Kunle Adegoke is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN). In this interview, he examines some of the bills unveiled by the Senate to overhaul the constitution, he speaks extensively on the importance of electronic voting, Diaspora voting, why the National Assembly should consider those bills that can address the needs of the citizens, among others. JOY ANIGBOGU brings the excerpts:
The Senate has unveiled 60 bills to overhaul the constitution, the bills range from state police, state creation, to electoral reforms, diaspora voting, etcetera. Prof. Itse Sagay singled out some of them as exercise in futility. Do you think there are aspects of it that are feasible?
Prof Itse Sagay is a celebrated constitutional lawyer who taught many people who are lawyers today from many institutions and he has been in government before, he probably understands what he is talking about. To a large extent he has some valid points with respect to some areas of constitutional amendments being proposed and are being worked on. The Constitution is not only a living document but a working document, why it’s important for it to be critically examined at any point of a nation’s development, moreso there are criticisms against such a document with the effect of how much it is serving the people over whom it was brought into existence. Probably it was enacted. I believe that the effort being made by the National Assembly is a salutary one. The only thing is that there are aspects that may not be necessary or may not be workable. One of them is the issue of the creation of additional states. A lot of sentiments may be responsible for bringing it as part of the
constitutional reform efforts. One fundamental question to ask before we go into the various areas, how viable will these new states be in the face of existing states, failing the test of viability. Let me talk about the autonomy of the judiciary, the autonomy of local government. The issue of state police, strengthening security in Nigeria because Nigeria is bedeviled by insecurity and to this extent people are being killed in various parts of the country. The Federal Government is working on it but it’ll be good to have a constitution that can substantially address this issue and pave the way for various organs of government to be able to meet the demands of the people. I believe these are some of the fundamental areas that they need to actually concentrate on. Equally, when you look at the issue of fiscal autonomy, this is one of the areas that I believe that the National Assembly should equally critically examine. How much can we say that the existing state enjoys the required autonomy in the federation? We are lucky that we have a judiciary that has been given a lot of freedom to the local government but whose implementation has been bedeviled by challenges in the past one year. We just rely on judicial interventions on some occasions when it is necessary because not all will go to court. If not for the current Attorney General of the Federation and the president that allowed the matter to go to the Supreme Court for determination we wouldn’t be here.
We know that electoral reforms have been sticky points since 2023 elections when we saw some previous reforms in action. The general consensus is that many people were not satisfied when it came to the election itself. We’re also looking at diaspora voting, we’re looking at the prospect of independent candidacy. Can you give your overall take on that?
When it comes to the issue of electoral voting, yes, there are infrastructural challenges that we are currently battling. In fact, the infrastructural challenges caused a lot of disparity between the number of people who registered, people who were actually cleared for voting in terms of accreditation, and, you know, areas where there are no networks and what have you.
These are part of the areas that structurally we need to address so that we can remove the dangers of places where there are no networks and which may render the letters of the law impotent, that they cannot be implemented in the absence of the necessary infrastructural structures that will sustain these things. Because an election is not just a substructure, it is also a superstructure. And a superstructure must effectively have a strong substructure upon which the foundation upon which it is going to rest.
Without that, we are definitely still winking in the dark. When you talk about diaspora participation in elections, there are millions of Nigerians, I’m not too sure of the number, but there are millions of Nigerians who reside in various parts of the world today where there are effective network services that can prop the use of the resource to diaspora voting. To this extent, we need to strengthen at the level of the Nigerian Communications Commission and other organizations vis-à-vis INEC. We need to strengthen those infrastructures that will make it possible for Nigerians residing abroad to be able to participate in the electoral process. We have too many of them out there who love Nigeria, who want to see changes in Nigeria, who want to see progress in Nigeria, because if they can be sending money home and we can be receiving and be enriching our economy, they should have the right to participate in the determination of who governs them because they are still coming home. The Yoruba will say, it is the home that you return to after the farm work. I mean, wherever you are all over the world, you definitely will still want to come back one day. And even if you don’t want to come back, you have relatives who are there at home and whose responsibilities affect your income one way or the other. So they should be given the opportunity to be able to participate in determining who governs them and their people. So I believe it is high time we worked on this aspect as well and ensure that organizations like NCC, the Nigerian Communications Commission, are strengthened enough to be able to make adequate provisions. And when you do this, you agree with me that the dangers, the problems we had at the level of JAMB, for instance, recently, were products of failure of our networks. There are some students who do not access the question papers online as at the time that they were supposed to do so on the computer. By the time some of them got the questions, it was too late. Which are part of the challenges that the network providers are having. And this is why it is important that there must be infrastructural strengthening before we can say we are good to go for diaspora voting.
I want us to look at number one, IReV, there’s been clamor that the IReV should be a coalition unit, as regards the coalition or against the coalition centre. Is there a way we can practically make that subject to the constitution and make it a law? Because most of the elections are rigged at coalition units. You lose your coalition unit, you are gone. Independent candidature is another thing. We should be able to come out and say, okay, vote for me independently, rather than the party dichotomy that happens. Another part of all of this is this laborious process of state creation, which a lot of people say is not viable. Another part of it, as regards the electoral process, is the fact that proper to electronic voting, end-to-end electronic voting, where you have a proper electronic system that you click on something, it counts the votes, and collates it at the same time, and it transfers into a place like the IReV, so having a proper electronic voting machine. In terms of conversation, what would you like to say about that?
Yes, when it comes to electronic voting, I think we have an experience at the level of the Nigerian Bar Association. Unfortunately, the system is still bedeviled with challenges, and there are allegations of rigging here and there. The implication is that electronic voting does not automatically guarantee that there will be absence of rigging. And I think up to about three or four elections now that have been conducted electronically at the level of the Nigerian Bar Association, there are election petitions that have succeeded the exercises. And to that extent, I want to believe that aside from having the law that will guarantee that there should be electronic voting, yes, we can borrow from what has been done at the level of the Nigerian Bar Association, but we should not borrow the negatives.
Because if it is possible to still electronically manipulate the process by which the electronic voting was done, and there are allegations that some people’s votes were being added to a particular candidate, while others are not moving ahead at all, showing a consistent pattern of rigging, definitely there is a danger in this. But at the same time, politicians themselves need to imbibe the spirit of constitutionalism, the spirit of legality that will give effect to this process. Yes, if people can use the Bible and the Koran for negative purposes, they won’t wonder what particular human creation cannot be used for negative purposes. So, an election that is brilliantly couched, fantastically prepared and enacted, if the people that will implement them do not share the spirit of the constitution, definitely there will be a very big problem. So, with respect to electronic voting, IReV and what have you, yes, we can talk about electronic collation, which is supposed to guarantee that there should be less human intervention. In all societies where they have succeeded, they allow the system to work. If the IReV is allowed to be from what you have transmitted from the polling unit goes to the collation center, and is allowed to be added according to how it should be done, we don’t have any problem with the results. But unfortunately, we have human beings that do not want this to be. And so much disheartens me, I am election petition lawyer to a very large extent, and my experience in many parts, House of Assembly, House of Representatives elections, and many others have been subjects of criticism. When it comes to electronic transmission of results, we have a long way to go. I want the National Assembly to work on the constitutional reform, so that we can at least know that we have a document that if allowed to work, there can be a good result.