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Attahiru Jega, chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, was recently voted Newswatch Man of the Year 2011. The radical scholar speaks to a Newswatch team of Femi Ige, chief operating officer, Bala Dan Abu, general manager, editorial, and Tobs Agbaegbu, senior associate editor, on how he was able to break the nation’s long chain of electoral failures and INEC’s plan for 2015 polls. Excerpts:

Newswatch: We want to start with your experience with the April 2011 general elections. What was it like? Was your experience what you expected when you came in?

Jega: My experience in INEC so far have widened my intellectual horizon. They have also deepened my appreciation of the complex nature of our country and made me more aware of the challenges of managing elections in Nigeria. I have been enriched by that experience because I have come to the realisation that I probably underestimated what is required to bring a credible electoral reform. When I was given this job, (I did not ask for it) but I thought I was adequately prepared, intellectually, to handle it. Upon reflection, I think I had sufficient preparation.

But it appears clearly that no matter how prepared you are, one must learn on the job. And I have learnt quite a lot on this job. I must also say that I am happy with the result. I don’t think that there is anything we did that we cannot do again. Of course, we have done quite a lot of self assessment as an institution to learn about what we can improve upon, there is a lot of scope to improve on. If we are to do things now, we will do them better because we are in a much better position to do them better. Quite frankly, the challenges were enormous and complex, and the issues were like we say generally, the more you see, the less you understand. It took a lot of time to understand certain things and to be able to clearly define the focus to deal with the problems. But I have been lucky to have the confidence and trust of Nigerians during challenging times and also to get support with the people I work with. They gave me the support and confidence that I require to handle the job. I take a lot of credit because things went right, may be if things didn’t go right, I will have also taken a lot of the heat. Indeed, a lot of the credit should also go to my colleagues who gave me the needed support.

The staff of INEC all over the country were also wonderful and gave much support for the things we have so far done. If you reflect over the matter, we did not bring up to one percent of the work force in INEC since we came in. It is not as if we transformed INEC by bringing in new people. It is the same people. They were the same people that conducted elections and were vilified in 2007. They were the same people we engaged and motivated to do a credible election in 2011. Really, it became clear to us that there are many honest, sincere and patriotic   people in INEC, who, given the right atmosphere, motivation and encouragement, could bring their best which would be good enough for their country. I think that is the story of the April 2011 election. We insisted on being very honest, sincere and transparent with what we did, both internally with our co workers as well as with other stakeholders. But we also created a framework, which was to say that this is the way to do things. We will not break the rules. We will not break the law. We will not expect anybody to break the law. Whoever breaks the law will be held accountable to the law. They should not expect us to protect them. Once we defined that framework and lived by example, then many other things followed. And our collective best was what resulted in the success of the voter registration and the April 2011 elections. I kept saying that what we did was not completely perfect. We knew that there is still room for improvement.

But it was a substantial improvement over the 2007 election, and indeed over all previous elections we have had in this country. The challenge now is on how we can keep on raising the bar, how to keep on improving and meeting international standards on credibility of the elections, and how to ensure that we don’t slip back into the old chaos that was past elections.

How do you turn around politicians and make them no longer to see elections as a do or die affair? We are doing a lot in preparation for 2015. We are bringing in a lot of institutional reforms, attitudinal changes, effective restructuring and reorganisation of INEC, so that we can first and foremost make INEC one of the best election management bodies in Africa, if not in the entire world, in 2015, and so that elections in 2015 will be much more remarkable than what we have had in this country. Really, that is the vision we have set.

