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The 2011 general
elections have come and gone, the exercise was adjudged by many as the
freest and fairest poll in the history of Nigeria’s democracy. However,
some candidates and political parties felt cheated and claimed that the
elections were marred with a lot of irregularities and have gone before
the election petition tribunals to challenge some of the results at the
poll.

The Chief Justice
of Nigeria (CJN), Aloysius Katsina-Alu, in conformity with the 2010
Electoral Act as amended recently constituted 210 judicial officers
selected as chairmen and members of the election tribunals for the 36
states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory.

The CJN had said
“In Nigeria, allegations of corruption have in recent past, placed the
role of Election Tribunal in jeopardy. Election petitions, just like
the ordinary day-to-day civil cases, are intended to be dealt with by
tribunals consistently fair, without bias or impartiality.” Mr
Katsina-Alu asked the judicial officers to bear in mind that when
election petition tribunals fail in their duties, the consequences will
be murder, arson, and grievous bodily harm.

With the time for
the filing of petitions by political parties now over, all is now set
for the election petition tribunals to begin work.

The Congress for
Progressive Change (CPC) filed a petition at the presidential election
tribunal to challenge the result of the April presidential election,
alleging irregularities and noncompliance with the 2010 Electoral Act.

The party is
contesting the result of the election in about 20 states of the
federation, cutting across the six geopolitical zones. The CPC
presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, told journalists shortly
after casting his vote in Daura, Katsina State that thumb-printed
ballot papers were used in several states.

The national
chairperson of the CPC, Tony Momoh, said the party was challenging the
results of the 2011 presidential election that returned President
Goodluck Jonathan to show the world that the election was fundamentally
flawed.

Speaking after the
party filed its petition at the presidential election tribunal, Mr
Momoh noted that the party was asking the tribunal to cancel results in
over 20 states of the federation, mostly in the South-South, Southeast,
and some parts of the North and the Southwest.

According to the
result announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission
(INEC), Mr Jonathan polled a total of 22,495,187 votes to defeat CPC’s
Muhammadu Buhari, who got 12,214,853. Nuhu Ribadu of the Action
congress of Nigeria (ACN) got 2,790,151 votes while Ibrahim Shekarau
got 917,012 votes. The total valid votes were 38,209,978.

Section 134 of the
Electoral Act 2010 as amended stipulates that “an election tribunal
shall deliver its judgment on a case within 180 days (six months) from
the date of the filing of the petition.” It also stipulates that the
petitions be filed within 21 days after the elections. “An appeal from
a decision of an election tribunal or court shall be heard and disposed
of within 60 days (two months) from the date of the delivery of
judgment of the tribunal.”

Wasting time

Though the CPC has
filed its petition challenging the result of the election, the
Presidential Election Petition panel is yet to be inaugurated 30 days
after the presidential election was held, even though the party met the
condition of the Electoral Act which stipulates that the petitions be
filed within 21 days after the elections. With the delay in the
inauguration of the panel, many are wondering if the Presidential
Election Tribunal will meet the provisions of the act which says “an
election tribunal shall deliver its judgment on a case within 180 days
(six months) from the date of the filing of the petition.” The CPC had
filed an application before the Presidential Election Tribunal sitting
at the Court of Appeal, Abuja seeking to compel the Independent
National Electoral Commission (INEC) and all its Resident Electoral
Commissioners to release certain documents and materials to be used for
its petition. Joined as defendants in the suit are the Independent
National Electoral Commission (INEC), Chief National Electoral
Commissioner (Attahiru Jega), Goodluck Jonathan, Namadi Sambo, Peoples
Democratic Party (PDP) and the Resident Electoral Commissioners for the
36 states including the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

When asked for his
comment on whether there would be enough time to dispose of the cases
before swearing in of the elected officials, Kayode Ajulo, an FCT
senatorial candidate for the Labour Party and a lawyer, said there is
controversy over the period to conclude the election petition cases at
the Election Petition Tribunals. He said the 2010 Electoral Act as
amended says all election petitions must be filed not later than 30
days from the date of return (from the day the result of election was
declared).

According to him,
the period for the filing of cases is too short considering the
electoral guidelines that require front-loading of evidence to be
relied upon. “With the new electoral guidelines that require front
loading of evidence, the time for filing and determination of the
petition is to short, considering that you need time to gather your
evidence from the party agents who were on the field. And considering
also that some people will want to hide some evidence especially INEC,
it will take some time before you will be able to get documents from
the commission, so I believe the time stipulated by the Electoral Act
is too short.”

