By Olalekan Bilesanmi

In this interview, immediate past Resident Electoral Commissioner, REC, for Akwa Ibom State, Mike Igini, expresses concern about what he describes as unwarranted attacks on his person by a National Commissioner of the Independent National electoral Commission (INEC), Mohammed Haruna, regarding the interpretation of some aspects of the Electoral Act 2022 and the controversial Akwa Ibom North West senatorial primary of the All Progressives Congress (APC). According to Igini, attempts to replace the APC candidate for the district with another person who did not emerge through a primary supervised by INEC, but which Haruna is advancing, will not bode well. Excerpts

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You were reported to have said that the President and NASS should be commended for enacting the 2022 Electoral Act. How will it impact the 2023 elections?

The Act has secured INEC innovations and procedures by returning power to the people at the polling units where elections will now be won or lost and not at wards, LGAs and other stages or points of result collation.

The most profound and empowering provision is the mandatory requirement of the law that the total number of votes scored by candidates and the number of accredited voters be uploaded to the digital cloud in an INEC portal that is accessible to voters and participating political parties.

Staying on your last statement, Commissioner Haruna Mohammed has said, as reported in the Vanguard newspaper, that you misinterpreted the Electoral Act as it affects the Akwa-Ibom North Senatorial District. How do you react?

First, I am very surprised that Mohammed Haruna, someone that l used to respect so much as a columnist before his appointment as a National Commissioner who ought to know better, could go to the media to attack my person and question my legal competency and he did that totally in ignorance of the true position of the law.

He accused me of “choosing and picking” provisions of the 2022 Electoral Act that suit me over politicians he was advancing their position. A supposed umpire defending individuals that did not participate in a senatorial primary against the provisions of the 2022 Act, that such individuals should be confirmed as senatorial candidates, as he has confirmed again in his latest attack on me and Mr Femi Falana (SAN).

I’m only disappointed but not surprised. l have seen things and the best and worst characters of human beings in the last ten years of public service.

An individual could be a great critic and a respected columnist when he is not in government and there are many out there that we have come to know as pretenders.

What provision of the Act did he specifically accuse you of picking and choosing?

In the first interview he granted that was widely publicized in June while trying to respond to a United States based columnist, Dr Kperogi, he claimed that INEC does not have the statutory power to reject individuals who did not go through primary elections but whose names were submitted by political parties anyway, without citing any provision of the law to back up his claim. 

What he said is wholly incorrect and patently untrue because by virtue of Section 84 (13), the Commission has undoubted power to reject individuals submitted as candidates that didn’t undergo primary elections monitored by INEC and did not emerge from valid primaries under Section 29 of the 2022 Electoral Act.

That power to reject by the Commission could also be challenged either by any aspirant or the political party under Section 285 (14) of the Constitution. He admitted this shortcoming in his response to Dr Kperogi who drew his attention to the position of the Senior Advocate, Mr Falana, that l was right on the position of law.

And this was what Haruna wrote himself, “I had agreed that the Senior Advocate was right and l was wrong because my opinion did not take Section 84 (13) of the Electoral Act 2022 into consideration”.

So you can see how unfair Haruna has been to me using his own opinion which is not law to challenge and attack me in the media when l cited copiously the provisions of the 2022 Act. Tragically, Commissioner Mohammed Haruna defended his earlier position in total ignorance of the law and relied on his opinion which is free whereas facts are sacred.

l decided not to respond to him publicly the first time for misleading Nigerians but instead called him to express my disappointment to him that, assuming l was even wrong, he should have spoken to me instead of going to the media to disparage me. I restated the correct position of the law to him to be well guided given that he is not a lawyer but a very cerebral journalist that people like me used to respect so much in the past.

Even as a lawyer, l don’t know all the laws and God forbid that a lawyer should know all the laws. But a lawyer should know where to find the law just as an educated non-lawyer that wants to challenge a lawyer and even a Senior Advocate of Nigeria like Femi Falana, a legal luminary of remarkable intellectual prowess; he should know where to find the law to engage well.

What do you think could be responsible for this attack on your person?

Frankly, I really don’t know why and l have been asking myself if maybe because out of respect for him and the image of INEC that should not be brought to disrepute, having to respond to him publicly I restrained myself. 

