Nigeria’s independent National Electoral Commission has come under the knives again. In recent times, the opposition has grown highly critical of the electoral management body, questioning its independence and ability to conduct a free and fair election in 2019.

At the centre of the fractious relationship between the electoral commission and the opposition stands a towering figure in the person of Amina Zakari, a National Commissioner who is widely rumoured to be a relative of the incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari. 

The latest news is that INEC has appointed Ms. Zakari as the chairperson of the Presidential Election Collation committee which would be in charge of the collation of the results of the presidential election in 2019. 

How it started

Upon his assumption of office and at the expiration of the tenure of the former INEC Chairman, Attahiru Jega, President Muhammadu Buhari announced the appointment of Ms. Zakari as the acting chairman of the commission. This decision was met with a lot of uproar especially from the opposition Peoples Democratic Party. First among many reasons for this opposition, was her perceived relationship with the President. A segment of the public rumoured that she was the President’s niece while some others alleged that she was the President’s daughter-in-law (none of which are true). She has had to publicly debunk those claims. Although Zakari herself does admit as a matter of fact that she has had a long standing relationship with Buhari.

The second reason was the internal opposition to her emergence. Ms. Zakari was not exactly the preferred successor of her erstwhile boss, Professor Jega who made his preferred successor known publicly.

“I have written to the president to inform him that my tenure was suppose to end yesterday and that I have decided to hand over to one of the national commissioners who is still around until an acting or substantive appointment is made. So I proposed to hand over to Mohammed Wali, who has a relatively longer span,” he said in June 2015 as he made his exit. 

Ultimately, Ms. Zakari’s chance of staying in the position which required her obtaining a Senate confirmation suffered a major setback and she had to return to being a National Commissioner in charge of the Electoral Operations and Logistics Committee. 

The controversy continues

Zakari’s new position meant that she would oversee the local elections which followed. These include the Gubernatorial elections in Bayelsa, Ondo, Anambra, Ekiti and Osun states. (Three out of the five were won by the ruling All Progressives Congress to the angst of the opposition PDP) 

As usual, the PDP which had already signalled that it had no confidence in Ms. Zakari would single her out for blame every single time they lost. Ultimately the party officially requested her resignation after the controversial elections in Osun state which returned the ruling APC candidate as the winner.  

Bucking under pressure, the INEC chairman Yakubu Mahmoud had to redeploy four commissioners including Ms. Zakari who was posted to the department of health and welfare and  replaced by Okechukwu lbeanu, another commissioner. 

The stakes get higher

With about six weeks to the general elections, INEC chairman Mahmoud Yakubu announced the constitution of two ad-hoc committees: The Electoral Logistics Committee and the National Collation Centre Committee – mandated to ensure the delivery of the elections. The latter would be headed by Ms. Zakari but the opposition is not having it. 

PDP spokesperson Kola Ologbondiyan described her appointment as a sign that INEC has been compromised and playing to the dictates of the Buhari administration. He said that it “constitutes a direct violence against the presidential election and there is no way votes cast by Nigerians will count.”

“This is the same Amina Zakari, who headed the ICT Department of INEC at the time that department was accused of manipulating the INEC voter register to accommodate fictitious, underage and alien voters, particularly, in remote areas where they plan to allocate and announce conjured votes for President Buhari and the APC,” the PDP alleged. 

But contrary to the rhetoric by the PDP, this role is not a new one for Ms. Zakari who held the same task during the previous 2015 presidential election conducted by Professor Jega under the PDP led government of former President Goodluck Jonathan.

According to the INEC chair Prof. Yakubu, the NCC committee would only be involved with purely administrative issues and would generally speaking be open to the party agents of all the registered parties as well as the media.  “It will serve as the secretariat for collation of results and venue for briefing of international observers and the media. It will also be accessible to agents of the seventy-three (73) political parties fielding candidates in the presidential election.”