After the election, everybody said we did well and there was a lot of commendation. We didn’t allow it to get into our heads. We told all the electoral officers to tell us what we did right and what we did wrong, so that next time, we will learn and make sure we don’t do those wrong things. It was a useful exercise. After we listened to them, we did another retreat with all the administrative officers and resident electoral commissioners, with the national commissioners and directors. And we asked them, as generals in the field, to tell us their own experiences and recommendations. We did a thorough assessment and we have taken decisions about what we can do better in future. In addition to that, we set up an independent assessment committee. We drew respectable people from the academia, Civil Society Organisations and it was just last Tuesday that they submitted their own report. It has given us very rich input, independent of INEC. We also appointed internationally respectable consultants to start a restructuring and reorganisation of INEC. They have gone very far, and we believe that they will submit their report before the end of the month of January. We have done staff audit too, to understand where we have strengths and weaknesses, so that when we come to do additional recruitments to know where there are gaps and how to fill them.

So, the next stage we are moving into now is strategic planning process that can now map out in very clear terms, what we needed to do in the short-term, medium and long-term process, from now till 2015. So, really, we are focused on putting in everything we have learnt from our experience so far, into building a better electoral management body, and doing a better job than we have done so far.

All the mistakes we learnt in the April 2011 elections, we have tried to correct them in Kogi. We are now planning for Adamawa elections, and we hope to do even better than we did in Kogi. Then we have other elections between now and July. Bayelsa in February, Sokoto in March and Edo State in July. And we want to make sure that every election we conduct is remarkably better than the previous. It’s a challenge we have to meet.

Electoral politics in our country ought to be better and it can be better and we are determined to make it better, so that electoral processes can become routine matters in our country. I have no doubt that once we are able to do that, the governance process in our country will even be better because people who come out of the electoral processes will be true representatives of the people. This means that they will have to be accountable to the people; they will be responsible people and will have to be responsive to the needs and aspirations of our people. And we believe rightly that we are moving in the right direction.

Newswatch: When you took this job, many of your colleagues feared that you were putting your integrity on the line. What is your opinion now that you are through with a major election?

Jega: You are right. And I have kept telling the story about how many of my colleagues and family members thought that I was crazy to have accepted this job. They felt it was a thankless job, and that I was putting my integrity on the line. Not in the sense of losing the integrity, but making it susceptible to all forms of unnecessary attacks, condemnation and insults which they thought would be unwarranted and I needed not to expose myself to that kind of thing. But I have asked repeatedly: what is integrity if it cannot be tested? So, I thought that I have the confidence to do this job, and since our country needed to get electoral management issues right, and if I continue to shy away from taking up such a job that I feel I am competent to handle because I want to protect my integrity, then I wouldn’t have contributed in finding an answer to a major challenge to my country. That was how I convinced myself that I should take up the job.

To some extent, those who warned me about taking up the job were right, because since I took this job, my integrity had been on the line. I have received all sorts of unjustified attacks, we have done everything possible to be non partisan, impartial and to create a level playing field to all parties, but we can’t please everybody. I seem to be the easy target and object of all sorts of insults and attacks.

But I know that it is just a few people that are doing that. Majority of Nigerians are happy with what we are doing, going by what I hear and read. Many wish us well and pray for us. I am not distracted by those attacks on my personality, knowing full well that I have not done any wrong to justify those attacks on me.

Newswatch: Let us move into the upcoming governorship election in Bayelsa, since you talked about elections lined up for the year. There is a controversy about the way and manner PDP chose its candidate for the election. In the eye of INEC, has PDP produced a candidate in Bayelsa?

Jega: What happened in the case of Bayelsa was that we were given notice by PDP that primaries were going to hold. And there were also intra-party quarrels there. And one of the factions went to court. And a court gave an order. We interpreted that order to mean that we were asked not to participate in monitoring the primaries and we have been law abiding.

One of the things that this commission has done since we came in is to ensure that we respected and obeyed the law. We stayed away from monitoring the Bayelsa PDP primaries. But what many Nigerians didn’t realise is that when the Electoral Act was amended, there was an amendment to section 31which said that whichever candidate is presented to INEC by a political party must be accepted and cannot be changed for any reason whatsoever. Technically, that means that our monitoring of primaries is, I wouldn’t say not irrelevant, but neither here nor there. In fact, you make it easier for abuses by not monitoring primaries. If you are monitoring and there is clear violation of a party’s constitution in the process of the primary, by law we can use that to take certain decisions about the conduct of the primary. But if we did not monitor a primary, we wouldn’t know what has happened. And if a candidate is given to us, we would have no reason not to accept it.

