On June 30, Professor Attahiru Jega stepped out of office after the expiration of his five-year tenure as chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). He is succeeded by Mrs. Amina Bala Zakari, a Federal Commissioner, appointed by President Muhammadu Buhari in an acting capacity. The erudite scholar has since returned to his natural habitat, the academia, where he made his mark as an intellectual avatar, a courageous administrator and a unionist par excellence.
Jega’s emergence on the electoral scene in mid-2010 was embraced in many quarters with mixed feelings. He became the fifth professor to be so appointed to the sensitive position after Professors Okon Uya, Eme Awa, Humphrey Nwosu and Maurice Iwu in that order.
Jega inherited a most discredited electoral body in the annals of democratic dispensation in Nigeria. His predecessor, Prof. Iwu, who superintended the 2007 polls that ushered in the regime of late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, did not only make a mess of the process but also expose Nigeria to global ridicule. The polls recorded an unprecedented number of election petitions that have thrown up staggered elections till date. The 2007 polls also became a case study and a reference point for fraudulent conduct of elections.
We recall that Prof. Iwu had sworn to conduct a free and fair election “even if that would cost me my life.” In that year’s exercise, more than 90 per cent of registered voters did not have the opportunity to vote.
INEC in collaboration with the then president, governors, ministers, lawmakers, commissioners and their agents compiled fictitious results, at times ahead of the polling day. Many policemen, soldiers, other security agents and politicians’ thugs completed the malfeasance by thumb-printing on ballot papers. Even after the obvious fraud that characterised the process, Iwu continued to insult Nigerians by countering the testimonies of local and international observers – they agreed that the elections were the worst ever conducted in the world – and awarding 80 per cent to himself and the electoral body he supervised. So glaring was the scam that even the late President Yar’Adua, who was a major beneficiary, admitted that the exercise that brought him to power was terribly flawed and promised to reform the process.
It was against that nauseating setting that Professor Jega emerged on the scene. The early months of Jega’s tenure were not a stroll in the garden. He had barely less than 10 months to conduct the 2011 general elections billed to commence in early April which were riddled with hiccups and controversies bordering on voter registration and other logistics. In fact, the first set of elections was cancelled as a result of the failure of the electoral body to get its acts together on time. Eventually, Jega’s INEC weathered the storm and was able to conduct a relatively free and fair exercise, though the outcomes did not go down well with many in some parts of the country as evidenced by the post-election violence that erupted.
After the 2011 baptism of fire, Jega and his team went back to the drawing board and strategised for the next general elections. Consequently, the electoral body came up with a number of innovations aimed at ensuring free and transparent polls ahead of the next national exercise in 2015.
Critical among the new strategies were the introduction of the Permanent Voter Card (PVC) and the card reader machines. The two innovations turned out to be the nemesis of election riggers and fraudsters in Nigeria. When it was obvious that the novelty was going to stand on the way of the ruling party, the PDP, in their scheming to retain power, Jega was harassed and intimidated to jettison the use of the idea but he stuck to his guns even in the face of alleged threat to his life.
Many who knew his antecedents as one that stood up to military dictators when he was the national president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) were not surprised by the courage he exhibited in the heat of the 2015 general elections.
No doubt, Prof. Jega is God’s gift to Nigeria. He is a man of honour and integrity; an epitome of courage whose name would be etched in gold when the history of Nigerian electoral evolution is documented. While wishing him well as he returns to his Bayero University environment to continue where he left off in 2010, it is hoped that his successor will leverage on the legacy he left behind and strive not only to match his records but also surpass them. The Nigerian electorate cannot settle for anything less in subsequent polls.
