Former INEC REC, Mike Igini has expressed displeasure at the level of deviation from established laws by INEC in the last elections.
In a vanguard newspaper interview, he established his angst at the general execution of the electoral process. He said “
The law expected the election managers, security agents and eventually the judicial officers to be consequence managers for deviants who refuse to comply with the expectations of the law. What were the expectations for these consequence managers if they become part of the problem, like refusing to conduct elections in designated polling units, failing to upload election results as captured in the designated result forms on the INEC IREV portal as the law demanded, and failing to collate results at wards?
The law prescribes consequences for all of these, but as I pointed out it requires the human agency to comply with good laws. As I noted repeatedly during my weekly public enlightenment before the election, good laws and innovations are not self-executory, they have to be implemented by human beings and that is why it’s often said that the devil is in the implementation.
The Law does not envisage a collapse of consequences or a full bloom of impunity, that is why Saint Augustine declared several decades ago that a Nation is nothing but a band of rogues without the Law, when laws are meaningless why should we bother to embark on nation building? It will be a futile effort.
This is why we have to rely on the final layer of consequence Managers step up to the plate assuming that credible evidence of deviations is established, it will be an invitation to anarchy not to ensure that there are consequences for clear breaches of the Electoral Law. The rule of law is a graceful ornament to a well-governed society and indeed the Corinthian capital of polished society. No country or nation can make progress beyond the value orientation of those who lead”. Igini had been a firm advocate of voter education leading up to the last elections.
