The INEC has been in the eye of the storm over the
announcement by its Chairman that Commissioner
Amina Zakari will Head an in-house committee to
oversee the management/ administration of the
elections day facility/Collation Centre at the
International Conference Centre. The main
opposition party, the PDP in rejecting this
appointment cited the fact of Amina Zakari’s
relationship by marriage to the president.
Although the INEC Chairman has given extensive
clarifications that the Committee’s work amounts
more or less to a Floor Manager’s role during an
event, the PDP is having none of that , instead
hinting that the INEC Chairman was acting out some
hidden script that was authored by the ruling party
to undermine the outcome of the 2019 General
Elections. Perhaps, this intervention would not have
been necessary if the highly respected Timi Frank, a
man not known to engage in frivolities, had not
alluded to some secret meeting in the Villa attended
by the INEC Chairman in the company of Amina
Zakari with the Chief of Staff to the president
wherein the INEC Chairman was "instructed" to
appoint Amina to the said Committee and to
ostensibly reverse the committee reshuffling that
saw Amina lose her Headship of the Elections
Operations and Logistics Committee.
The PDP and its surrogates banking on the
conservative nature of the Elections Management
Body(EMB), especially its resolve not to engage
political parties in any media wars are fouling the
already charged political air with outright
falsehoods and the dangerous weaving of contrived
conspiracies that are capable of eroding the
credibility that every EMB should have as elections
approach. While I do not speak for the INEC or
indeed, its Chairman, I consider myself a
stakeholder in the Nigerian project, especially on
issues of elections given my membership of the
PDP since 1998 and also my over two decades of
participation in elections in Nigeria as an Observer
and expert commentator on politics and democracy.
I have therefore decided to take a moral stand to
unwrap the real sinister intentions of those who
resort to deliberately maligning institutions of State
in the hope of gaining or scoring cheap political
points. The purpose of this intervention will,
therefore, be to unravel who the real Amina Zakari is
and whose interests she has been protecting all
through her career in the INEC. I will then posit that
Amina's influence has been reduced not so much
for the change in her duties at the INEC but as a
result of the innovations that have been introduced
in the system.
Amina Zakari is an indirect niece of president
Muhammadu Buhari, by marriage. This relationship
has been and is still being exploited by the family.
Indeed, Amina's brother is the minister of water
resources in Buhari's government. These are facts.
Amina benefitted from this relationship when she
served as a consultant with Afri Projects
Consortium, the lead company that drove the
implementation of the PTF projects then Headed by
General Buhari. However, Amina's foray into
national consciousness was not influenced by
Buhari. Between 2004 to 2007, Amina Zakari served
as a Special Assistant to President Olusegun
Obasanjo, who drafted her to the FCT. It is in this
role that she amassed the political contacts that
would later lobby for her to become a National
Commissioner at the INEC. Let me be clear, by
2010, it was clear to everyone that General Buhari
was going to take another shot at the presidency,
there was no way that the PDP would take the
advice of someone they knew would be on the
ballot with its candidate in the choice of a National
Commissioner in 2011.
How come Amina Zakari's membership of the
Commission and her filial relationship with Buhari
could not prevent a humiliating trouncing of her
uncle at the polls in 2011? So, the talk of President
Goodluck Jonathan consulting Buhari and accepting
Amina as his nominee is baloney, but even if that
was remotely true, Amina's actions in the INEC has
not served any purposes for the president but has
benefitted my party, the PDP, to the detriment of the
integrity of elections until the current helmsman in
INEC came on board to restore sanity to the
Commission. I will buttress this position with
numerous instances, relying on my 20 years of
engaging with INEC and insider knowledge of
election operations in Nigeria.
