Election rigging: Universities should reply Obi, by Tonnie Iredia

A scathing recent remark by the presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress NDC, Mr. Peter Obi that Nigerian professors now help illiterates to rig elections in the country must have disconcerted many citizens.  It is certainly a remark which keeps Nigeria quite low in the comity of nations more so as it shows the irony of the most read serving the unethical needs of the least read. It is however doubtful if professors go all out to look for only illiterates to offer such patronizing service to. The truth of the matter is that what is pushing the affected professors is greed and not the status of the recipients of the service. It is clear that in a bid to make additional money for themselves, the professors are working for whoever can pay for the service whether such ‘masters’ are illiterates or not. They are indeed working for the highest bidder; meaning they can gain from more than one customer.

Such commercialists are not in the least bothered about the implications of their actions especially the effect the posture has for their country. What is in it for me, as the saying goes is what motivates the conduct which seems to suggest that it is a way of life that will persist no matter who is condemning it. In truth, Peter Obi was not the first to highlight the condescending act. Earlier in the year, a former Vice-Chancellor of the Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, Professor Chinedum Nwajiuba called for a halt to the practice of engaging Nigerian professors for election duties. He made the call in a lecture he delivered last February as part of programmes marking the end of the administration of the Vice-Chancellor of the Michael Okpara University of Agriculture Umudike, Professor Maduebibisi Ofo Iwe.

Nwajiuba, condemned the apparent eagerness of high-ranking academics to serve as electoral officials, saying that it has considerably diminished their status. He cited some instances when highly regarded academics ended up messing their hard-earned images while performing election duties for INEC and getting caught enmeshed in political intrigues. According to the former VC, “we saw in a governorship election in 2019, a Vice-Chancelor who obtained a first class in mathematics, with a PhD in mathematics and who became a professor of mathematics, but unable to correctly work out, two-thirds of 27 local government areas of a state…. at a review of the 2019 elections, in a meeting held at Radisson Blue Hotel Ikeja, with foreign partners present, it was truly embarrassing.”

The poor showing at Ikeja could not have been poorer than what the entire nation saw with many professors who served as returning officers finding it difficult to read out figures they wrote by themselves as votes scored by different candidates in an election. In another clime, the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC would have put a halt to the indiscriminate use of Vice-Chancellors of federal universities as returning officers for general elections. Top-ranking lecturers on their part would not have needed any call for them to see why they should reject such assignments. But we can conclusively say that our university chieftains are not likely to listen to Nwajiuba or other analysts. After all, their umbrella body, the Academic Staff Union of Universities ASUU had earlier similarly publicised the same admonition but in vain.

It would be recalled that ASUU itself stopped the policy of participating or deploying members as a union to election duties after finding the general election structure flawed. It ruled that any set of university lecturers serving as returning or collation officers for INEC were ‘doing so on their own accord rather than as an institutional representative of ASUU.’ This sounds funny because ASUU is saying that if a lecturer misbehaves at a public function, it will have no negative effect on ASUU, it is only the lecturer that would be disgraced. It would appear that our universities as institutions have the same opinion and as such do not bother about the shame that debased lecturers bring back from election duties. If so, how are such lecturers able to participate in determining students who excelled in knowledge and character?

When Professor Attahiru Jega became the chairman of INEC, he introduced the policy of deploying university lecturers as returning officers to boost the credibility of the electoral body. The policy, assumed that highly educated individuals would possess the moral integrity to resist political manipulation. Those of us who knew that the assumption was unduly simplistic wondered how such a conclusion was easily arrived at. Were all the abuses in our universities especially examination malpractices done by ghosts, farmers and other persons outside the universities?  Well, within one election cycle, we were proved right. Jega himself publicly lamented that certain academics compromised their positions by colluding with politicians to manipulate electoral outcomes.

Initially, the nation was misled into believing that the high-ranking academics only announced what was sent to them until we got to the peak in which courts convicted professors for manufacturing figures different from those sent to them from collation centres. In other words, there were professors who personally controlled the manipulation. Although many of them were helped out of the hook, the few that were convicted established beyond reasonable doubt that to be a professor does not create any immunity around the holder which stops him from being a bad influence on society. For those who had the misfortune of serving in locations supervised by activists like Mike Igini, it was just impossible to get out of trouble. They were duly prosecuted, convicted and sent to jail rubbishing all their academic laurels.

In the Southeast, a human rights Organization, under the name, International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety) commissioned an independent investigation which revealed scores of Vice-Chancellors/Professors and others who were behind the reported rigging of the 2023 Polls in the region. The group named citizens that helped to rig the general elections of 2023. At the same time, the group spent ample time eulogising some people in the academic community who refused to be part of fake results. Among them were: Prof. Nnenna Oti, Vice Chancellor of Federal University of Science and Technology FUTO, Owerri, Prof. Charles Esimone, VC-Nnamdi Azikiwe University, UNIZIK, Awka, Prof Maduebibisi Iwe, VC- Federal University of Agriculture, Umudike, Abia state, and Prof. Uzochukwu, Resident Electoral Commissioner REC for Abia state.

The point to be made is that every profession or group has its bad eggs. It is therefore wrong to condemn a group because of such a segment, no matter the size. Today, many people are unsettled by many judicial decisions especially those that are usually overturned by the higher courts. Despite such infamous judgments greatly increasing by the day and causing severe concerns to some people, we still have to recognize that not everyone in the sector has become mad. There are still a few who continue to give of their best. What this suggests is that we cannot keep to the idea of getting university officials to help solve our election debacle which has been greatly compounded by them. To do so is to continue to do the same thing while expecting a different result.

The blind can now see that the old idea that the academic community is the model which the rest of society should emulate is stale. We need to design better modalities for identifying people of integrity in our society that can be trusted to take society away from certain ills. Painfully, the universities have chosen to be silent as if that can redeem the damaged image foisted on them by some of their greedy and irrational members. Gone were the days when our universities stood in unison against societal ills – unacceptable decisions affecting not the universities particularly but the nation in general. For instance, it was the critical segments of our universities that stopped the obnoxious Anglo-Nigeria Defence Pact of 1961.

Peter Obi and other critics who have openly condemned the new posture of our universities for being part of the unacceptable conduct of falsifying election results must get a reply. The academia must be active in bringing the discredit to an end because it was super active in elevating it to its current high degree. Our universities will keep a dented image if they continue to pretend that what lecturers are known for now in election is caused by the individual lecturers and not their institutions. There is no gain in playing the ostrich.

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