Buhari has been messed up; he deserves our pity —Junaid Muhammed

In view of the reasons given for the postponement of the presidential election, did you think the election would still hold today, as rescheduled?
Well, I don’t know more than you do in the sense that I don’t know much. However, I am of the opinion that if it was necessary to reschedule the election as it was done by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), they should have made sure they have more time to effect changes. I believe they could still play with more time, not just one week, but perhaps even two weeks or one month.

Secondly, I also believe that in picking the blame, somebody certainly must accept responsibility for this mess. We also have to look backward beyond INEC and its management. For example, though I cannot confirm this, but I am aware that the Electoral Law provides that ballot papers must not be printed earlier than one month before the election, which means that if the ballot papers were being printed by the Nigerian Security Printing and Minting Company and they needed to follow the law as it stands and they were unable to print not more than 25,000 of the ballot papers, we cannot do an election without the ballot papers which are key and critical to the election but which are not enough to go round the country.

Thirdly, is the interference by the so-called Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP). I think the bureau decided to muscle itself into the operations of INEC. They insisted that certain procedures must be followed, which I agreed with because if INEC is using public money directly from the consolidated revenue fund of the federation, of course, it must do the things right; it must procure whatever it wants to procure up to a certain level in accordance with the law which established BPP.

Now I understand; again, I don’t want to be too emphatic that some of the leakages and some of the problems arising from the last election came from the involvement of non-INEC staff who claimed to have been deployed by the person who is heading the BPP. A lot has happened and a lot is still happening in the process of democratic elections in this country. I prefer that they investigate this thing very thoroughly and the blame needs to be put squarely on those who were responsible so that we can, at least, make progress. Otherwise, I don’t see how we can move forward.

But, I have no doubt in my mind that the one-week postponement was not adequate and I also have no doubt in my mind that the number of ballot papers alleged to have been printed was grossly inadequate. All these issues have to do with logistics. Every election held in this country- I can vividly remember the one of 1959- has been rendered almost inoperable by the problem of the country itself namely, geography, topography and demography. I know of instances, starting with the 1959 elections and other elections thereafter when people who were on queue either to register themselves for subsequent elections or people who had queued up in order to validate their ballot papers, collected them and then went ahead to cast their votes but dropped and died. It happened in all parts of Nigeria.

But luckily enough so far, other than those pockets of violence in areas like Kaduna and, of course, because of irresponsible, reckless and violent statements of some political actors, we have not had that kind of a situation whereby people were rushing and dying because they wanted to vote in an election. I am certain that unless something is done, this thing would become cyclical; that any time we have an election cycle, there is going to be a problem. This is because it seems every time we have an election umpire, that is, INEC, you would find some people posted there which you and I cannot explain why.

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There was a controversial lady who has a link, three years ago and nobody is saying anything. In the process, she was posted to be the Supervising National Commissioner for the South-West and of course, she managed to pick up a lot of controversies. They said she was even friendly with Fayose; not doing a particularly good job in Ekiti. I believe the woman is a pharmacist and I respect pharmacists but I don’t think a pharmacist has a place anywhere in conducting an election. I think they were aware of this lapse and she was deployed to a so-called committee on health. For goodness sake, of what use is a committee on health is to the conduct of elections? If it is a lawyer or social scientist or an economist or a statistician, that would make a sense to me. But certainly, nobody can convince me that in the conduct of an election, you would need somebody who is a doctor or a pharmacist. In these issues and from what I heard, the more you look at this election, the less you see because a lot is happening.

Given what you just said, what did you think may likely happen if the election should fail to hold again?

For goodness sake, I pray that it does not have to go that way; I pray that we would manage to have the election. I hope that the people concerned would get themselves together and decide that what needs to happen should happen. This is not to say that the election must be perfect. Of course, there are assumptions which the INEC management put on themselves. For example, people are saying elections should not be staggered. But as far as I am concerned, historically, there are a number of genuine reasons. Our democracy is like that of India which is used to staggered elections. In India, elections sometimes take up to one month and two months. This is because India has a population of 1.3 billion people; there is a state in the north of that country which has a population of over 300 million people, more than the entire population of Nigeria. Now, if you say these people must conduct their election in one day, then there would never be an election in India. But they have been having elections and those elections have been very much credible in spite of some occasions of violence and combativeness because of their character.

Are you advocating the conduct of staggered elections in Nigeria?

I am not saying staggered elections must be done in Nigeria this time, but I believe it can be done. Please, instead of these disgraceful exercises, we should find means of staggering our elections. As things are now, the Army is stretched, in addition to fighting a war against terrorists in the North-East, some miscreants in the Niger Delta and bandits in the North-Central and, of course, some parts of the North-West; they are already very highly stretched.