When in 2014 it became clear to the PDP that the
technological innovations that Jega was introducing
were going to be a bulwark against the tradition of
votes allocation, a massive campaign was
kickstarted to do away with the PVC and Smart Card
Reader technology. This campaign played out in the
media. Unbeknownst to many, the battle was not
restricted to shaping opinions against the use of the
PVC and SCR, it extended into the Commission. The
arrowhead of those who called for the abandonment
of the innovation was Amina Zakari. Amina Zakari,
Prince Adedeji Soyebi, and another National
Commissioner, Ambassador Lawrence Nwuruku, a
card-carrying member of the PDP, led the
groundswell of opposition against the deployment
of technology in the 2015 elections which created a
sharp divide in the Commission. In fact, Jega had to
beat a retreat in implementing full use of
technology in the transmission of results because
of the opposition mounted by these Commissioners
who were apparently carrying out the instructions of
external forces. I was therefore amused that the
same party raised hell when PMB wrongly rejected
the Electoral Act Amendment on account of the
electronic transmission of results clauses in the
Bill.
One of the issues the PDP raised against president
Buhari's ill-advised and very vexatious withholding
of assent to the Electoral Act Amendment Bill is
related to the use of incident forms during
elections. However, not many Nigerians may know
that these forms were first muted by Amina Zakari
to the Commission under Jega as a way of
cushioning the effect of the SCR. We now know that
the PDP, especially states in the South-South were
the biggest beneficiaries of the extensive use of
incident forms introduced by Zakari. Let us take a
look at the numbers. In Kano and Katsina, out of
the 3,943,080 that were accredited to vote in both
States in 2015, 851,062 used incident forms,
representing about 22% of the total votes cast.
Comparatively, in Rivers and Akwa Ibom States, out
of the 2,717,479 persons that were accredited to
vote, a whopping 2,525,460 used incident forms,
representing an outrageous 93%. Amina's
'ingenious' contribution to democracy in Nigeria
came through for the PDP.
Professor Jega was very much aware of Amina's
unwholesome affinity with politicians and waited
patiently until the last minute to neutralise her. Just
a few days to the 2015 elections, Jega removed her
as the Head of the Elections and Party Monitoring
Committee of the INEC and moved her to the
Planning Committee which had basically finished all
its elections planning. Perhaps this deployment was
instrumental to the success of the 2015 elections.
Interestingly, with the advent of a new government
and a new party, Amina's covert actions have
always been in alignment with the interests that
paved the way for her to come into the national
limelight, the PDP.
As Acting Chairman of the INEC, following Jega's
departure, Amina almost bungled the Bayelsa
elections. Under her watch, over one hundred
thousand ghost voters, many with almanack
pictures as identification were introduced into the
Bayelsa Voters Register. It was not until the
appointment of Professor Mahmood Yakubu as the
INEC chairman that this anomaly was corrected
through the deployment of the Automated
Fingerprint Identification System(AFIS). Many of
these ghost registrants were in areas that were
considered the PDP's stronghold in Bayelsa.
While many were too eager to lampoon the INEC for
the Kogi debacle in 2015, only a handful may be
aware that the needless quagmire would have been
avoided if Amina did not try to save the PDP from
crushing defeat in the hands of the APC under late
Abubakar Audu. The Kogi election was to be won at
first ballot when Amina surprisingly decided to
proceed to Kogi rather than remain in the INEC
Headquarters as Head of the Elections Operations
Committee. Amina drafted to the field another PDP
appointee and someone she relentlessly lobbied to
continue as national commissioner, Prince Soyebi.
Amina would move to Dekina local government area
which is the home of the PDP candidate, Idris Wada.
It was the crises in Dekina that led to the
declaration of the election as inconclusive. This
writer was at the collation centre in Lokoja and
witnessed first hand how the PDP Returning Officer
and party agents were insisting that the election is
inconclusive rather than be concerned about the
victory of the Party's candidate.
Since the Osun election is already in court, I would
refrain from commenting in details about it but,
agent Amina was handy for the party in the first
election. As an accreditated observer, I was left
shocked to realise that Amina as Head of the
Elections Operations of INEC chose to travel out of
the country without waiting for the rerun election
that was scheduled just about five days after the
first one. At the Collation Centre in Oshogbo,
Amina's man-Friday, Prince Soyebi could explain to
the world which party's Returning Officer he was
continually talking with on phone while collation
was going on.
Consequently, not too many followers of events at
the INEC were surprised when the INEC chairman
announced changes in the Headship of committees
within the Commission, a move that effectively
brought Amina's reign and influence over elections
to an abrupt end. The question that jumps out of
this narrative is: why is the PDP washing its hands
off Amina since she is their creation and has paid
back adequately? Instructively, Amina Zakari was
the Head of the Collation Centre sub-Committee in
2015, the same sub-Committee that the PDP is now
rejecting, there is no record of the party objecting to
that appointment since she was related to a man
that would be on the ballot with the party's
candidate.