Unfortunately that is our law and that is something that needs to be addressed in the near future because if we have to monitor, there must be a purpose for our monitoring. And that purpose is to ensure that things are done well. But you can’t tell us to monitor and tell us to accept whatever candidate you present to us. So, in Bayelsa, we didn’t monitor because we respected a court order, but then, when PDP eventually sent us a name as their candidate, we accepted it because that is what the law says. It is an unfortunate situation that the legal framework is still not very clear and firm in terms of what role INEC can play in sanitising the electoral process. This is one area where we have to pursue further amendments in other to address these kind of ambiguities.

Newswatch: Now that a precedent has been set with the PDP primaries in Bayelsa State, what will INEC do henceforth?

Jega: The fact of the matter is that because of that amendment, even during the April 2011 elections, we were compelled to accept candidates who did not go through the primaries. I talked about it a lot during that time. In fact, some of the things we have seen in Katsina State were all part of it. If you recall, in Katsina, a party faction held its primary, the faction went to court and got an order that said we must recognise their own candidate and we recognised them. And they went for the election. It is only now, when the Supreme Court gave its judgement on that matter that we now went back to issue certificates to people we knew were properly submitted. Even then, that is still the subject of another legal tussle. The other faction is now in court to challenge the action. As I said, we maintain our sanity by being law abiding. Whatever a court rules is what we obey until it is changed.

Newswatch: Will these kind of cases in court, as we have in Bayelsa and Adamawa affect the dates for the election in those states?

Jega: The answer is a big if. If there is an order from a court that says don’t do this, we will respect the order. But as I speak with you now, unless something changes, there is no court order, so we are continuing with our preparations.

Newswatch: Given your experience in the management of elections in Nigeria now, what aspects of our laws on election would you want amended?

Jega: First and foremost, I will want an amendment to section 31 of the Electoral Act which provides that whichever candidate a political party submits to INEC must be accepted and cannot be rejected for any reason whatsoever. I don’t think that is in the interest of electoral process deepening and consolidation in the country. I have evidence that many political parties have abused that provision. Even though they are supposed to choose candidates through democratic means, many of them hide under that provision to present candidates who did not participate in the primaries. That provision needs to be changed, and we will do whatever we can to get the National Assembly to amend it. We would also want to see amendments that can strengthen internal party democracy.

Frankly, the nature of internal party democracy we practice in this country leaves much to be desired. Similarly, we also want to see a lot of reform measures regarding political party registration, and which party can contest election under what circumstances. We are doing a lot of ground work and home work to be able to engage the National Assembly on electoral reforms in these critical areas. Similarly, we would want to see a situation in which some of the recommendations of the Justice Uwais electoral reform committee can be brought on board in order to further the electoral reform process. In particular, it had become very clear to us that really, the prosecution of electoral offenders will probably be better handled by an election offences tribunal as recommended by Justice Uwais. We committed ourselves to prosecuting electoral offenders. On voter registration alone, we had over 870,000 electoral offences. We were able to prosecute, but as I speak with you, we have not been able to prosecute more that 200 offenders because our legal department is too small, and it is overwhelmed, either by tribunal cases or pre-election matters. And our legal bill, by employing private legal practitioners, just on election matters alone, is quite a lot. So, for us to be the ones handling electoral offences, we will do our best if the law is not changed but the best thing will be to have a separate body that will handle such matters. So, there are quite a number of areas we hope to engage the legislature early enough, because we want to avoid a situation where we can only have a few of the amendments before the 2015 election.

Newswatch: Does INEC have powers to de-register political parties?

