New Telegraph

2023: Nigerians must ensure that electoral offenders suffer penalties –Kukah

Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah is the Bishop of Catholic Diocese of Sokoto and Convener of the National Peace Committee. In this interview monitored on Channels Television, he speaks on the recent peace accord signed by the presidential candidates for the 2023 general election and preparations by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), among other issues. ANAYO EZUGWU reports

Why did you adopt this method of signing a peace accord before the commencement of the campaigns?

If you read the full text of the peace accord, it speaks to two different issues, first is that we spend a lot of time explaining things ordinary people should know. They are the rules of engagement and conduct, which are very basic things of civility that by now we shouldn’t be talking about them. But they still persist in our political situation.

That first part is just to encourage politicians to respect one another, respect the rules of the game and also submit themselves to show commitment to collaborate and cooperate with state agencies in order for this process to be smooth. The second part of the accord speaks to the issues of commitment to accepting the results of the election. After you finish all these, maybe two or three days before the election itself, then we will sign the second component, committing themselves to accept the results of the election if they are adjudged to be free, fair and credible.

Why will they have to wait till a few days before the election to sign the second part of the accord?

Maybe, I have to take you back a little bit, the peace committee was not supposed to be here by now because when Kofi Annan of blessed memory based on his experience from the 2013 election in Kenya, which went very bad and a number of people died, in the Nigerian political system, there was an air of possibilities of all kind of things going wrong in the election. And of course, if you recall, so many things had been expressed in 2011 and then I was summoned by Kofi Annan, who I never met although the conversation started with the Swiss Embassy focusing on what kind of lessons can we learn from Kenya, and how we can make sure that those kinds of things don’t happen.

So, Kofi Annan and Chief Emeka Anyaoku summoned me and we had a conversation at the Transcorp Hilton, I was quite humbled when they proposed that I should convene prominent Nigerians to be able to encourage and help us draw from an inspiration that I had from a conference organized by Chief Ben Obi, which Emeka Anyaoku had the honour of chairing. If you remember, something very significant happened and it was unprecedented, and I can tell you how excited I was to open the newspapers and even on television to see General Muhammadu Buhari and President Goodluck Jonathan hugging one another and those pictures spoke a million words.

So, we then have to take advantage of that and again, happily, President Jonathan had set up the office of inter-party affairs, of which Chief Ben Obi is the chairman. So, that is what brought about the peace accord committee and there was the signing of what we called the Abuja Accord. But there was also a clause that proposed the setting up of a peace committee for the 2015 elections.

The whole idea was to see whether we would help Nigeria walk through these landmines to be sure that the elections didn’t go out of control. After we succeeded, I presumed that we should all shake hands and go home but the chairman then decided that we should have a debriefing among ourselves. And if you see the kind of people who were assembled, they were very busy people and we just assumed that after that everybody would go home but we spoke to the media, civil society groups, Board of Trustees of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and All Progressives Congress (APC), Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Senate President. We had a meeting with President Jonathan and President Buhari, who was just sworn-in and almost everybody said the peace committee must remain and become part and parcel of this process. That is how the journey has continued and brought us to where we are today.

This time around, you had the party chairmen also as part of the signing, is it that they have significant roles to play?

Let me give you an example drawing from the Catholic Church or Christianity. When two people want to get married, there are witnesses and even the priest is an observer of such marriage because it is the two people getting married that will step forward and invite other people. So, the party chairmen are important because they are more or less holding the post and they are more than just witnesses. Those signing the documents are an affirmation of the commitment of the entire party apparatus to submit to the principles that have been laid down. The presidential candidate themselves have to sign and that is why if you noticed, it was the chairman of APC that signed because Bola Tinubu was not present. And of course, there were three other parties that didn’t show up for all kinds of reasons. On balance, we had 15 presidential candidates that showed up and everybody appended their signature. It is really to give you a sense of validation that we are on the right track.

With the national chairman of the APC signing; will it have the same impact as the candidate himself?

