on him. And the contractor has written to apologise to Nigerians and indeed INECI would not like to tell you now.
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