… Intellectuals must involve in politics
BY BENEDICT NWACHUKWU, ABUJA
Former Chairman, Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof Atahiru Jega has charged Nigerians to unite and challenge the President, Muhammadu Buhari and the National Assembly on their plot to jettison Electronic Transmission of Results by INEC in conduct of elections.
Prof Jega, gave the charge at a one-day National Political Summit, “Restoring the Legitimacy of the Nigerian State: The Imperative of Electronic Transmission of Results organized by the National Consultative Front to commemorate the 2021 Independence celebration in Abuja.
The former INEC boss who was a co-chairman at the summit maintained that the time to stop the “Vandals and Bandits” from commandeering election results had come.
He said, “One of the ways to begin to halt the denial to bring remarkable improvements in the ways and means by which public officers are elected is rising against the unpopular decisions of both the Presidency and the National Assembly.
“The electoral process must have integrity to enable people with integrity to be elected freely and fairly by the people. A situation in which the vandals and ‘bandits’ commandeer the electoral processes to perpetuate their stranglehold on power and continue to mess the country and citizens up, must be opposed, struggled against, and reformed.
“The legitimacy of the Nigerian state has, no doubt, taken significant bashing in the last few years. Citizens increasingly question the credibility of the ways and means by which elected public officers get elected and assume leadership positions. They are increasingly disappointed by what elected officials do with power. And they are also profoundly frustrated and angry, with the failure of those who preside over the state and its governance processes to satisfy their basic needs and aspirations, be it in socio-economic provisioning, security of lives and property, or in the management of the economy to drive employment, productivity, economic opportunities for the citizens, or in the management of diversity in a plural society.
“The failure of those in power to enable the Nigerian state to discharge its obligations to the citizens, has today made Nigeria to be one of the poorest, most insecure, poorly managed and most fragile states in the world.
“Manual transmission of election results has been one key area in which reckless, unpatriotic and self-serving politicians have undermined the integrity of the Nigerian electoral process. Bringing remarkable integrity to the Nigerian electoral process would no doubt require the jettisoning of the traditional obtuse, manual transmission of results and replacing it with appropriate technology, with electronic transition of results.
“Globally, this has been proven to add remarkable value to the integrity of elections, the quality of citizens’ choices in elections and the minimisation of litigation and conflicts associated with electoral outcomes. Hence, electronic transmission of results also, ultimately, enhances the quality of governance by improving the responsibility and responsiveness of elected officials who would been compelled to see citizens’ votes and choices as truly counting in determining electoral outcomes.
“It is therefore, necessary that all patriotic citizens work together to draw the attention of the members of the National Assembly to respect Nigerians’ demand for electronic transmission of results and effect necessary reforms to the electoral legal framework to bring this about. The time to do this, is now.
We must not lose this opportunity,” he said.
In a related development, the convener, Adawole Adebayo described the apathy of the intellectuals to politics as a major bane of good governance.
The US based lawyer said having professors participate in politics or governance does not make the difference.
“Professorship is a title, it doesn’t make one an intellectual. Just like permanent secretary in the civil service. One can be a permanent secretary yet does not know simple administration. What does it take to be a professor in the universities, you just sit down there and write on a particular field?”
Adebayo argued that professorship suggests that one concentrated on a particular field one specialised and by that one can be a professor in a particular field and ignorant in other fields.
“You can be a professor of fishery or agronomy or jurisprudence, you are a professor but what it suggests is that you concentrate so much on a narrow subject and become an expert on the subject but ignorant in all other subjects.
“But intellectualism is about testing the physical strength of issues. There is no one person who is an intellectual unless that person goes through a process. And when you talk about being a governor, administration requires focus and integrity. So if a person is a professor who probably acquired it by fraudulent means or cutting corners, then everything he (or she) does will be in same manner.”
He maintained that in politics, people who come were desperate and that was why the intellectuals right from the days of Awujobi, Tai Solarin, Bala Usman, Achebe were always on the margin discussing issues that were important but not in the centre of people’s emotional attention.
Adebayo also noted the desperate politicians got to the grassroots, did anything they could for the purpose of elections but intellectuals in Nigeria would always come together to look at issues and discuss them.
“We can raise so many issues and discuss them and proffer solutions. Unless we go to the grassroots to meet with the people and educate them, we will not get it right. I can’t be confident that if you go to all the rural areas and meet the women, do a survey and ask them what is the problem of our election that they will tell you electronics transmission.
“For intellectuals, it gives us pleasure to pontificate on these issues but the person who wants to rig election in 2023 has started rigging it now. He is in the gutter dinning and drinking with that blind downtrodden man, realising that his vote is as important as Prof. Wole Soyinka’s and unfortunately on the day of election, Soyinka maybe in Oslo delivering lectures while that blind destitute will cast his vote. All we need to do as intellectuals is to match the desperate politicians in their games without being violent,” he noted.
