Barrister Dan Nwanyanwu is the national chairman of the newly registered Zenith Labour Party, ZLP. In this interview with our correspondent, the lawyer-turned politician speaks on the 2019 general elections, the need to give the electoral umpire, the benefit of the doubt, and insecurity in the North-East among other national issues. Excerpt!

The release of Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC guidelines has generated a lot of heat; what is the position of Zenith Labour Party with regards to the guidelines?

The guidelines that are normally released by INEC come after a general election; you learn from the potholes, the mistakes, errors, experience gathered from the previous election. There must be a mischief you want to correct and that makes you to keep amending the guidelines.

For example after the general election in 2015, it took a very long time to realise that people voted into the night in some places. Accreditation took place from 8am till about 1pm and then voting commenced till late in the night. So you discover that it takes a lot of time. So in order to correct that, I think that was tested in Bayelsa that it is possible to do accreditation and voting at the same time and it went very well. So subsequent elections where it was tested it showed that simultaneous accreditation and voting helps the process and by 3pm, most polling stations were done with accreditation and voting.

But the main crux of the objection by some of the political parties has to do with the number of accredited voters. Yes of course, accreditation will be known. In the previous exercise, you finish accreditation and you announce the number before you start voting but in the last presidential election, most people who got accredited, about 2 million voters did not return to vote and you know the difference between President Jonathan and Buhari was about 2million. So how do we solve that problem?

Instead of asking voters to get accredited and go, they will now get accredited and vote and if you like, sit down and that was what brought about simultaneous accreditation.

By the time that is done, at the end of voting, the records will be there. You have the number of people that passed through the machine, we are no longer going to have incidence forms, the votes will be counted, the votes will be recorded, copy of signed results will be given to party agents and all these will be done in the presence of party agents. There will be automatic transmission which has never been done but I hope it will be done now, and then a copy of the result will be pasted. So I am for simultaneous accreditation and voting because it will save time.

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The one I am opposed to which I learnt they have corrected now is allowing persons whose names are not in the register to vote, it is never done. The voters register is germane to the election.

There is also the issue of incidence forms, although INEC has said it will not be used; there are indications that the commission is designing a new pattern to allow people who are not captured by the card readers to vote and some people think that is a back door of bringing back the incidence form

I am opposed to that, we must do things properly. If one is not captured by the card reader, but your name is in the register, you must find out why the card reader had refused to read that card. As many as they are, they must be put aside and another card reader used to test them. The card reader must accept you, if you are configured within the system.

But you know you cannot have a perfect system.

What I don’t accept is the way INEC is being attacked that they want to rig the election.   Three years after election as the national chairman of Labour Party, I have taken time to study the system of INEC. It is difficult for INEC to help you, INEC has no vote to give anybody, they cannot do it; the system is being improved upon everyday and apart from that I know Professor Mamoud Yakubu he is a credible Nigerian.

The votes are in the polling units where you and I will be and the party agents will be and if we are all there, let us see how those votes will be taken away; if they are counted and recorded and we have our copy, let us see how the votes will be taken away. If the security agents perform their duties the way it is supposed to be, there will be no problem, and the votes are at the polling units not in INEC.

And don’t forget that, that was how we recovered Ondo and Edo states with those copies given to us at the polling units and the Supreme Court said that is where the winner or loser of an election is known not at the collation centre and that is why political parties must be observant, careful and watch and make sure those results are counted and declared there and copies given to them and their agents.

In the 2015 general election, there was this allegation of massive underage voting particularly in Kano and some places in the North-West; not long ago the major opposition party the PDP alleged that in the bye election parliamentary in Kano, there was the same incidence of underage voting which they were unable to control. Has the Prof Yakubu Mamoud-led INEC improved on that aspect?

What happened in Kano was so unfortunate but the one that happened recently was a local government election and it was not conducted by INEC. INEC doesn’t conduct local government elections, so it was possible for the government to do what it likes.

INEC has told the political parties that they have cleaned the register through what they call AFIX and that goes back also to the political parties, agents of political parties. The problem is that when we are picking agents, we don’t pick people with knowledge and capacity, we pick people who have little or no knowledge of what their role is at the polling units. You cannot have 30-50 agents of political parties and you manipulate the process unless there is a compromise among them.

But their names shouldn’t even be in the register in the first place.

INEC has said they have cleaned up the register and we hold them on to that. I know it is getting better, it was worse before and I don’t want to throw away the baby with the bath water, if the system is bad, I will tell you.

How many states does your party intend to win in 2019?

Zenith Labour Party was the last party to be registered and immediately we were registered, primaries came.   So you can see that we are not contesting on a level playing field and that is why if you ask me, I will say postpone election but let the handover date be sacrosanct. We postponed elections in 2015, heavens did not fall. We can do it again once there is a reason for it and even the way I see it, INEC may not be prepared.

So, in Zenith Labour Party, we need more time so that we can come at par. That is not to say that we have not worked enough to win, we are going to win state assembly seats, House of Reps, Senate and governorship.

What gives you the impression that INEC seems not to be prepared for the elections?

I am not speaking for INEC. A lot of factors have come into play but I don’t want to drag this interview into those factors; all I am saying is that if Zenith Labour Party have its way, we need a little more time to enable us win more seats because every day we move, we get more converts so that means if I have more time, we will have more converts, I am just trying to explain to you how hard we have been working.

