Nigeria will be at the risk of plunging into crisis that could turn it into another Somalia if provisions of the laws are not respected in the 2011 elections, former Head of State General Muhammadu Buhari said yesterday.
Buhari, who was speaking in Abuja at the public hearing on electoral reform and constitution review bills organised by the House of Representatives, said the problem of the election system was really not about the laws but about the leadership and the elite.
The House Ad-Hoc Committee on Constitution Review is holding hearings to collate views on a constitution review bill and five other bills bordering on electoral reform sent to the National Assembly by President Umaru Yar’adua.
Buhari said he feared that Nigeria could become lawless and ungovernable in 2011 if the due process was not respected in the elections.
“I’m building around Nigeria’s global way of rationalising incompetence. By this I mean people are saying well, we are hungry, some will say because we’re from different tribes, people will say because we are from different religions. I am saying this is all because of the incompetence of the elite.
“That is why I gave the example of Somalia, which is about one ethnic group and same religion. But they managed to kill their country. For 18 years Somalia is an unknown country. But if you talk to a Nigerian he will be quick to jump to say that somebody hates him because he is either Hausa/Fulani or because he is Igbo and so on,” he said.
The former presidential candidate of the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) in the 2007 election said the problem bedeviling the country is the greed and corruption of the elite, and not poverty and illiteracy.
Buhari said the elections laws are good in themselves and that the problem is non-adherence to these laws.
He said apart from the constitution and the INEC Act, “for 2003 election, there was 2002 Electoral Act, and 2007 election there was 2006 Electoral Act. These five documents are good enough, now we’re wasting so much time to reform what we have not even practiced. We didn’t even allow those five documents to work according to our own laws. So I am warning the Nigerian elite, certainly myself is inclusive by any standard, that if we want our own country we have to be much more serious,” he said.
Earlier at the public hearing, former Secretary to the Government of the Federation Chief Olu Falae, on behalf of the Mega Submit Movement (MSM), said they adopted the Justice Muhammad Uwais committee report on electoral reform, saying without credible election there would be no democracy.
Falae, one-time presidential candidate of the Alliance for Democracy (AD), suggested that in subsequent elections litigations the onus of proof should be on the INEC and not on the petitioner because, he added, petitioners find it difficult to get electoral materials used for elections.
Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole said he opposed allowing independent candidates in future elections because there were many political parties for interested persons to join and that allowing independent candidates would make the process cumbersome.