By Ikeddy ISIGUZO, Chairman, Editorial Board
In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers . . . we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. – Alexander Solzhenitsyn

JEGA

PROFESSOR Attahiru Jega, Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, makes it impossible for others to be fair to him. The man has laboured in the past nine months to destroy himself.

The unforgivable silence of most Nigerians has saved his job thus far, but Jega is bent on doing himself needless harm.

Jega arrived on the job as “a man of integrity.” We understood that to be an adherer to moral and ethical principles; a man of sound moral character; honest, virtuous, decent, good, upright. These attributes, Nigerians chorused, were all her top electoral umpire required. He never rejected these weighty garbs.

Within weeks of being on his desk, he announced a timetable under which the electoral processes were to commence last August – that started the series of postponements of every INEC programme, throwing our transition into doubts.

Voters’ registration suffered postponements and schools had to be shut down for it. The Constitution has been amended times over to accommodate INEC’s schedule, same for the Electoral Act.

His tenure at INEC has recorded remarkable milestones, the most memorable being that elections could not take place, less than 24 hours after Jega in a broadcast had encouraged voters to hit the polling booths.  He spent the whole of that week giving assurances that INEC was ready for the elections.

What manner of man could have given his fellow countrymen and women false hope when he knew electoral materials had not arrived? What would it have cost him to call off the elections during that broadcast?

He was not done. He postponed the elections by 48 hours, apparently clueless about how much work it would take to move the materials to the polling booths. Again, the elections had to be re-scheduled because INEC was not ready.

How does one make sense of Jega’s conduct and the condoning of INEC’s slipping control under him? Even now, INEC is not sure to deliver the materials. The silence over this nonsense makes sense.

The overwhelming endorsement Jega got for the job from the media and civil society groups effectively put those who should have criticised him in a quandary. As a former national president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, he had the support of a formidable constituency.

His popularity in the media was from his ASUU agitations. Little less was known about him other than he was a university vice chancellor and a consultant to INEC.

Yet as late as February when he started bumping into arrangements for the elections, our panellists at the Vanguard Conference Hall doubted his abilities to pull off this assignment. I will quote one of them copiously as his contributions captured Jega, his integrity and all.

“I blame the media and civil society for its appraisal of Professor Attahiru Jega right from his appointment as INEC chairman.  We seemed to have placed a lot of emphasis on the man’s integrity and not on his capacity to do the job.

We brought a man to do a project management job; we should have been rating him along those lines,” Dagogo Karibi-Whyte, lawyer, and Secretary General, South East South South Professionals, submitted.

“His integrity is a great asset, but it has little or nothing to do with the capacity of the official to do the job. Integrity was not going to be a substitute for capacity. Any project management company would have broken the exercise down to various components from registration to the elections. The break down is important for an understanding of the challenges of the exercise.

“The numerous requests from INEC for extensions, more money show that the organisation is thinking as it moves along. You cannot organise elections in this manner. We cannot expect magic in the elections.  INEC is out of its depth. We have to salvage the situation by asking Jega to call in professionals who can help him.

“In Nigeria, once one is a professor it is assumed that he can do anything. As vice chancellor, he was not a project manager. His inadequacies are being exposed,” Dagogo said.

Prophetic as these positions have become, they never envisaged that the elections would be subjected to the type of cloudiness that has become a Jega offering to Nigerians.

A minor way of looking at the damage Jega is doing is the economic loss and the panic his INEC is visiting on the country but there is more. The courts are filled with cases on INEC’s selective recognition of candidates.
Jega has created new standards of competence at INEC. If we accept them, will it be fair to criticise his successor if he lowers the standards? If we are not concerned about the wastes these elections have caused, must we ensure they choke our future?

The greater insult is that we are being asked to support Jega without knowing what stunt he will pull next.
“I will tell you a big secret, my friend: Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It happens every day,” Albert Camus wrote in his 1956 book, The Fall. The judgement is not on Jega alone – it is on all who are explaining Jega’s dedicated compromise of elections that we were promised would be the freest, fairest, and most credible Nigeria has had.