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We are not failures, academics fire back

By Onyedika Agbedo
25 April 2019   |   3:53 am
Former Chairman of Academic Staff Union of Universities and Independent National Commission (INEC), Prof. Attahiru Jega, has come under fire for calling out university lecturers and vice chancellors who were on election duty as returning officers for the commission, saying they colluded with politicians to rig the 2019 general elections. Jega had recently made the…

Former INEC Chairman, Attahiru Jega

Former Chairman of Academic Staff Union of Universities and Independent National Commission (INEC), Prof. Attahiru Jega, has come under fire for calling out university lecturers and vice chancellors who were on election duty as returning officers for the commission, saying they colluded with politicians to rig the 2019 general elections. Jega had recently made the allegation in Kano, accusing academics of worsening the country’s electoral fortunes.

But in a swift reaction, members of the academia condemned Jega for his unguided utterances and further alleged that under Jega the commission committed grave electoral wrongs that further perpetuate the inbalance in polity.Those who spoke to The Guardian see the allegation against the lecturers as generalisation taken too far. Head of Department of Political Science, Babcock University, Ilishan Remo, Ogun State, Prof. Abiodun Michael Oni, stated: “Nobody directed any lecturer to rig any election. But there are individual differences. We have people with integrity among us and we have people without integrity; there is no doubt about that. But having said that, the number of lecturers that were involved in electoral malpractices might be less than 10 per cent of those that were called to serve.”

Oni called for the investigation of any lecturer who is suspected to have shortchanged the system saying: “I support calls for the investigation of the lecturers that participated in the elections and anyone found guilty should be fired. Thank God that many of them are Federal Government employees. So, they should be investigated and if found culpable should be shown out of the way.”

Former Vice Chancellor of the University of Lagos, Prof. Oye Ibidapo-Obe, on his part, said the allegation that lecturers were compromised was incorrect. Obe, who also served as INEC’s returning officer in Imo State during the 2015 general election, said university lecturers were men of integrity, noting that Nigerians always take delight in ridiculing their institutions.

“I think that allegation is not correct; these are men of integrity,” Obe declared. Also, Prof. Gordini G. Darah of Delta State University, Abraka, expressed a similar view. Darah, a former Editorial Board chairman of The Guardian, particularly described Jega’s allegation as an act of hypocrisy and told him to “apologise to the academics that he insulted. If it was Prof. Attahiru Jega who made the allegation, then it was an act of hypocrisy. I say this because it is disrespectful on the part of Jega to make a general statement that criminalises academics. If he had specified the ward, voting unit or state and then identified the names of those academics, then it will be possible to investigate the allegation. We don’t know what he means by rigging of the election. Rigged in favour of who? In favour of Buhari? He ought to indicate on behalf of whom the rigging was done. If he didn’t indicate that, then he was making a cheap political statement.”

Darah extolled the virtues of Nigerian university dons, saying: “Let us recall that Prof. Jega was chairman of INEC and he was immensely popular at the beginning of his career there, not because of his personal attributes, although he is a scholar of political science. His popularity and high profile arose from having been president of Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). And ASUU, for the past three decades, was known by the Nigerian public as the bastion of integrity, as the only association that had the courage to challenge military dictatorship. ASUU fought vigorously in defence of human rights; ASUU fought on behalf of the oppressed masses. Jega carried this reputation into INEC. That helped him in his work. That heritage was built by these academics that he is now condemning. That’s one point.”

Darah continued: “The next point is that Prof. Jega is not a witness of truth in this matter because under his charge, INEC was notorious for rigging elections. Let me give you two instances. One of them was that before the 2015 elections, Jega’s INEC redistributed voting units in parts of the country. He did it arbitrarily; no scientific criteria were applied. He deliberately awarded the bulk of these voting units to the northern parts of Nigeria. That is rigging of election; he was doing rigging in advance because he gave undue advantage to the area. Arising from this, the charge of under age voters became prominent in Jega’s time. Those under age voters were in the northern parts of Nigeria; they were not in Lagos, Warri, Port Harcourt or Calabar. And it was so dramatic in the presidential election that in Kano, viral photographs of people casting votes who were not qualified to vote were circulating. They were part of the results that Jega delivered.