Jega: Clearly, we have powers to de-register parties under certain circumstances. That is why we have already de-registered six political parties. And the process is ongoing. As we speak with you, we are still reviewing the process. We may de-register additional parties. But we are also looking at the best model for dealing with political parties. Is the best model to deregister parties or to make sure that only particular parties can contest for the presidential election or for the governorship? We are still studying the models, and we have seen good models where a party can remain registered but unless it meets certain conditions, it cannot field candidates. That gives them the opportunity to keep on developing themselves up to a point where they will be able to field candidates.

Newswatch: Voter registration has been a controversial exercise in Nigeria. What will INEC under you do to make it less controversial?

Jega: What we did in January made voter registration much less contentious than it has been in the past. And since January, we have been improving. We hope to move to a situation in which voter registration will be a regular, timeless exercise. As a person becomes 18 years, such a person can just walk into any INEC office and register. It will be a process of continuous registration. That’s what we are working on now. So far, what we have done is to establish a national data base on each of the 36 states and FCT Abuja. But we have been improving and consolidating on that data base, to accommodate people who may be on transfer or are involved in entirely new registration. We are doing it in phases. As I speak with you, for example, we have already done continuous voter registration in Kogi, Adamawa and Bayelsa. These are states where we have elections scheduled. So, before the election in December in Kogi, anybody who became 18 since last January had the opportunity to register. Many of them registered. We did so in Adamawa and Bayelsa.  Our people have now moved to Sokoto for the continuous registration exercise in the state. Before the end of this year, we would have perfected the system.

As they establish and make all our data bases fully functional and integrated, such that continuous registration exercise will become a regular registration process. And the exercise will become very efficient, non cumbersome and non controversial at all. The interesting thing about the exercise in Kogi, Adamawa and Bayelsa is that when we finished, we made a demonstration before all stake holders. Any information anybody wanted on any registered fellow was brought out for him to see in a screen. It can be done here at the headquarters. Any information about anybody, say in Uyo,  Kwara, etc can be accessed from the data base at the headquarters here. After updating and upgrading all the data from the states, the next thing is connectivity. We connect all to our services because we are going to have a robust internet service network.

The contractors are working on the projects and before the end of the year, all our data bases will be fully integrated such that continuous voter registration becomes a routine. Not only voter registration, people who move from where they are living to another place or state, can have their data registration data changed to reflect their new place of abode, with ease.

Newswatch: If all these were as easy and available as you have told us, why was INEC unable to avail CPC the information they requested when they were in court to challenge the victory of the PDP during the April 2011 presidential election?

Jega: A lot of the things CPC said were political and they were not correct. I would not say that they were lying, but I will say that they were communicating information that was not correct. For example, the first court order we received was that we should make arrangements for CPC to have access to the electoral materials. We got CPC lawyers and the PDP lawyers, and INEC lawyers to sit at an INEC room here. We said we will allow them access to our materials as ordered by the courts but that they should know that these election materials are not here at the headquarters. So, we asked them to develop a schedule where all of them will agree. The idea is that on so and so date, for example, they will be in Kogi or Kwara state, for example and we will ask our officials in those states to provide the materials for them all to see. The materials are basically, the result sheet, the ballot papers, and the ballot boxes. They all sat here to draw an itinerary. But at the right time when they were to go, they jumped out to say they didn’t want to go again to each of the states but that we should bring everything to the headquarters. When we refused because that was not what was agreed, they now went back to court to now tell the court that they now needed access to our biometric data base. We told them that there was a difference between election materials and biometric data base.

The biometric data base contained information that was private and we are expected to protect that information under the law. If we let you have access to the biometric data base, in fact, theoretically, you would be able to identify who voted for whom. And we said that we won’t grant their request. We told them, however, that if we get a court order directing us to release the data they wanted, that we will release them. They went to court and the court refused to allow them to have access to the data base. Having failed to get access to the data base through the court, they now abandoned other things they wanted to do and started blaming INEC. They now told the whole world that INEC denied them access to election materials but refused to explain that what they failed to get, even through the courts was access to our data base.