Our doors are open for the APC presidential candidate to sign anytime. If you remember, in the 2019 elections, Atiku Abubakar was not available and then his political opponents began to exploit that by saying that he is not committed to peace. And we said that to know that our doors were open and Atiku Abubakar came to the secretariat of the peace committee and appended his signature, the same thing with Oby Ezekwesili. So, our doors are still open and I told the national chairman of APC that if Tinubu comes back from his trip, our doors are open and his signature space is still there.

This time, the candidates will sign twice. Is it that this first part wouldn’t achieve that needed commitment for the election?

We are very much encouraged first of all by the development that has taken place in the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and I would like to actually commend the President and the National Assembly for the process they have made so far in signing the Electoral Act into law. The President has also made a commitment during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), in which he made it very clear that Nigeria is committed to deepening democracy. The real challenge for us is to get the political actors themselves to sign on to this peace accord. Like I said, the first part is a commitment to some of the very basic ingredients of politics.

There are rules for every game but as you can see, we come from a very tortured past where people don’t take the law seriously. Whether it is the constitution or the Electoral Act, our responsibility is to ensure that the actors, in the long run, suffer penalties. And these penalties should include a clear commitment to the things they signed for, to cooperate with the civil authorities, obeying the law and making sure that they don’t instigate violence. I’m hopeful that going forward, if we have a tribunal or a commission dealing with electoral offences, it will be possible to elimi-nate electoral fraud. I speak for the peace committee and indeed Nigerians that our dream is for people to begin to suffer penalties in this country. You can actually have your presidential ticket either you win or lose taken away from you or you can have a gubernatorial ticket taken away from you because you did not play according to the rules of the game. If you score a goal in football match and the fact that there was a foul means that the goal is disallowed. It is almost like a Video Assistant Referee (VAR); that is where we should be moving because we have shown absolutely no commitment to respect for rule of law.

Are you saying that the documents they signed could be a kind of evidence in court concerning whatever they commit themselves to; is it something that would be justiciable in future?

I’m looking forward to that and we cannot live in a country where people like very fragile disobedience to the rule of law. It is just not possible because democracy focuses on rule of law and processes. People cannot just sign up for these things and get away without consequences. I’m really and truly looking forward to a situation where the National Assembly itself is a beneficiary of these processes and is also supposed to be responsible for legislating processes by the quality and the kinds of laws that we make. Yes, that is the target we should be heading for, so that politics would become more respectable and honourable.

If you want to be a mechanic, you will probably show evidence that you have learned the trade somewhere but politics is the only thing you don’t need a qualification to participate in. The result is that especially in the kind of environment we live in Africa, too many criminals have found their way into politics.

So, it is now our responsibility to create the kind of laws and environment that will make it very difficult for criminals to work through this system and that people cannot go away with a prize that is dented. I think that the late President Umaru Yar’Adua of blessed memory was honest enough from day one to say that he won the election but he was worried about the kind of prize he was holding. He promised to set up mechanisms for making sure that we resolve this issue and I was lucky to have been appointed because I served with Justice Mohammed Uwais to look through all these distortions in the law. So, that is a goal we all should be headed for.

How does signing of the peace accord going to play out on the issue of fake news on social media?

The signing, in my view, is symbolic and I think it is also a commitment to good behaviour. There is a lot of domestic violence going around and all the men and women who are involved in domestic violence didn’t sign onto that when they were getting married but they signed to a certain level of commitment and like I say to people, elections are like a wedding because a wedding is not a marriage. A wedding is just a ceremony. So, the election is just a process and as we have seen severally that the promises that politicians make when they are campaigning take a completely different tone when they win the election.

So, sometimes it is important that we understand that people make this promise and they don’t have the intention of keeping their promises but it is our collective vigilance to make sure that we hold their feet to the fire. That is why all of us cannot be spectators and we tend to think that after electing these people, they will be of good conduct but they have shown an inclination to anything of that nature.

It is in our interest, the media, civil society and judiciary to have the confidence to step up and challenge these people when they go wrong. If you talk about the small people in the system; again if you have the institutional capacity that gives you an opportunity to return to the scene of the crime and gather evidence, it means that you will have the opportunity to track and listen to stories of who did what. The important thing is to create the deterrent and to have a deterrent culture. You will never catch every criminal but the law must show qualities that somebody would not get away with a criminal act.

