The days of electioneering are here again. Politics has since taken the better part of the polity. It’s all right if the politicians are the ones in the thick of it, never okay for state institutions meant to be independent to get involved in it. That is where the rest of us should get worried. This is where I have a problem with the recent statement of the acting Inspector General of Police (IGP), Suleiman Abba, that his institution will collaborate with other security agencies “to ensure that candidates with criminal records are not allowed to contest the election”.
It is a no brainer that any serious society would not want to see its governance structure, especially the elected positions, populated by criminals. It is equally nothing spectacular for a police chief to state that he would move against criminals. Pray, isn’t that what we pay our police to do anyway? On the face of it, therefore, the police boss should be commended for this position. But then, we know these are unusual times in an unusual clime. So some of us have to see beyond what is stated.
Notice that the police boss did not talk about ‘criminals’, but persons with ‘criminal records’. And both connote different things with different legal meanings. While a criminal is someone involved in criminal activities, someone with ‘criminal records’ could mean a criminal, a convict, an ex-convict and even an accused. Are these the whole array of persons the police boss wants to move against? More importantly, why is this planned investigative collaboration among the security agencies limited to or focused on election only? That, therefore, raises questions of political undertones and could possibly link the police to allegations of partisanship.
To be sure, the only lawful way to stop someone from contesting an election on account of criminality is to show that the person is a convict. It is not enough that the person has a ‘criminal record’. After all, what does it take to create a criminal record apart from an allegation of crime, and bingo, a person becomes one with ‘criminal record’, no matter how unreasonable and unfathomable? So then, in the wisdom of the police, that is enough to make a person liable to be stopped from seeking election.
Even if we have strong reasons to believe that someone has committed a crime, we still need a court conviction to stop them from standing election; otherwise they can stand election, even when they are in lawful police or court custody. And that was what happened to Senator Iyiola Omisore and Governor Theodore Orji in 2007.
The point must be made that the police and all law enforcement agencies ought to be interested in ridding the society of crime or bursting criminal activities through investigation, prevention and prosecution at all times. If the police and other law enforcement agencies have all along failed to prosecute ‘politicians with criminal records’, it is mischievous and dubious to use such information as cheap blackmail just to stop them as candidates. And if our history on this is anything to go by, immediately after the elections, when the law enforcement agents would have effectively stopped certain politicians from advancing their political interests, nothing else happens. The cases are usually abandoned.
Flash back to 2007. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and other agencies like the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) were ready tools in the hands of the Olusegun Obasanjo administration to frustrate the political ambitions of some politicians, notably the then Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, on allegations of corruption. EFCC even brandished a notorious list from its supposed black book (white book, it should be actually) of ‘indicted politicians’, from which many politicians had to fight with every drop of their blood to extricate themselves.
It took Atiku several months of ingress and egress in the law courts, up to a couple of days to the presidential election, for the Supreme Court to save him from being disqualified. The Supreme Court held then, rightly so, that anything short of a court conviction did not amount to an ‘indictment’ weighty enough to disqualify a person from standing election. Interestingly, after the elections for which the ‘criminal record’ politicians are harassed, they are hardly ever moved against by way of prosecution for their alleged criminal records. And if they ever are tried, there is lack of diligent prosecution. Which means this whole thing was all politics.
We cannot continue repeating the same atrocious strategy every election season.
