US embassy cable - 03ABUJA2046

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 ABUJA 002046 
 
SIPDIS 
 
 
E.O. 12958: DECL: 11/19/2013 
TAGS: PHUM, EAID, KDEM, PGOV, NI 
SUBJECT: REVIEW OF INEC'S PERFORMANCE DURING AND SINCE THE 
2003 ELECTION 
 
 
CLASSIFIED BY CDA ROGER MEECE FOR REASONS 1.5 (b) AND (d). 
 
 
1. (C) Summary:  Six months after the April elections, 
Nigeria's Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is 
rather less Independent, and its actions during the 2003 
elections and since raise difficult democracy and rule of law 
questions.  While the elections were less violent than many 
expected, INEC held a flawed first round of elections for the 
National Assembly in April, an apparently even more seriously 
flawed second round of elections for the Governors, Vice 
President and President, and an almost non-existent third 
round for state assemblies.  It never has held the fourth 
round of scheduled elections for local government officials. 
INEC also had great trouble producing materials required by 
Nigeria's election law, especially the national voters 
register, candidates lists, and vote tally sheets.  The 
election results have been contested in court by many losing 
candidates. 
 
 
2. (C) In the most prominent of these, brought by losing 
presidential candidate Buhari, INEC's lawyers deferred 
responding to court subpoenas for months, and then told the 
judges recently that the required documents above still do 
not exist.  In other words, quite separately from the 
democracy issue of whether INEC was involved in rigging the 
election, INEC violated the Rule of Law by not having the 
legally required materials for the election, or it is 
violating the Rule of Law by flouting the court's subpoena, 
or both.  And since the election, the ruling PDP has replaced 
10 of INEC's 12 "Independent" Commissioners with people the 
Opposition (and some PDP members) believe are the President's 
supporters, and then most recently floated proposals that 
would allow the INEC Commissioners to overrule Returning 
Officers in future elections and to de-register what the 
proposal called "erring political parties."  End Summary. 
 
 
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THE ELECTIONS 
------------- 
 
 
3. (C) Logistically, the April 12 National Assembly elections 
were fraught with problems.  The ad hoc staff had little 
understanding of procedures on election day.  INEC, through a 
series of its own failures, was unable to mobilize staff or 
transportation.  The ballot box seals and the security 
envelopes for reporting results were not used in many cases, 
and most are still in warehouses (though available for use in 
subsequent elections).  The April 19 elections for Governors, 
the Vice President and President brought only a few cosmetic 
changes to the logistical side of the process, but 
highlighted a collapse of the supervisory aspect of the 
elections as results were manipulated through the ward 
collation centers, the state elections offices and in Abuja 
at INEC Headquarters itself.  The state assembly elections 
may as well not have taken place, as the lack of preparedness 
was mirrored by far more public apathy than normal on voting 
day in Nigerian elections. 
 
 
4. (C) The EU publicly reported on the presidential election 
that problems in six states were so severe that effectively 
no election was held.  In five other states, the EU cited 
severe problems that effectively negated the elections there. 
 The EU did not limit its criticism to these 11 of Nigeria's 
36 states, and identified specific problems in the other 
states which would have affected the overall results there. 
U.S. Embassy observers at election sites in 14 of the 36 
states witnessed many of the same problems. 
 
 
5. (C) INEC has shown no accountability for any of this to 
the Nigerian public.  There appears to be no cultural 
awareness at the top that change for the better is necessary. 
 The fact that INEC professional staff are working on 
improvements is also not seen by the public. 
 
 
6. (C) Opposition candidates allege that the elections were 
rigged, not merely tarnished by incompetence, and that INEC 
was an active participant in the rigging.  INEC is now a 
defendant in many suits brought in Nigeria's courts against 
various of the 2002 elections, the most prominent of which is 
losing ANPP presidential candidate Buhari's against INEC and 
President Obasanjo.  More than 85 percent of the other suits, 
especially those by less powerful complainants, were 
dismissed by Nigerian lower court judges on "technicalities." 
 
 
------------------ 
RULE OF LAW ISSUES 
------------------ 
 
 
7. (C) Buhari's suit seeks to overturn Obasanjo's election as 
rigged, but a sidebar to that story raises serious Rule of 
Law questions about INEC.  In May, Buhari's lawyers persuaded 
the tribunal to subpoena the national voters register, 
candidate lists, and vote tally sheets from the 2003 
election.  All are items the Election Law requires in order 
to hold the election.  After months of not answering the 
subpoenas, INEC's lawyer this fall told the court that the 
national voters register had not been completed, that the 
tally sheets for the presidential elections were "still being 
produced" and that the various polling station tally sheets 
should not be accepted as legal documents.  "Only the results 
as announced by (INEC Headquarters in) Abuja should be 
considered valid," he averred.  The judges were incredulous. 
As one Federal Court judge asked INEC's attorney, "You could 
announce the (election) results within hours, but after six 
months you can't produce the documents used to arrive at the 
results?" 
 