Any day somebody is pulled out of the National Assembly or government house on the ground of established evidence of malpractice; that day people will begin to learn lessons and our democracy will continue to grow. We can move away from this obsession of calling religious leaders because politics is not about moral appeal but about laws and enforcement of laws.

One of the presidential candidates said that the signing of the peace accord shows that elections in this country are war; does this worry you and what is your thought in that regard?

The President delivered a speech at UNGA and it was a fantastic speech but it also speaks to the fact that he is not making excuses because we cannot be part of the international community and involve in making excuses. The quality of our democracy does not meet even local standards; that is the truth of the matter. We are operating in a very convoluted environment. Look at Kenya for example, they made a lot of mistakes but guess what, Kenya has had five or so presidents since their independence on December 13, 1963. Jomo Kenyatta was prime minister for one year then he became the president. But when you transform that to Nigeria, we can’t even speak of Nigerian presidents because there is a convoluted vocabulary, there are presidents, heads of state, military presidents and heads of government, and so we don’t even have that sequence in the conversation.

The point is that in every sense of the world, very few African countries have such a past as Nigeria has, the series of military coups, the distortion of the political environment, the lack of commitment to law and due process, the inability of this country having a very steady National Assembly. The result is that we are where we are today. So, the National Peace Committee in my own view is like a midwife. By now, we should have been out of the way and I don’t imagine that we will continue to remain embedded in the political processes of Nigeria. But the truth of the matter is that the Nigerian political elite have shown no commitment to the rules of the game of politics.

There are too many people who just see politics as a transaction. Just imagine an entry fee of N100 million to be able to buy a form. Imagine the huge amount of money that people are asked to pay. It is just like going to a nightclub; if you charge that much fee what are you going to expect when you enter the hall? We are now hearing the stories of problems of vote buying and so on.

If it costs so much to enter the door, how would you expect anything less? So, the peace committee is a moral authority encouraging our political class but sooner than later, it is important that Nigerians take full charge of insisting on minimum conduct that is acceptable to us as a people because of what is going on in Nigeria in the name of politics falls far below the threshold.

In 2015, President Jonathan congratulated President Buhari and that was a game changer to the way we do things in Nigeria. Would you consider that culture now in our political system?

The Jonathan scenario is totally different and I don’t what to say that there is no one like Jonathan anymore but it is about character. I think Jonathan’s advantage apart from his personal conviction was that he came from a background that didn’t threaten anybody. I say this because, in hegemonic politics, which is the politics of dominant groups whether they are ethnically base or religiously based, whichever way they conceive, they are hegemony and have consequences. So, if you want to break away from that, it has consequences. The Ijaws didn’t threaten anybody and they have not created hegemony.

Now, with a president from Northern Nigeria, the only thing you need to do is to sit back and see the argument since Jonathan took over from Yar’Adua. Most of that conversation is still playing out today and I think that President Jonathan is significant in laying the fact that he contested an election, it wasn’t as if it is like Buhari, who do not have any other chance of another term because that induces a certain kind of behaviour that is not the same as when you are contesting. What Jonathan did, the significance is profound but you can trace the trajectory because if you are a president from the northern part or the Suth-West or South-East, these hegemonic blocs sometimes will not allow you to give up power because of the benefits of the entire group of people. To answer your question, it comes down to what kind of convictions do people have.

Jonathan made a point that his ambition does not worth the blood of any citizen. We have a system in which for many politicians, there is no limit to ambition as long as they are alive. Nigerians are always quick to call themselves giants of Africa but we are nowhere close to that otherwise we will not be having this conversation. Again the Nigerian political environment is peculiar and it is not like any other environment like Kenya. This is Nigeria where stealing of resources thrives and thieves are in political positions; where people show you very clearly that you are not expected to occupy political office and come out empty-handed. We are saying that we are running out of resources in Nigeria but there is still a lot to be stolen otherwise all these people running around to govern us would not be here.

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