Immediate past senator representing Rivers South East, Senator Magnus Ngei Abe has said that the bedrock of Nigeria’s problems is faulty electoral process, stressing that if Nigeria can get it right with her elections, the myriads of problems facing the country would be solved.
Senator Abe stated this while speaking at a symposium organized to mark his 56th birthday celebration by the Rivers Voice of Freedom in Port Harcourt.
The former lawmaker stated that: “The foundation of everything wrong in the society is electoral process. If you get the electoral process right, in ten years everything in Nigeria will change. Why do I say that? Today, we have a process whereby the preference of only the leader counts. So the leader can come today and handpick a thug, an armed rubber, a greedy man, somebody that nobody in that society respects and say ok! This is the person that will go and say others can die and then that is the person that would go. You turn left, you turn right, whatever the people say at the end of the day would not matter. That election would produce the person that has been predetermined”. He noted that such a situation cannot lead the country out of her problems.
“That is not democracy and that will not lead us out of our present economic and social situation. Why do I say so, it’s because if we have a situation where nobody can determine the outcome of an election, where it is the votes of the people secretly casts that can determine who emerges, no leader would come up and say this is what I want because he knows that at the end of the day just as today the people are afraid to come out and say this is what we want, is thesame way they would want to hear from the leader because they know that what the leader is saying that will happen at the end of the day. If we reverse the situation and say the people would decide, thesame way leaders too will wait to see where the people are going before they will come out to decide whether to go left, whether to go centre or forward. What the people want is what would happen in a democracy”.
He added: “So what happens now, where the leader speaks first before the people is a reflection of the facts that it’s the leaders’ that decides and not the people”.
He said when the people are allowed to decide, things will change.
“ What will happen when the people will speak first and the leader would speak probably after the people have spoken will also be a reflection of the fact that it is the people that decides. Once the people are the ones deciding, everything would change. First of all, the mere fact that you cannot compromise the process would be that you will not waste money on the things that compromise the process”.
Abe noted that Nigeria spends so much on elections .
“ As we see today in the Federal Republic of Nigeria, more than eighty percent of our resources, a lot of our resources go into pursuing electoral process or the political process because it is dictated by the politics in our expenditure. Why do I say that? As soon as somebody is voted in and even the cost of getting to win an election is totally, totally unrelated to the cost of our economy. We have gotten to the stage now where people are now making budgets for an election to include monies to give voters. If the voters have to be paid, the electoral officials have to be paid, the security officials have to be paid, the electoral umpires have to be paid even the observers have to be paid. If everybody is collecting money before a winner emerges, how will a winner be accountable to people that have already been paid? Then you begin to shout, no dividends of democracy, the government is personally, who do you think brought out that money that you were sharing on election day? You cannot eat your cake and have it back”.
Continuing the senator said: “ If we want a system that there would be jobs, opportunities, security, rule of law, impartial treatment, equal treatment of all citizens, then we must make conscious effort to enthrone true democracy where the voter and his votes determines the outcome of each and every election, where thugs have no place, godfathers have no place, the leader has one vote, the follower has one vote and at the end of the day when we enthroned that kind of democracy, it would be a democracy that will work for all and not only for just a few people because one”
