Nigeria's 'slow' election reform

Even reforming elections in Nigeria will not fix democracy.

That is the opinion of pro-democracy activists in Nigeria's capital Abuja.

A year ago, Umaru Yar'Adua was elected in a poll that was condemned by international observers as being the worst Africa's most populous nation had held.

He immediately promised reform and set up a committee to recommend what should be done to ensure improvements.

Public hearings for the committee begin in May and it is expected to publish a report in August.

Read the full story here.

This article addresses the continued attempts in Nigeria to reform democracy. Nigerians have made numerous changes to their election process, but many believe that election reforms will not fix the democracy in Nigeria. This article addresses the concern about previous elections in Nigeria, including President Umaru Yar'Adua's election last year. The reliability of the results of his election was questionable because of the assumed corruption that was present. This article also refers to Yar'Adua's vow to stamp out the corruption in Nigeria by making necessary changes which is evident because he immediately created a committee to discuss what should be done to reform the elections after he was elected. This shows the corruption that has consumed Nigeria for so long, and if nothing is done about this corruption, then the nation's legitimacy will soon be lessened if it has not already been.

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U.S. report questions voting rights abuses in Nigeria

For the first time this year, the United States government is commenting openly about its disappointment with how certain 2007 election petitions are being settled in Nigeria without attention being paid to what it described as criminal activity during the polls.

In its current World Annual Report of Human Rights for 2007 released yesterday in Washington DC, the U.S. government submitted that in Nigeria "the government's human rights record remained poor, and government officials at all levels continued to commit serious abuses."

The greatest threat to liberty is "the abridgement of citizens' right to change their government, " according to the report presented to the press by Jonathan Farrar, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour at the State Department, the equivalent of Nigeria's Foreign Affairs Ministry.

According to the U.S. report: "Although it was widely accepted that the 2007 elections were fraudulent, most of the tribunals overturned elections based on technicalities such as not having the party logo on the ballot or not having the party name listed, rather than for criminal activity related to the elections."

The report noted that after the flawed 2007 polls, tribunals received over 1,250 legal motions filed across the country to overturn the results of individual elections for all levels of government posts, including the Presidency.

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Even over a week after the tribunals, people are still complaining over the results of the tribunal. The article, unlike some other ones, cites legitimate reasons for complaint, particularly in the full article. The elections were mainly overturned because of technicalies rather than large problems, denoting the desensitization of nigerian towards these large problems.

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INEC Pays N21m Life Insurance Claims

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) yesterday issued cheques worth N21 million to 10 families of their deceased staff as payment for their Group Life Assurance Claim.

He said the policy to pay the life issurance was borne out of the fact that the process of electoral democracy "remains a very stressful and risky assignment in Nigeria and Africa as a whole," adding that election management agencies should ordinarily not be a life endangering matter.

"It is a sad commentary on our state of being as a society that various staff of the Commission have had to face extreme exposure to strains, pressure, threats and physical assault leading to temporal and at times permanent disability. In some unfortunate cases, death has resulted in the course of what ought to be a civic duty of carrying out electoral duties," Iwu lamented.

"This insurance will also cover the total permanent or temporary disability resulting from accident and natural causes as well as taking care of the medical expenses for career public servants arising from accident," he added.

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Life insurance must be paid to electoral workers for disabilities and even death. The significance pretty much explains itself. Electoral workers shouldn't have a life threatening job in any democracy.

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Kenyan lauds Nigerians for nonviolent elections

Note the happiness, not rioting after the previous election.

A former Kenyan parliamentarian and the owner of Club of Madrid, Prof. Ruth Oniango, has expressed satisfaction at the manner Nigerians conducted themselves in response to country's general elections in 2007.

Oniango said that despite the reported flaws in the elections, Nigerians did not resort to political violence, rather, they approached the rectification of the flaws peacefully.

"Professor Ruth Oniango, a former Kenyan parliamentarian, has saluted Nigerians for not finding recourse in violence in spite of some lapses that visited the April general elections.

"She remarked that, unlike in her native country of Kenya, where the head of the electoral commission could not announce who won the recent election in the country, it was heartwarming that Professor Maurice Iwu could announce the result of Nigeria's poll and wager publicly that the result of the elections reflected the intent of the voters.

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In the midst of all the criticism about flawed elections, corruption, and oil prices, someone has found something positive to talk about in Nigeria. However, the fact that the praise comes from someone whose democratic status is arguably in worse shape does somewhat dull the appeal. The absence of violence in the recent, likely flawed elections is proof the Nigeria is doing something good in its transition to democracy. Any display of legitimacy in a fledgling democracy like Nigeria is a good thing.

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Yar'Adua Faces Court Over Alleged Fraudulent Elections

Since the election, denounced by some outside observers as the most fraudulent they had ever witnessed, over 1,200 petitions have been filed by the losing candidates in protest against the results. Almost all the successful petitions so far have alleged individual breaches of the electoral law, such as ballot papers with missing names. But more systematic crimes may have occurred, and indeed the first petitioner to prove wholesale malpractice on election day—many voters never even saw ballot papers—won his case last week against the governor of Enugu state. Those bringing the case against the president hope to do the same.

The former military president, Muhammadu Buhari, and the former vice-president, Atiku Abubakar, are leading the charge against Mr Yar'Adua—both lost to him in the presidential poll. They allege that the elections were a sham, that the country failed to produce a complete voters' register and that ballots lacked serial numbers (and were therefore impossible to track). Furthermore, Mr Abubakar says he was illegally excluded from the poll until the very last minute, preventing him from campaigning.

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Many people in Nigeria are claiming that the most recent elctions were fraudulent, and this is no surprise for a counry so recently Democratic as Nigeria. The recent change to Democracy would also make it easy for someone to denouce the elections as the "most fraudulent," because they have probably only witnessed three. In all seriousness, the claims over fraud are probably true to at least some degree, but whether anything will be done remains to be seen. Holding elections for a seceond time may prove difficult or impossible to accomplish.
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The election petition tribunal sitting in Enugu on Friday removed Governor Sullivan Chime of the Peoples Democratic Party.

It also ordered the Independent National Electoral Commission to conduct a fresh election within three months starting from the day of the ruling. It said that the election that brought in was not conducted in accordance with the Electoral Act, 2006, and that majority of the electorate in the state were disenfranchised as they were not allowed to vote and exercise their constitutional right.

In the consolidated suit brought by the DPP and Egwonwu, the tribunal said that the petitioners were able to prove that majority of the electorate were not allowed to vote during the election. Ottah stated that the 17 witnesses - one from each of the 17 local government areas in the state - were able to prove that the election was “not substantially in compliance with the Electoral Act,” describing the witnesses as “witness of truth.”

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While Nigeria has had a successfull change in presidents, this story seems to indicate that Nigeria is not so politically stable after all. The amount of the electorate that were not allowed to vote indicates a large problem with the nigerian voting policy, at least in this area.