This, coupled with numerous calls from colleagues and well-meaning Nigerians that appealed to me not to respond to him, perhaps my restraint, misguidedly, emboldened him to embark on this second unprovoked and unjustified attack on my person. 

His opinion is an isolated ignorant misconception within the Commission. I know the Chairman well and several National Commissioners sufficiently to know that such misguided lay opinions which ostensibly strips the Commission of its gate keeping mandates is not the norm at the Commission.

Given that you said you respect him as an elderly person, have you called him again that he is off track?

Yes, l did and the response was not what I expected; he told me to go to hell and do whatever l wanted and I should go away with my respect for him.

Can you imagine that! It is indeed very shocking in the first place that a National Commissioner will go public to attack a colleague in the media when l was still in office in June and now that l have left he has continued just because of individuals he mentioned, whose conduct violate the oath of office he took when he was sworn in as a Commissioner of INEC.

What really are his specific accusations of you this time?

This time around he accused me of not obeying what he called a “Federal High Court judgment” which is not true because he doesn’t have the full facts. For the avoidance of doubt, here are the facts about the contrived APC crisis in Akwa lbom.

The APC in Akwa-Ibom State had a successful State Congress on October 16, 2021 wherein all the notable key stakeholders were present. There are video recordings and pictures of all those who were present at the Sheergrace Arena, venue of the congress; and staff of the Commission from Abuja and state monitored the exercise.

At the end, one Augustine Ekanem emerged for the position of state Chairman after polling 1,278 votes. However, another aspirant and the last on the list of 10 contestants, Stephen Leo Ntuekpo, who scored 006 (six) votes, allegedly altered the result by dropping figure one (1) from the 1,278 and placing it before his own 006 to now read 1,006 while the score of the real winner of the congress was reduced to 278 votes in the alleged forged document.

This was the document he made himself that he took to INEC for certification and used same to sue the APC national body under the then-Acting Chairman of their party Gov. Mai Buni of Yobe State, and Secretary, Sen. Akpan Udoedehe, who is now in NNPP. INEC Headquarters EPM and Legal Department surprisingly certified this document despite having the original of the successful congress report in their custody.

When my attention was drawn to the criminal action, we received a protest letter and I immediately called the head office. In response, the Commission wrote a letter to the APC National Secretary to invalidate the forged Congress result certified as an error. Paragraph 4 of the letter stated thus, “Note that the certification in custody of the Commission in compliance with the law does not confer validity on that document that is otherwise invalid or void by virtue of the provision of the law”. 

Is Commissioner Haruna aware of this letter written and dated 1st February 2022 and signed by the Secretary of the Commission? That was the document Ntuekpo used to secure a Federal High Court judgment on the 17th of March 2022 that Haruna is defending vigorously. But he was never sworn in as APC Chairman in Akwa Ibom State by then-APC Acting National Chairman and Secretary, both of whom in their official capacity immediately proceeded to the Appeal Court on the 18th of March and filed a stay of execution of the judgment obtained by Mr Ntuekpo.

When the matter came up on the 7th of April, the Appeal Court granted an order for parties to maintain status quo and adjourned till the 17th of April. The status quo ordered to be maintained at the time was the fact that Augustine Ekanem was the duly sworn-in Chairman, while Stephen Ntuekpo only had a judgment that was in his favor but was never sworn-in as Chairman given that the APC leadership that would have conferred him with authority appealed against the judgment.

It was not a case of two claimants-chairmen who were sworn into office in which case we could be talking of the invocation of the principle of the latter in time. But, surprisingly, just four days after the Appeal Court adjourned after granting an order that status quo be maintained till the next adjourned date of the 17th of April, this Court of Appeal order was disregarded and the new Chairman of APC, Adamu Abdullahi, and Secretary, Sen. Iyiola Omisore, respectively on the 11th of April swore-in Stephen Ntuekpo in total disobedience to the order of the Court of Appeal.