The same thing happens to the police; if you look at the number of its men and officers which is just about 400,000, that is a number that is very far from being adequate for a country of this size, of these complexities and of this topography. I don’t think or believe that the police by themselves, without the assistance of the paramilitary and the armed forces, are prepared for the conduct of an election. Elsewhere, you conduct an election without even knowing that there is an army in the country. I look forward to a day when that would happen in our own country where the police, the paramilitary and the army would not be a part of our elections. Such an election would be very credible.

In the midst of the crisis, President Muhammadu Buhari, probably in a bid to stem the increasing cases of ballot box snatching, issued a directive that ballot box snatcher should be shot at sight; what is your stand on this?

I think Buhari spoke in English; you and I are not original speakers of the English Language and my understanding of what he said is not exactly like yours. What I am saying is that there has been a deliberate effort, especially by the media and, of course, by the main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), really to raise this issue to a level it ought not to be raised or reached. So, I don’t want to waste my time on that issue.

But I want to say this: If a law has been violated through non-compliance with certain provisions of either the constitution or the Electoral Law or the Enabling Act of INEC or any other extant law, those concerned must be punished. But their punishment must be circumscribed by what the law provides. I believe ballot box or vote snatching is a crime in our legal system, but I don’t believe that the punishments provided by the law itself include killing people if, indeed, Buhari said kill the people, but I don’t believe he said so. But then, you can give what is called verbal order to shoot at sight those ballot box snatchers. If he said so, I think it is just a reported pronouncement. I think there is an attempt to create mischief, especially on the part of the PDP and a section of the media, but we must be very careful. All of us ought to watch our language because I don’t believe that the Nigerian election itself is worth one human life. But I don’t believe the president was categorical or that he gave the order of shoot to kill.

Even, if he gave the order, how many policemen do we have? How many soldiers, air force men and naval personnel do we have? How many officers of the paramilitary-Customs, Immigrations, Prisons and Civil Defence and even Yellow Fever [traffic warder]- do we have? Are they enough to carry out such an order, if it was to be given or it was true to have been given? I think we should be very careful.

Some people are particularly concerned because they feel there is no clear difference between ballot box snatching and vote buying and the president has been silent on the issue of vote buying, especially as witnessed during the governorship elections in Ekiti and Osun states last year. They are asking, why is the president now coming out to say ‘snatch ballot boxes at the risk of your life’?

Supposing he said, ‘give bribe to voters at the risk of your life’, there is no difference. Both ballot box snatching and vote buying are wrong; both are criminal offences; both have been created as offences by the law and both ought and must be punished whenever the offenders are arrested. But, I have not seen a single case where in Nigeria, in the course of my over 40 years of public life, people who have been caught involved in electoral offences have been taken to court, duly prosecuted and jailed. That has never happened. One is not justifying what Buhari said, now that he is in power, but what is happening is a conspiracy of the elite group. I believe that unless we come together and put our electoral process in order and put men of integrity and people who believe in democracy and in Nigeria in power, there is not going to be a credible election.

The president did not really help matters as he recently said the All Progressives Congress (APC) won the Osun State governorship election through what he described as remote control but which some people regarded as ballot box snatching and vote buying…

Look, I think you people are not being considerate. One, you know this man has problems with his health and with self-expression and you are asking questions about what he said or did not say. What I am saying is that you know that somebody is already infirmed physically and mentally, so raising some of these issues by some people who are not even members of his party, to me, is unfair to him.

Let us go through the electoral process; win or lose, at the end of the day, hopefully, democracy will win and we will have a system which is more acceptable than what we have now. But honestly, what can I do? What can he do? The words were already out and they are never going to be taken back. These things have been said.

The people who messed up the president are those who are with him; people who he brought into his administration — the so-called cabal in the presidency — and for as long as he retains that cabal, his tenure in government, either one term or two terms, is not going to be without an incident.

There will be problems over and over and over and many of them are behaving like upstarts. When I said it exactly three years ago, I attacked viciously the Chief of Staff to the president who is one of the main sources of leakages from the president’s office and he gives order to people without any order or explanation from the president himself. Without getting any clearance from the president, he will ask people to go and speak and when it becomes a problem or an issue, he will pretend and claim that he has never heard of it.

There are so many people like Abba Kyari, the Chief of Staff in the presidency. If I were you, I would pity the man (President Buhari) and I would pity the country more because with characters like Abba Kyari and Babachir Lawal and others around Buhari, you can never run even the most organised and the most educated government in the world. This is because they don’t mean well for the country and they don’t mean well for the president. The level of corruption going on there is almost unbelievable.