By Nwafor Sunday

The presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, in the last general election, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, has proposed seven things that would straighten Nigeria’s democratic system.

Atiku who spoke at a press conference in Abuja, organised by the party days after the Supreme Court quashed his claims and affirmed President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s election, noted that the apex court has normalised identity theft and forgery.

“With its judgement, the Supreme Court has simply told Nigerians that it is alright to win an election by any means including “forgery, identity theft, violence”, he said.

Recall that Atiku, Obi, the Allied Peoples Movement, APM, and two others approached the PEPC to challenge the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC’s declaration of Tinubu as the winner of the February 25 presidential poll.

The INEC had on March 1 announced that Tinubu of the APC won the presidential contest ahead of 17 other candidates. It declared that Tinubu scored 8,794,726 votes to defeat Atiku Abubakar, who got 6,984,520 votes, and Mr Peter Obi, who came third with 6,101,533 votes.

The announcement did not go down well with Atiku who dug up several issues along with his counterpart, Mr Peter Obi.

Some of the issues that were raised and settled by the Supreme Court include: INEC substantially complied with the Electoral Act 2022 and the constitution in the conduct of the poll; election cannot be nullified due to unavailability of results on INEC’s IReV portal; failure to secure 25 per cent of votes in the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Abuja cannot invalidate a winner’s election; petitioners did not prove allegations of rigging; the issue of APC’s double nomination of Vice President Kashim Shettima had earlier been decided by the court on May 26, 2023; and Tinubu’s forfeiture of $460, 000 drug money was raised when the Respondents had already filed their process.

Puffed with the verdict, Atiku suggested that in order to reduce the desperation of incumbents and promote equity and national unity, the country needs to move to a single six-year term for President to be rotated among the six geo-political zones.

This he said would prevent the ganging up of two or more geo-political zones to alternate the presidency among themselves to the exclusion of other zones.  

His words: “Firstly, we must make electronic voting and collation of results mandatory. This is the 21st century and countries less advanced than Nigeria are doing so already. It is only bold initiatives that transform societies.

“Secondly, we must provide that all litigation arising from a disputed election must be concluded before the inauguration of a winner. This was the case in 1979. The current time frame between elections and inauguration of winners is inadequate to dispense with election litigations.

“What we have currently is akin to asking thieves to keep their loot and use the same to defend themselves while the case of their robbery is being decided. It only encourages mandate banditry rather than discourages it.

“Thirdly, in order to ensure popular mandate and real representation, we must move to require a candidate for President to earn 50% +1 of the valid votes cast, failing which a run-off between the top two candidates will be held. Most countries that elect their presidents use this Two-Round System (with slight variations) rather than our current First-Past-the-Post system.

“Examples include France, Finland, Austria, Bulgaria, Portugal, Poland, Turkey and Russia, Argentina, Brazil, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Namibia, Mozambique, Madagascar and even Liberia where a run-off is expected to hold in the coming days.

“Fourthly, in order to reduce the desperation of incumbents and distractions from governing and also to promote equity and national unity, we need to move to a single six-year term for President to be rotated among the six geo-political zones. This will prevent the ganging up of two or more geo-political zones to alternate the presidency among themselves to the exclusion of other zones.

“INEC should be mandated to verify the credentials submitted to it by candidates and their parties and where it is unable to do so – perhaps because the institutions involved did not respond in time – it must publicly state so and have it on record.

“A situation where a candidate submits contradictory credentials to INEC in different election cycles and the electoral umpire accepts them without question points to gross negligence, at best, or collusion to break the law by the leadership of the INEC, at worst. The submission of contradictory qualifying documents by a candidate as well as those found to be forged or falsified should disqualify a candidate even if the falsification or forgery is discovered after the person had been sworn into office.

“The burden of proving that a document submitted to INEC is forged should not be on the opposing candidates in the election. It is never the responsibility of an applicant for a job to prove that the person who eventually got the job did so with forged documents.

“In addition to these proposed constitutional amendments, the Electoral Act should be amended to provide that, except where they explicitly violate the Constitution and other laws, the rules and procedures laid down by the electoral umpire and made public for the benefit of the contestants and the voters will be treated as sacrosanct by the courts in deciding on election disputes.

“A referee cannot be allowed to set the rules for the game only to change or ignore them when one side has scored a goal or is about to win the match. We must restore confidence in our electoral system which the current leadership of INEC has completely eroded and undermined. Also, we need well-thought out provisions in the legislation and regulations to reform the judiciary, including the introduction of an automated case assignment system; transparency in the appointment of judges; a practice directory that stresses that the goal of judges in election cases should be to discover and affirm voters’ choice rather than disregarding voters’ choice for the sake of technicalities.

“There should also be publicly available annual evaluation of the performance of judges using agreed criteria. By improving the transparency of the electoral process and reducing the incentives to cheat, in addition to transparency in the appointment of judges and other judicial reforms, the number of election petitions as well as corruption in the judiciary will be significantly reduced. More importantly, we would have succeeded in taking away the right to elect leaders from the courts and return it to the voters to whom it truly belongs.”