And in order to avoid the likely sanction of the court for contempt, the same appellants ambushed the Appeal Court by filing a notice of withdrawal of the matter their predecessor took to Appeal Court against Stephen Ntuekpo. But the order of Appeal Court was still subsisting irrespective of their action. It was during the prevailing extant order to maintain status quo from the 7th of April all through the 26th of May when the APC governorship primary ought to have been conducted but was not conducted except for the senatorial primary that was conducted on the 27th of May 2022 that produced retired DIG Ekpoudom. The primary was conducted by the APC and monitored by the Commission with full report.

The process of sudden withdrawal to prevent the hearing of the main matter after all they had achieved the goal of swearing in someone who used forged document had been achieved. That judicial process was only concluded on the 30th of May at which time all primaries had been concluded. It should be noted that from on the 17th of March when Stephen Ntuekpo obtained judgment with a forged/altered result certified regrettably in Abuja, the state office never received any letter from Abuja directing the state office to obey any Federal High Court ruling that we disobeyed contrary to what Mohammed Haruna claimed.

But there are claims in INEC that seem to suggest that Senator Akpabio’s re-run or re-conducted senatorial election was monitored…

I challenge anybody or Haruna to produce the names of those staff of INEC either from Abuja or at the state that monitored that Nicodemus senatorial primary he is talking about and defending vigorously. We are lawyers and we deal with records.

There are official records with dates and sequence of events from INEC monitoring officers to the INEC Headquarters in Abuja. We had RECs meeting at the Commission Headquarters on Wednesday 8th and Thursday 9th of June. I woke up on Friday morning to see on social media what they called breaking news that Akpabio had won a re-run senatorial election for Akwa lbom North-West.

I was inundated with calls from everywhere to confirm the story, and l responded to the effect that there was nothing like that because it had been conducted since the 27th of May and hence that the North-West senatorial train had left the station. I went further to explain that a re-run election means that there was a previous exercise that may have been cancelled, and who cancelled the first election and for what reason?

And in any case, in a re-run election in line with the judgment of the Supreme Court as per Labor vs INEC that only those who participated in the cancelled one for any reason can participate, and no new entrant to the race can be included. The man Commissioner Haruna wants to be a candidate never contested the 27th May senatorial primary but at all material time he was a presidential aspirant at the event that took place on the 8th of June 2022; this is not my opinion, it is a fact in public record.

Commissioner Haruna also expressed his opinion on the effect of Section 115 of the Act that no offence had been committed by any politicians…

His opinion is based on his understanding of a provision of law. But he is not a judge, and not even a lawyer, to be saying categorically that a lawyer misinterpreted the law.

Some of the provisions you find in the extant 2022 Act like Section 115 is meant to deal with past mischief by politicians who buy more than one nomination form with the hope that if they don’t succeed in their party primary election, they will go to the other party they have purchased their nomination form to be a candidate and contest the same election.

This has led to the growing culture of people jumping from one party to another in matter of days within the same period of primaries. It is to put an end to this that the novel Section 115 was proposed. We are all witnesses to the problems, how when senatorial primaries long conducted on the 27th of May are be reopened after the presidential convention that took place in June.

This is the situation Section 115 was proposed to prevent and to cure instead of going back and forth. Thus, purchasing, filling and signing two nomination forms aspiring to be a candidate in more than one constituency (presidential or senatorial), which are different constituencies’ election, is an offence. The old Forms CF001 and CF002 have now been changed to Forms EC9 and EC9b and they are issued or given free to political parties by INEC. No individual who has emerged as a candidate will ever fill two forms after emerging as a candidate to be penalized.

It is those expensive nomination forms sold by political parties or aspirants that aspire to be candidates that Section 115 is intended to deal with and not INEC forms filled after emerging as candidates. If it’s INEC free forms then of course nobody will ever commit the offence prescribed.

So you see, it is a regulatory mechanism to make the regulatory role of the Commission easier to accomplish, and advance internal democracy for political parties while consolidating democracy in Nigeria.  No election manager will, therefore, take public positions to go against the Commission’s competence to administer such provisions to advance the partisan position of third parties outside INEC.

This lay and ignorant position is an isolated position and it is not common practice in INEC going to attack a colleague in media and, worse, doing so in total ignorance. Some people are just trying to make the work of the Chairman of the Commission difficult for the law abiding people in INEC.