Wunmi Bewaji, pro-democracy activist, is the executive director of Coalition of Democrats for Electoral Reforms (CODER). In this exclusive interview with INIOBONG IWOK, he spoke on 20 years of democracy in the country, 2019 general election, among other issues in the polity. ExcerptS:
How would you describe 20 years of unbroken civil rule in Nigeria?
Nigerian democracy is sophisticated, it should be celebrated, Nigerians should be happy. This year, 2019 we celebrated twenty years of uninterrupted democracy; that is why in our organisation, we told the government to celebrate it in a big way. Now, there is everything to celebrate. Since 1999, we have had six presidential elections, in many states there have been change of government from the ruling party to the opposition party in recent years; if you ask me that is a success. The process may not be perfect, we may not be there yet, or in a position that we can sit down and relax. But if you look at it no democracy ever sits down and relax; even in America now you have a right wing racist as the President. You have in UK a Prime Minister that wants to suspend parliament; in Nigeria that has not happened. We had Obasanjo and his plot for life presidency, which was presented like a third term agenda. If we had not aborted that Obasanjo would still have been ruling now. We should celebrate our democracy.
What does your organisation set out to achieve?
What we do is similar to what NDI; the American National Democratic Institute or RII, or the American Republican Institute does. We are committed to free and fair elections in Nigeria. We work in any way that we can contribute to achieving free and fair elections in Nigeria. We are always willing to assist the system having come to the conclusion that there is no alternative to democracy.
Democracy requires creativity on the part of the citizens; it also requires cooperation; you find a situation where a lot of people say elections are rigged in the country. We have development partners assisting us since 1999 that is what we brought to the system. But our democracy is growing even other African countries are looking up to us now for leadership in the continent; so we should also do it by ourselves now. In 1999, the NDI was just ten years old, but NDI is thirty years this year; that means that Nigerians should be in a different position now. Our organisation has benefited from these foreign organisations. We have benefited in terms of training from the National Democratic Institute. We understand the terrain; the way things are done. We can understand the Nigerian factor; observing elections, nobody can do better than us.
But an average Nigerian on the street still thinks there is nothing to celebrate, because their condition of living has not improved?
There is a difference between democracy and good governance; what you are talking about is good governance. Democracy is the right of the people to have a say on how they are been governed. The privilege of every citizen to elect the person they think can do the job; may be, by doing so, it could be on tribal reasons, religion, ethnicity or all that. If you say this individual is a Christian, but is not competent but you vote him into public office and then you turn around and blame democracy, I am sorry. It does not work that way; democracy gives you the liberty to choose your leader, even if he is the wrong person. Like in the United States where people knew that the man was a racist and they still went ahead and voted for him; that is democracy. I would say it again that democracy is a freedom and it allows you to choose your leader. So, what you discover is that voting is done based on what I called primordial sentiment; ethnicity plays a huge role in how Nigerians vote, religion plays a key role too on how Nigerians vote. That is a back-way of looking at things; so, the moment we decide to embrace merit that is to say; this individual is not from my tribe, but he is competent I would vote for him. That is why I say we should de-emphasise certificate; the focus should be on integrity, but these days the average Nigerian is taking money before voting. People say, poverty is the reason for bad choice, but I would say bad choice is the reason for poverty. Look at the voter turnout in the last general election, it was 16 percent. We saw a national average of 23 percent. Some people think they are too big or too rich to vote.
Is this not a sign that Nigerians have lost confidence in the system?
No. This is an area that we have done extensive study; there are four elements of democracy in Nigeria. Firstly, we have the strong men; secondly, the demigod; thirdly the political illiterate and fourthly, the sinister. That is those who would say; they have already chosen who would rule, your vote would not count. There is no country where you have this kind of people and there would be good governance. In most cases, it is the minority people that are not good enough that often end up ruling them.
What kind of electoral reform is your organisation advocating for?
What we are saying is mass participation, we must boost participation, not really to force people, but we should increase Nigerians’ participation in the electoral process. We had advocated for voters’ participation certificate; when you vote you are given a certificate. So, another area is use of technology, we have to embrace it and make voting easy. We have BVN, driver’s licence and the rest. There should be a way we can link all of them together. Nigeria has the largest pool of data, what are we using it for? We have almost 100 million of biometric data, what are we using it for? We have political illiteracy, go to UNILAG a lot of our professors don’t have PVC. In our research, we discovered that it is the market women who are registering and taking part in the electoral process. The so-called elite and educated Nigerians often shy away from voting; they prefer to stay at home and be watching the turnout on television.
Based on your group monitoring, how would you describe the conduct of 2019 general election?
The 2019 election was credible, free and fair. It was not a perfect election, it was bedeviled by the same Nigerian problems, but by and large, the election was free and fair.
Do you think President Buhari’s refusal to sign the amended Electoral Act into law affected the credibility of the election?
No, that even saved the election; because we have been trying to use technology since 2004. In 2004, I met with some technology companies that were trying to come to Nigeria. The stakes are high now, you can’t go to a national election and at the end something goes wrong. Even in the U.S where technology is being deployed to conduct elections, they still use hand-voting. You remember the incident in Florida, where people alleged manipulation of their votes and demanded paper-voting should be used alongside technology. If we have to do technology, we must test it for some time, all the political parties must be brought in.
But the opposition parties alleged that there was wide-spread rigging and discrepancies in the election result?
No. That argument does not hold water; that is why we have said you must remove the judicialisation of our electoral process. We said in our report; that there is no country in Africa where two, three, four, five months, after election, candidates are still going to court to challenge the result. The need to challenge the results of elections must be limited. Are you saying that violence affected only your voters? If you say there were vote-buying did you identify those buying the votes? The violence did not affect only one party; even when you have several parties in the ballot. If you have lost election you should be discipline enough to accept the result.
You agree with the Court of Appeal judgment affirming Buhari’s victory?
That was a sound judgment. If you say there was violent in Ibadan, it cannot be targeted at only the opposition; it would affect all the voters of the other parties. If at the end of it someone emerged, so be it. We have to focus on governance now. I think Nigerians should learn to accept election result, rather than raising issues like he is not a Nigerian and so on.
Do you support the clamour for restructuring of the country?
It is an idea, a project of monumental proportion that we must do; there is no way we can run away from it. If you look at the history of the country and other countries that have the same structure that we have, a multi-ethnic nation, the only way is true federalism which respects the component units. There are component units in the federation; what we are trying to do is to work together in harmony, but it does not mean we should lose our identity. If am a Yoruba; I am a member of a Yoruba nation and through that I acquired my citizenship of Nigeria. That led to the constitutional conference that give birth to Nigeria; where our founding fathers decided that a federal constitution is best for Nigeria, to take care of our diversity. What they advocated for was unity in diversity.
But because of the long years of the military rule and because of the mistake of the military; where by the federal constitution we took from our founding fathers was jettisoned. Also, the local government reforms by Obasanjo further destroyed federalism in Nigeria. People would say they don’t know the meaning of true federalism; it respects the diversity of our nation. But that diversity has not been respected; that is why we have the balkanisation of the nation. We have states that cannot take care of themselves; then we have a constitution that talks about creating more states, rather than two states coming together to create a mega state.
What is your view on zoning of political offices in Nigeria?
Zoning is good, in view of our diversity and in view that we operate a very fragile federalism. We have diversity; nobody can deny that; so, everybody must have a sense of belonging. So, zoning take care of that. Why do you have the federal character commission? It is written in the law and allows people to have fair share of public office; that is where zoning comes from.