Mr Adegboye
Awomolo, one of the leading counsel to INEC, said the confusion over
the issue of duration is caused by the fact that there are many pirated
copies of the Electoral Act in the market; that unless one sees the
gazetted copy one cannot say which one is correct.

Controversy over
duration In his own response a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Mike
Ozekhome, said section 142 of the act says “Without prejudice to the
provisions of section 294(1) of the Constitution of the Federal
Republic of Nigeria, an election petition and appeal arising therefrom
under this Act shall be giving accelerated hearing and shall have
precedence over all other cases or matters before the Tribunal or
Court.” According to him, with that section it is expected that the
tribunals will round off within a reasonable period of time and that
even if there was any delay it would be minimal.

The national legal
adviser of the CPC, Abubakar Malami, said recently that based on
lessons learned from past election tribunal cases, the party would use
scientific means to prove its case at the tribunal. “This case will
therefore depend mainly on the authentication and verification of the
fingerprints on the disputed ballot papers cast.”

“To the CPC, this
use of the Forensic/Biometric system based on INEC’s capturing of all
the 10 fingers of every voter is a novel idea that can help solve
forever the challenges of multiple voting and outright concoction of
results; two critical issues in our electoral malpractices,” Mr Malami
said.

“Our present case
in the tribunal is thus aimed at establishing the truth and preventing
future elections malpractices in our country’s democratic experiment,”
he added.

Explaining the
legal backing for this, Mr Ozekhome said section 151(1) of the Act
gives power to the tribunal for “An order for inspection of a polling
document or an inspection of a document or any other packet in the
custody of the chief National Electoral Commissioner or any other
officer of the commission may be made by the election tribunal or the
court if it is satisfied that the inspection is required for the
purpose of instituting, maintaining or defending an election petition.”

He submitted that
given the time that would be spent on inspection of electoral
materials, the tribunal may not be able to deliver its judgment on a
case within 180 days (six months) from the date of the filing of the
petition.

In the light of
this limitation, it remains to be seen whether the parties aggrieved
over the outcome of the general elections and which have piled up
evidence to prove their cases, would see justice done at the end of the
day.

Vice President of the World Bank, Oby Ezekwesili, speaks to our reporter in Cape Town, South Africa. Excerpts below.

Economic competitiveness in Africa

Looking at the many
indicators of economic competitiveness, one will see a whole range of
things that have to do with the quality of the country’s macro-economic
and sectoral policies and institutions, as well as governance and
regulatory systems, particularly the cost of doing business in one’s
neighbourhood.

In all these,
Nigeria still has a huge agenda to accomplish and the areas of specific
focus are numerous. Therefore, the earlier the government starts to
tackle these obstacles and constraints to business, the better for the
country.

Productivity does
not just happen without those obstacles being tackled. When one looks
at the progress recorded so far in the information, communication and
technology as well as the telecommunications sectors, for example, it
was because there were important policies and regulatory systems put in
place by the government for the private sector to see the signals and
move in to invest.

However, in the
energy sector, the situation is in the opposite direction. Even with an
important piece of legislation, really operationalizing the Energy
Sector Reform Act has not happened, because the Petroleum Industry Bill
(PIB) is still pending before the National Assembly for approval. So,
that gap is there. Therefore, private capital will not go into that
sector until the confidence about trustworthy and credible regulatory
systems as well as the legal framework is in place.

Gaps in useful skills

If one looks at the
issues about the human capacity, the skills and entrepreneurship
matters a lot for productivity. Nigeria is struggling with skills
adequacy, particularly the quality and their relevance to areas of
need, because of the poor state of her education system. The issue of
infrastructure deficit in general is huge, and the government needs to
address this as urgently as possible. For a nation like Nigeria, the
4,000 mega watts (MW) of electricity currently being generated and
distributed is just inadequate to power the economy and drive
productivity in key sectors.

Looking at the
important sectors like agriculture, which accounts for some 45 percent
of the gross national product (GDP), enough focus is not given to
ensure that all obstacles to its growth are removed. But, one thing
that one knows for a fact is that institutions, policies and good
quality, effective and efficient public investments are the key things
needed to facilitate the process of economic growth in any country.
Priority for the economy The government must pursue an all-inclusive
growth of the country’s economy.

This is essentially
saying that government should not desire the growth to only affect a
small section of the population, but everybody.

