By Bob MajiriOghene Etemiku
A few weeks ago while looking through the dailies, attention at the Civil Empowerment and Rule of Law Support Initiative, CERLSI, was drawn to a news item indicative that the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, had at last decided to have a communications policy.
We have said ‘at last’ because from our interactions with the INEC, it did seem that the commission in all its years of existence from 1998 till date, stakeholder and public access to INEC information was based on the whims and caprices of the leadership of the commission.
There has been no template for information dissemination and agglutinate apart from their website. What was even more worrisome is that after the signing of the Freedom of Information into an Act of Parliament in 2011, INEC had no strategy in place for dealing with cases related to the distillation and request for information from stakeholders and members of the public. All it seems to have put in place is a mechanism for addressing election issues only through the law courts, thereby effectively shutting out stakeholders and gagging grievances from members of the public.
We have made the above assertion responsibly, and we will proceed to highlight it with our experience with INEC before, during and after the 2019 general elections. At the core of our existence as an organisation is voter enlightenment and education, a position we hold very dear as a strategy for transparency, accountability in governance, and a driver of the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN.
Therefore, with as much as 198 days (about 8 months) left for 2019 general elections, we wrote to INEC Chairman, on August 7 2018, ‘seeking to participate in all areas of voter education, enlightenment and sensitization matters and election observation monitoring and monitoring programs’. We did not get any response from INEC, not even an acknowledgement of our letter.
With the conviction that the build up to the elections was a bit heavy on the INEC oga, we shifted our attention to the state resident electoral commission in Edo State. Vide a letter dated December 9, 2018 we sought the same thing from the Edo INEC resident commissioner.
Apparently because we were there personally with an acknowledgement copy of our letter, the resident electoral office received our letter on 11th December, 2019. Nevertheless, as the days wore on and we did not receive any word from the commission concerning our request for participation in the voting process, we decided to visit the commission again for feedback on our request to be involved in the voter enlightenment process.
That was when we found out that certain organisations, stakeholders, and civil society groups scheduled to participate in the voter education were already assigned and dispatched to all the local government areas of Edo state. CERLSI met INEC officials in Benin City to find out parameters these assigned organisations met to carry out voter enlightenment.
To our utter dismay, we found out that most of the organisations were friends, cronies or relatives of the officials responsible for recruiting organisations to embark on voter enlightenment. Most collected the stipends for the voter enlightenment campaign, pocketed same and melted into thin air.
CERLSI has protested this shoddy arrangement through a Freedom of Information letter, dated 19th February, 2019. In our letter to INEC Benin, we requested a list of the NGOs and CSOs they recruited for voter education prior to the General Elections. We wanted to find out modalities for their selection, what was contained in their reports and how much they were paid to carry out that exercise.
Eight months after, the INEC in Benin has not responded to our freedom of information request. And this is why we at CERLSI believe that the recent and so-called INEC ‘communications policy’ or strategy has no merit whatsoever. It is one document or policy they have no plan to follow through on or implement.
First, from reading through the ‘communications policy’ on their website, it seems that there are no provisions for its engagement with and response to FOI requests, further raising the question of the genuineness of the intentions of a commission seeking to be fair and just wit election matters.
Secondly, the communications policy makes it clear in its general principles section that all information relating to the Commission’s stakeholders and its operations is confidential. Nobody knows what this means. Essentially, information relating to the commission’s stakeholders and its operations cannot be confidential and hidden from public scrutiny. If information that should be available to the public is shrouded in a ‘confidential’ halo then let heaven help Nigeria.
At CERLSI, we hold that that recently released INEC comms policy is one structured to hide things from Nigerians. If that were not so, they would have responded to our FOI requesting to know the set of conditions voter enlightenment groups for the 2019 general elections were selected.
We declare thus that the massive failure and general apathy that characterized the 2019 general elections, together with the gale of litigations are all symptoms of a system bereft of a very well thought out comms and allied policies and programmes of INEC. The commission would debunk this by first responding to our FOI, and then look to including a clause in their comms strategy or policy that takes care of FOI requests.
Etemiku is deputy executive director, Civil Empowerment & Rule of Law Support Initiative, CERLSI.