 
8. (C) Outside the court, INEC Chairman Guobadia commented 
within the past month that INEC is "only now starting to 
collate the registration forms" for the national voters 
register.  The sad story was that the contract for the 
automation of that process was paid in full, but much of the 
equipment either never materialized or was inappropriate for 
the task.  According to one employee of the contractor, the 
company intended to short the contract and never believed 
that its promises were possible given the timeframe and the 
resource constraints.  As more examples of the failures of 
INEC officials come to light, there has been no nationwide 
effort at tracking down the officials who mishandled their 
duties on election days and even fewer efforts to charge any 
of them with the various criminal penalties arising from 
their nonperformance. 
 
 
9. (C) Regardless of the reasons,  INEC is claiming in court 
that items did not exist that are required by law to hold the 
election, and still do not exist.  Buhari's lawyers clearly 
want to use the voters register and tally sheets to show that 
returns gave Obasanjo more votes in various areas than there 
were registered voters, or than the polling stations' tally 
sheets indicated, and they have entered into evidence voters 
register documents and tally sheets obtained by ANPP poll 
observers to make just that democracy point.  But the rule of 
law quandary remains.  It appears INEC either is lying to the 
judges about the documents now, or did not have the documents 
when the law required them at the elections.  Or both. 
 
 
------------------ 
SINCE THE ELECTION 
------------------ 
 
 
10. (C) Not complying with court subpoenas has not been the 
only problem with INEC since the April elections.  This past 
August, the PDP changed ten of twelve INEC Commissioners 
despite opposition from virtually all other parties that the 
new commissioners were supporters of the President, not 
independent.  Several of them were promoted from their 
state-level INEC positions, where they presided over the most 
egregious examples of rigging in the flawed 2003 elections. 
Others are family members of known Obasanjo supporters.  None 
have a reputation which would enable them to carry out any 
semblance of a fair process. 
 
 
11. (C) The PDP rammed the new Commissioners' appointments 
through Senate approval despite a walkout by the entire 
opposition and some PDP members.  The PDP refused to allow 
discussion or even questioning of the candidates by the 
Senate, before or after the walkout, making a shambles of the 
legally mandated confirmation process.  The manipulation was 
so bad that the PDP had difficulty keeping a sufficient 
number of its own members in the Senate session to allow a 
vote.  Not one of the ten new Commissioners is a person 
acceptable to the credible opposition parties. 
 
 
12. (C)  Two months later, new INEC Commissioner Maurice Iwu 
presented a well-publicized proposal for changes in Nigerian 
law to give the now partisan Commissioners new powers "to 
sanction erring political parties, including de-registration" 
and to ensure that INEC Returning Officers, "whose loyalty is 
questionable," should not override or supersede the INEC 
Commissioners in conducting elections -- a case, the reported 
INEC proposal said, "of a hired servant having more powers 
than the master."  INEC Chairman Guobadia told IFES afterward 
that Iwu's proposal was not INEC's position. 
 
 
13. (C) While the proposal from the new Commissioner to give 
the political appointees more authority in deciding how 
elections can be conducted is not a done deal, or even a 
concrete proposal for change, the likelihood that something 
resembling his suggestions is adopted is very high -- even 
despite opposition from within INEC's professional staff.  In 
Nigeria, the normal pattern of change is for a flunky to 
float a controversial idea (sometimes accompanied by denials 
from higher level officials) to soften the blow when the same 
officials steamroll the decision into place. 
 
 
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COMMENT 
------- 
 
 
14. (C) A move to centralize more power from professionals 
and local officials into the hands of the 12 Commissioners 
will be troublesome in any case.  The failure of rigging 
efforts during the April elections in various localities, and 
in the states of Kano and Lagos, were attributed to public 
monitoring and to dedicated lower-level officials who refused 
to act on Abuja's orders on election day. 
 
 
15. (C) INEC's attitude at the tribunals also points to the 
cultural problem within the organization.  By obfuscating and 
delaying, INEC is in no small part responsible for the 
continuing uncertainty over the election result.  If it was 
sincere, INEC would have produced the subpoenaed documents 
and made every effort to assist in determining if the various 
cases had merit.  If INEC were really independent, its own 
interests would be served in cleaning up the various messes 
it left behind in order to win some level of support from a 
public which views it with an ever more jaundiced eye. 
MEECE