When one looks at
most economies in Africa with natural resource endowments, the tendency
is for them to allow that sector to be the only game in town.

In the case of
Nigeria, petroleum has been the dominant natural resource, and
government tends to focus all its attention to this sector, to the
neglect of the other key sectors. But, government needs a change
towards diversifying the structure of the economy. For so long, the
continent, and Nigeria in particular, has talked about diversification,
but this does not just happen.

There are certain
important policies and measures that the government needs to take to
bring it on. In the agriculture sector, for instance, which is still
the mainstay of more than 60 percent of the country’s population, what
quality of policies does the government have? Or what kind of framework
for investment is in place? What kind of institutions are there to
enable the regulatory underpinnings of a functional agriculture sector?
By the way, the agriculture sector in Africa, based on the World Bank’s
analysis, is the most viable private sector, and government needs to
see it as such, because it is business.

Right now, what
countries are learning is that, if one follows the World Bank
Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which
looks at agriculture from four principle pillars, namely markets and
infrastructure, land and water management, food security and
vulnerability as well as technology and research, one would ensure that
the quality of investments, institutions and policies that enable the
interaction between the farmers and the private sector, whether in
terms of the commercial agriculture investment and the role of the
government as well as the systems that allow these interactions to
function in a coherent manner to support agricultural expansion and
productivity as well as improvement in the yield from agriculture.

If government wants
to address the joblessness situation in the continent, and Nigeria in
particular, the agricultural sector is where focus needs to be on, to
remove all the bottlenecks and constraints to operators in that sector.

One cannot use
platitudes to do it. It must be through concrete and specific
strategies. Nigerians in Diaspora and infrastructure development The
World Bank is currently working on the possibility of establishing
Diaspora bonds as a response to resource gaps in dealing with the
challenges of infrastructural development. Africa has a need to spend
some $93billion annually on this. But, currently about $45billion is
being spent, leaving an additional need for about $48billion. When one
looks at the sources of domestic revenue mobilization by governments in
Africa, it is probably hitting the limits of what they can have.

So, it requires the private sector to come in as a part of the combination to tackle the infrastructure deficit.

But, as part of
that private sector initiative, there is a huge population of citizens
of the continent that are in other territories of the world, who are
remitting an average of $23billion into the continent. Therefore, they
represent a very important growth population to target, to see how much
more can be raised to help address these development finance gaps that
the continent has.

The bank is still
looking at how that process could be facilitated through countries
floating those kinds of bonds for their own citizens abroad to
subscribe.

The technicalities
of how the process will work are still being worked out, to identify
the incentives that would underpin the attractiveness of those kinds of
bond instruments. But, the theoretical construct is that these
remittances happen, though, sadly, right now they go towards
consumption, and that there is some space for determining how much of
the money spent can be redirected into the process of building some
medium to long term funds required for investment in the continent’s
development process.

The countries that
have done that are those that have moved ahead, namely Kenya, Zambia,
Liberia, and Sierra Leone, where the policy environment towards their
Diaspora is very strong.

These countries are
providing the capacity and training their Diaspora get exposed to that
is fundamentally global class, which makes a big difference to the
quality of governance. The World Bank hopes to partner with the African
Development Bank (ADB) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

Since 2007, it was
discovered that the Diaspora was an important development community
that was missing in the World Bank’s engagement and relationship with
Africa. But, over the last few years, the bank’s relationship with the
Diaspora has grown significantly.

World Bank and women in Africa

The bank’s 2012
flagship report, The World Development Report (WDR), is going to be on
gender, focusing on the many levels of the optimal and productive use
of women in economic policy development to bring about growth.

The report will be
looking at the issues that have to do with access to quality education,
training and finance as well as related kinds of issues. It will also
look at the involvement of women in the whole policy arena in decision
making as well as the impact of education to health outcomes.

What we see is that
when women are educated, they tend to delay decisions on certain issues
till such a time they can make the right choices, particularly the
decision on when to get married. So, they are not like people who do
not have any choice. And that is important, because then it will enable
the woman to make the right choices concerning her children’s education
and their health needs.

All these work
together to improve the possibilities of accomplishments of the
families, and by extension, the society. Therefore, the woman is a
major factor in economic development, which is why it is normally said
that investing in women is smart economics. It is not something one
does on the basis of sentiments, because 50 percent of the population
is women.

If one does not invest in women and get them to the point where they
are participants in the economic growth strategy, to enable them
deliver at their best, one is basically operating at less than optimum.

