COLLECT YOUR PVC: A MEANS TO AN END
“Ask your neighbour, have you collected your PVC?“ This was the question posed by my Vicar in Church on Sunday January 15, 2023. I like the rhetoric and I like that the platform of the church is being used to drive civic education. PVC is Permanent Voter’s Card, it is the card you present to electoral officials for accreditation on election days. A successful accreditation is a proof that you came to vote. When ballots are counted at the polling unit (PU), the total (valid + invalid) must not exceed the No. of accredited voters, else, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) will cancel the results of the PU. This accreditation will be done by the device called BVAS — Bimodal Voter Accreditation System.
The 2023 election has so far generated awareness, but I must mention that it has not been any different from what I have witnessed in the past. I started participating in elections in December 1998 at the start of the 4th Republic. As an adult, I have taken keen interest in all 6 elections so far in the 4th Republic and the only time I was unable to vote was in 2015. We started rough, the elections were most terrible in 2003 and 2007, but sanity and a lot of improvements started from the 2011 elections when we introduced the electronic voter registration and a permanent voter register. Before then, we used to register before every election and the registration was valid for one election cycle only. The terrible circumstances of the 2003–2007 elections are responsible for the off-cycle elections held in about 6 states today for the office of the governor. Two other states, Bayelsa and Imo off-cycle elections are due to other reasons.
My thoughts border on how the hype and noise seem to be more about the presidential elections only, as though, governance is only about the presidency. Unfortunately, I have not been hearing so much about the more critical elections and that’s election into legislative offices. While the office of the president and those of the governors are important, the more important elections are the legislative offices and it bothers me that many do not realise the power of the legislature in delivering governance. Nigeria runs a presidential system of government, there are three arms, the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary. The executive are the president, governors and the local government chairmen. Not many people understand that while the Executive is meant to deliver the infrastructure, the good health, education etc, the power to deliver all those is derived from the legislature. The aces belong to the legislature, the power to appropriate finances belong to the legislature, so if we have wrong people there, the executive may be ineffectual. The legislature is the representation of the people and they determine what the executive can do, how they should do it and how much they can spend to do it. Therefore, it is an illusion thinking that voting a right candidate as the president is the silver bullet, it is not, the aces belong to the assembly. At the federal level, we have a bi-cameral legislature consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Senators represent different states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), while the House of Representatives are federal constituency representatives. The Senators are three per state and one for the FCT. Constituencies on the other hand are delineated by population size, states with higher population have more representatives. At the state level, we have uni-cameral legislature, and the institution is called House of Assembly. The institution at the federal level is called National Assembly, made up of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The correct terms to use are House of Assembly for states and National Assembly at the federal level.
Voting the right president and governor without the right assembly members to complement it is no work done. For instance, while we lament that government has borrowed so much, what we often fail to understand is that the loans can only be authorised by the assembly. If you do not want government to borrow, tell your legislators not to approve it, if they go against your wish, the power to recall them is in our hands, all it takes is to gather signatures of 2/3rd eligible voters within the constituency to recall them i.e remove them from office. The only problem is that many do not understand this power. The fault really is with our education system, if I am asked to make recommendations, I would always suggest that the dichotomy between science class, commercial class/art class at the secondary school level should be removed, it is not a stage for specialisation, students should be able to take subjects across subjects they find interesting. That someone wants to become an Engineer should not mean the person should know nothing about politics and government. I believe lack of information/knowledge is why people do not give attention to election of legislators.
What to do? My recommendation is that people should scrutinise their House of Assembly candidates, House of Representatives candidates and their Senate candidates to select the right persons. The legislators are closes to us and members of our constituencies, the president or the governor is far away, the legislators are meant to put them in check on our behalf. People should start asking if they even know the names of those who are aspiring as legislators, if you do not know their names, you are not prepared as a voter. We should know their names, know what they plan to present on our behalf in the assembly. The hack should be that anyone who does not understand the problems of the constituency, should not be sent there and whoever has been giving good representation should be returned as many times as possible. Unlike the president and governors, legislators have no 2-term restrictions, their term is limitless and usually, it is better for a constituency to have legislators spend more time in the assemble because it is operated on a ranking basis. Older legislators have privileges over newer legislators, the older legislator is allowed to make contributions ahead of the newer person and they also have privilege when it comes to nomination of projects. Once you get it wrong with your legislator, your constituency will suffer for it. The Northern part of Nigeria and Lagos seem to understand this game, they return their legislators for up to 3/4 terms in office and they transfer the preference they enjoy to the benefit of their constituency.
My conclusion on this is that as people plan to vote WISELY, the vote WISELY should reflect more on the quality of legislators they elect.
Happy New Year
