Recently, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) made a damning revelation about political parties devising various means of circumventing the Electoral Act and the constitution in a bid to have their way.
Chairman of INEC, Prof. Mahmoud Yakubu, disclosed that apart from the general malaise of lack of internal democracy, leading to imposition of candidates on the electorate, certain political parties were in the habit of seeking to alter the list of their candidates even after the mandatory period allowed by the law.
Yakubu said that in the build up to the 2015 elections, some political parties went as far as deploying fraudulent tactics including “murdering” candidates in a desperate move to substitute such candidates whose names had already been submitted to the election management body.
He said that at least in two instances, a certain political party had to declare some of its candidates dead and provided every necessary documentary evidence to support its claim only for the alleged “dead candidates” to resurface at the headquarters of the electoral commission like ghosts.
He recalled that a political party wanted to substitute its candidate after the expiration of the 40-day window for substitution and knowing full well that the only provision under the law was in the event of death. Out of negative ingenuity, the party wrote a letter to INEC notifying it that their candidate was dead and needed to be replaced with another candidate.
The letter was accompanied with a certificate of death duly issued by a government hospital declaring that the said candidate was dead.
The party also attached another letter purportedly from the family of the deceased and addressed to the political party confirming that the candidate was dead.
Based on the letter from the deceased’s family, the party approached the court and swore to an affidavit that the candidate was dead and needed to be substituted with another candidate.
In another instance, a political party wrote to INEC claiming that four of their candidates who were driving in a vehicle to a campaign rally, had an accident and all four of them died on the spot.
As in the first instance, all the necessary documents were attached to convince the electoral commission that these candidates had passed on and would naturally not be available to participate in the elections.
Sadly, these bizarre stories emanated at a time INEC is yet to resolve the challenges of electoral violence, ballot box snatching, under-aged voters, underaged candidates, manipulation of results and other sundry malpractices associated with our elections.
As it is with most acts of electoral fraud, there is a strong suspicion that corruption is at the root of the move by the political parties adopting unconventional means to substitute their candidates.
We believe that there should have been a system of reward and punishment in our electoral system. The political parties caught in the act of “murdering” some candidates in order to substitute them with others should have been sanctioned to serve as a deterrent to others.
It is also apparent that the political parties did not indulge in the fraud all alone. At least they had accomplices in the hospitals that issued death certificates for persons who were still alive and the courts that issued affidavits authenticating the fictitious deaths.
With the documentary evidence on the action taken by the parties and their accomplices, INEC should have taken up the matter with the officials of the parties by referring the matter to the police for thorough investigation.
This callous move to substitute candidates with reckless impunity has exposed the general rot in our system.
Who were the party officials that conceived this idea? Who were the doctors in the government hospitals that issued the death certificates? Was there a police report on the supposed accident before the hospital prepared the certificates? These are some of the questions we need to answer if we want an end to these acts that beat every sane human imagination.
This chain of fraud that spans across our institutions must be tracked and broken if we are interested in having anything near a credible electoral system.
As a country, we cannot continue to overlook matters like these because they may seem little, but they are the seeds of the massive fraud that we find in our electoral system. Over time, INEC has blamed its inability to do much about electoral crimes on the lack of prosecutorial powers under the Electoral Act and the plethora of functions already in its kitty.
While this might be true, we can’t continue to run the electoral system on excuses that embolden unscrupulous politicians and their accomplices in other government agencies to continue to undermine the system.
We hereby reiterate our belief in the Justice Muhammed Uwais Report on Electoral Reform, particularly the recommendation for the establishment of an Electoral Offences Tribunal to deal decisively with every snippet of electoral fraud in the polity.