Some senators-elect
from the north central region of the country converged Friday on the
senate press centre to address journalists on their preferred choice of
senate president for the next senate session.

It turned out that
they want David Mark, the incumbent senate president representing Benue
South senatorial district, to lead the seventh senate. This declaration
of support is coming after the ceding of the post to the zone by the
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

According to the
senators-elect, Mr Mark has led the national assembly successfully. “He
was able to introduce the ‘doctrine of necessity’ to resolve a near
political crisis that almost tore Nigeria (apart) last year through his
doggedness and commitment to ensuring that Nigeria moves forward,” said
one of them, Zainab Kure (PDP – Niger South).

The endorsement of
the incumbent senate president to lead the next senate by
senators-elect from his region was the climax of a series of public
endorsements and antics by the incumbent senate president to ensure his
re-election into office, which would be a record.

Mr Mark has had his
sight set on leading the next senate from way back as the last quarter
of 2010; he has carefully orchestrated his manoeuvres ever since.

His first
endorsement came late last year when he supposedly entered into an
agreement with the president for mutual support to reclaim their
respective offices. The frequency of endorsements has surged since he
secured re-election to be a member of the next senate.

Mr Mark is also
said to have won the favour of his party for the job following a recent
power-sharing deal which doled out the senate presidency to the north
central region of the country.

Open campaign

On June 6, when the
seventh session will convene for the first time to elect its leaders,
only the 109 senators-elect will be voting to decide who leads the
seventh senate. But the heated campaign for who holds the prestigious
office in the senate has gone beyond the senators-elect themselves to
the general public. Mr Mark is clearly ahead of other contenders in
popularity rating as well as a recently popularised merit-based
requirement for the next senate president. He is also the favourite
amongst his peers, the returning 39 senators to the next senate. He is
however not relenting on his campaign and acquiring endorsements from
all over.

Groups ranging from
Idoma professors from his district, to former colleagues at the senate,
have all supported his bid at various points. They have avoided public
support for his rivals, Bukola Saraki and Danjuma Goje, outgoing
governors of Kwara and Gombe State, respectively, both of whom have had
to carry out their campaigns through lobbyists.

National Assembly
workers were stunned at the close of work on Thursday to find pamphlets
stuck to their cars titled, “Eight Basic Reasons Why Sen. David Mark
Should Return as President of the Seventh Senate.” Most workers were
agreed it was a new twist in the campaign for the position of senate
president.

Mr Mark is being
praised especially for the stability of the senate under his reign.
Suleiman Adokwe, a re-elected senator (PDP – Nasarawa South), said on
Friday that “since we no longer experience frequent changes in the
leadership of the senate, it means we have found the formula.”

Unnecessary rule-tweaking

The efforts of the
senate president to make his way back to the most prestigious office
will come to a head on Tuesday this week when the senate intends to
adopt an amendment to the standing rules in a way that will place other
rivals at a disadvantage.

The proposed rule
will replace Rule 97[1][f] of the current standing order of the senate.
The new rule introduces a ranking system through which senators can
aspire for prestigious offices in the senate. It ranks experienced
lawmakers before first-timers without legislative experience, placing
the latter as last and least eligible to aspire to high offices in the
senate.

At the top of the
rank are senators returning, and based on the number of times
re-elected; this is where the sitting senate president belongs. They
are followed by senators who had been members of the House of
Representatives.

Third on the
ranking are senators who have been members of a State House of assembly
or any legislative house. The least in the ranking system are senators
getting elected for the first time – where Messrs Goje and Saraki both
belong.

Analysts are of the
opinion that tweaking the rules to favour the incumbent is unnecessary
at this point, considering the senate president’s virtues.

However, the senate
president is not leaving anything to chance. He has also reached out to
opposition lawmakers who will be members of the seventh senate.

A “Door 2 Door for
Mark 2011” campaign organisation was recently co-opted into the
re-election efforts. Its members undertook the pamphlet placement
campaign on Thursday on the premises of the national assembly.

This week, all the
elected lawmakers will be retreating to the central points in their
respective geopolitical zones; the campaigns are bound to continue at
these places. An official of the senate, who did not want his name
mentioned, said the incumbent “will leave no stone unturned” in his
quest.

Ayogu Eze, the senate spokesperson and a strong promoter of the
incumbent’s second term bid, on Thursday belittled every other
contestant eyeing the post as he declared Mr Mark the clear favourite
for the office, saying, “There is no contest for the senate president’s
office.”