“The second act of rigging under Jega, which I call electronic rigging, was that under his charge, INEC deliberately denied the release of Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) to areas of the country that they suspected would support president Jonathan. A glaring case was that of Lagos State. If you are an election specialist, you will know that the decisive votes for that Jonathan/Buhari election were going to come from Kano and Lagos states because they had almost equal number of registered voters. More than four million of Lagos voters did not have cards. Once you don’t have cards, you cannot vote and Jega did nothing about it. He was aware of it until the election day. Those people were denied their franchise, thereby giving Kano undue advantage. Go back to the records that came from Kano. The difference between Jonathan’s votes and Buhari’s votes was two million. If Lagos voters had got their PVCs, that gap would not have been there.

“To come back to the charge of academics being used now to compromise the integrity of our elections, most of the past chairmen of INEC had used academics because they are trained; they are intellectuals; they are scholarly; they are diligent; they are analytical and they have capacity to communicate and convince people about the sanctity of figures. INEC has used them in the past decades to advantage and Prof. Jega used them more than anybody else. Can he now swear that none of all the people he involved to conduct elections during his time, whether academics or non-academics, was compromised? Was it only during the 2019 elections conducted by INEC under Yakubu that academics were compromised? I’m saying that the origin and genesis of that abuse is traced to Jega’s time as chairman of INEC.

“So, he is shedding crocodile tears and those of us in ASUU who sacrificed our freedom to build that organisation to be the best, most organised and most reputable union of academics in Africa believe that it was Jega that brought it to ruin. He did it via the involvement of professors and vice chancellors in elections in a country where politicians with money can compromise even gods and the angels. So, let him not transfer his guilt to other people. He was responsible for bringing the academics to a position where they could now be compromised.”

DARAH, who was a delegate to the 2005 and 2014 National Conferences in Abuja, described as irresponsible the call to stop the use of academics for elections in the country.His words: “It is not a responsible demand because all lecturers in our tertiary institutions are not corrupt. We teach the students; we examine them; we certify them. The lecturers handle the entire system of education and intellectual production in the country. I am saying that if you remove the best brains and the most experienced people in doing analysis in figures and so on, the country will even have the worst electoral experience. So, that is scape-goatism.

“The structure of election rigging in Nigeria is deeper than the involvement of academics. The entire Nigerian system is rigged. The 1999 Constitution we are using is a military decree. The population figures we are using to determine who is qualified for election is false; it is rigged. Figures are arbitrarily allocated to areas. Even in this 2019 elections, look at the figures that came from Borno and Yobe States. They were more than figures that came from Lagos and Rivers States.

“So, if we are lucky to undertake the restructuring of the country, throw away this useless constitution, make elections non-commercial enterprises, remove resource ownership and control from the centre so people don’t die fighting civil wars in order to get to the centre and make elected representatives to be on part-time, election rigging will be curtailed in the country. As long as the cabal, the ruling hegemony in Abuja remains in charge of oil and gas resources of the Niger Delta, they will always corrupt the system beyond control. So, let Jega apologise to the academics that he insulted.” Obe also believes that university dons are still the best set of Nigerians that could continue assisting INEC to deliver credible elections to the country.

He queried: “Who else will do it? Which of our institutions can we say is better than these universities in terms of integrity? Let’s be honest with ourselves. Which institution? Is it the police, the army or the civil service? So, that allegation is not correct; it cannot be correct. I mean, people just talk at times for the sake of it. But why do we like to ridicule our best institutions? Why do we like this culture of pull-him-down? We are not facing issues of economy; we are not facing issues of unemployment, hooliganism and gangterism, which have led to kidnapping. We are not facing issues of poverty and hunger. Those are the issues we should be facing as a country. 

“So, they should continue to use academics for the conduct of elections. I wasn’t part of the last election but I know the people that participated were nominated by the various vice chancellors. I think they should continue that. These are people of integrity. “If you bring angels to come and conduct elections in Nigeria, except the angels appointed by God, they might want to do some wuruwuru!”

It could be recalled that in the last 32 years, the headship of INEC had always been drawn from the academics, who in turn fall back on their constituency to appoint those who would help them deliver on their assignment, mainly as returning officers. These include Prof. Eme Awa (1987–1989), Prof. Humphrey Nwosu (1989–1993), Prof. Okon Uya  (1993), Prof. Maurice Iwu (2005–10), Prof. Attahiru Jega (2010–June 2015) and Prof. Mahmood Yakubu (2015– till date).As Nigerians begin to question the methodology of these academics, the shape of future conduct of elections in the country remains uncertain.

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