You talked about winning seats including governorship but beyond Abuja, not much is known of your party. What gives you this confidence?

On the contrary, my party is known outside Abuja, not here (Abuja). We are very popular in some states;

What is your take on the inability of other political parties apart from the APC and PDP to come up with a third force?

It is because of the environment, the political barometer. The environment in Nigeria today will not allow that.

How do you mean?

There are inbuilt institutional potholes that will not let you have that third force and one of it is funds. The funds are not in the hands of those that would have given effective third force. In this year after the presidential election, the president will either be Buhari or Atiku and that is factual. Not that Moghalu (Kingsley) is not good, he is fantastic, not that Oby (Ezekwesili) is not good, not that the others are not good, they may be better than the two but the conclusion of the matter is that their time has not come, it is based on the political barometer in Nigeria.

This election is going to be the last we are going to have the likes of Buhari, Atiku and Co to come out and run for presidency in terms of their ages, capacity, background and disposition.

In Osun state and Ekiti state governorship elections there was this allegation of collusion between security agents and INEC to intimidate the entire opposition in favour of the APC; going into the presidential election which is just about a month away, are you in any way worried that there may be   a repeat of this?

The Osun and Ekiti state governorship elections left very bitter taste in the mouth. Osun was good until it was declared inconclusive. It was that second attempt that the security agents hijacked and stole the mandate of the people. This is one mandate I know will be recovered if the judiciary is still what it ought to be, same thing in Ekiti and it is the same security, the same police.

I told my colleagues last year that we should be worried about the security agents particularly the police. Let us shift a little bit from INEC and confront the Inspector General of Police. My party did not sign the peace accord though we were not around but we made our observation clear, that the IG of police must give assurance that it will not do things that will lead to break down of law and order at the polling units and luckily he has been removed and a new IG of police has been appointed.

Do you think President Buhari will keep to his word by conducting free and fair elections?

I don’t want to anticipate him but it is INEC that conducts elections, it is left for Professor Mahmood to do the right thing and go or do the wrong thing and be on the wrong side of history but the Mahmood I know will not tarnish his image for a pot of porridge

How worrisome do you consider the situation in the North-East and some parts of the North going into the elections?

It holds enough threat and that was the situation we found ourselves in 2015 and yet we had all the voters that voted. The difficult thing for this election is that it will be difficult to rig. The 2015 election was between Jonathan and Buhari, between North and South.

This election is between North versus North, Fulani versus Fulani, Muslim versus Muslim, even within the same age bracket; it would be different from Jonathan versus Buhari, so anybody planning to manipulate should also know that within the other stronghold, there are also factors, strong people that will challenge it and that is why we must allow the process to take its course peacefully without overheating the system and creating problem in the system.

You said the election would be won either by the PDP or APC candidate. It therefore means your party will vote in a certain direction; what party or candidates will your party vote for?

It is too early to ask now. In the last meeting we had before the festive holidays, a committee was set up to set out criteria that anybody we want to support must fall into. Part of what we told them is to look at the peculiarity of the factors from each geopolitical zones.

For example I just came back from the South-East after 21 days; what is there now is that the Igbo people are saying we will not wait for four more years, that whoever needs their support must come and put it in writing, it will be made public that after four years, he will not run again. For the APC candidate that one is sacrosanct, for the PDP candidate it is left for him to go and sign the four years pact.

If Igbo will not come out to claim their right to contest and move support from other geopolitical zones after four years, it will be seen that they have sold out their own, why? After eight years, the South-West would have been out of power for 22 years, the South-South would have been out of power for 12 years. When it returns to the South again, you cannot tell them not to run, they will tell you the Igbo gave their turn away.

I have also spoken with other leaders from the south east and their argument is that for 2019, at least going by the last meeting they had with the Igbo elites, they supported Atiku on the basis of restructuring. Do you have a different view?

You are now trying to push me to tell you who I will support, whoever I will support will not be different from who my party will support. I am the leader of a political party and I don’t want anybody to take the votes of the Igbo and to some extent the South-South for granted, it is not going to be that way; nobody should take us for granted any more.

What is on the table? The people you are talking about are businessmen who think about how to improve their business and how to line their pockets. We are talking about communal and corporate interest.   Has anybody put anything on the table?

The Nigeria Bar Association, NBA which you are a member of, a few weeks ago gave out their position about the rule of law being under siege in the last three and the half years of the Buhari administration…

(Cuts in) There have been a lot on infractions on the rule of law, I am not happy that court orders are never obeyed, I am not happy that Dasuki is still there after many court orders, I am not happy that El Zakzaky is still there, I am not happy that Deji Adeyanju is still locked and the key thrown away, a young man that is not harmful but was only expressing his views, I am not happy that Dino Melaye, a Senator of the Federal Republic is not being allowed to speak up. All these things are happening but we have a Vice President, my teacher, my Professor of law at the University of Lagos who taught me law.   We have Professor Itse Sagay who taught me law, they are all in this government, I can say if I have my way with what is happening now,   I wouldn’t have allowed them to teach me, if you reverse the clock I will say don’t teach me.   “Teacher don’t teach me nonsense” according to late Fela, what you taught me is not what you are practicing.

What is your position on fake news syndrome?

There is actually fake news, there is also hate speech but it was APC that started fake news and hate speech through their spokesperson before the 2015 elections.