The PDP's Press Release on the announcement of
Amina's Headship of the Collation Centre sub-
Committee cited a conflict of interest as its reason
for rejecting Amina's appointment. This reason is
just hogwash. A party that had no qualms in
nominating card-carry members of her party into the
Commission cannot now lecture the nation on
ethics and propriety. I was disgustingly amused
when I sighted Ambassador Lawrence Nwuruku, a
former INEC National Commissioner, and Mr Nasir
Ayilara, former INEC Resident Electoral
Commissioner representing Kwara State, at the last
PDP National Delegate Convention in Port Harcourt,
proudly hanging their delegate cards on their necks.
It is not also hidden that the former Governor of
Abia State, Ochendo Theodore Orji was once an
INEC Administrative Secretary. The current governor
of Bauchi State was an INEC Commissioner
appointed by the PDP. In all these, where was the
party's sense of propriety?
If the PDP takes a critical introspective look at its
position on Amina, they would realise that they are
inadvertently conceding that President Mohammadu
Buhari and by extension the APC are better
character judges than the PDP ever was. Out of the
12 serving National Commissioners of INEC, only
Amina and Prince Adedeji Soyebi were original
appointees of the PDP. In castigating Amina, the
PDP has tacitly admitted that the 10 National
Commissioners appointed by Buhari have better
character traits than appointees it sponsored
initially to the Commission. The PDP cannot
distance itself from Amina, they created her and
turned her into what she has become today. She is
their baggage, and they must embrace her. Perhaps,
the improvements in elections management have
ensured that the Party is no longer getting value for
money from Amina leading the bigwigs to conclude
that she has become a rogue agent.
That the party would think that out of the 12
National Commissioners, 37 Resident Electoral
Commissioners, 38 Returning Officers, and the
hundreds of people that would be in the ICC, one
woman has the powers to determine the outcome of
elections tells Nigerians all they need to know about
the quality of opposition in Nigeria.
The reality which any discerning person would know
is that elections in Nigeria have drastically
improved and has moved away from the ignoble
days of votes allocation. Perhaps, the PDP is still
holed up in the past and is refusing to ask some of
us within its fold that engage with the process to
enlighten its apparatchiks on current trends in
elections management. Why would they not have
this medieval mentality when rumours have it that
they have engaged the discredited Maurice Iwu as
one of their elections consultants.PREPOSTEROUS!
To put it succinctly, not even the chairman of INEC,
Professor Mahmood Yakubu can rig elections in
Nigeria. What is the role of the Collation Centre in
determining the outcome of elections in the current
dispensation? The improvements introduced by the
current chairman in the elections process and
management has decentralised results handling and
collation. So, the collation centre is merely a
glorified viewing and tabulation centre. Let us not
forget that president Jonathan conceded defeat even
before pending results had made its way to the
collation centre. That was possible because the
results from the various polling units were already
in the public domain. Any party with a functional
situation room and parallel votes tabulation facility
would know the outcome of the elections even
before those at the INEC Collation Centre. So what
is all the fuss with the appointment of Amina to
oversee refreshments and welfare, a condescending
floor manager position from her lofty height as the
head of the Elections Operations Committee?
This needless stoking up of tension within the
polity makes many to wonder why the PDP is
chasing shadows and engaging in irrelevant
distractions rather than run an aggressive issues-
based campaign to present a credible alternative to
voters. The disaster that the APC has become
means that any well-oiled opposition can wrestle
power from it, but the pretenders to the throne seem
to want to continue in this tactless pursuit of
shadows-the party appears to be unconcerned that
the Inspector General of Police, who in my opinion
represents the greatest threat to its 2019 ambitions
still has a job after attaining his mandatory
retirement age. The end game will perhaps be to
have an excuse for a defeat if its lacklustre
campaigns come back to haunt it .
https://www.saharareporters.com/2019/01/08/amina-zakari-pdps-baggage-chima-amadi%E2%80%8B
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