NBA presidential candidate rejects election result

Joe-Kyari Gadzama who came second in the recently held Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) presidential election says the poll was rigged against him.
Mr Gadzama, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), was defeated by Yakubu Maikyau, another senior advocate in the election which held last Saturday, July 16.
PREMIUM TIMES reported that Mr Maikyau emerged the winner of the election of the body of Nigerian lawyers after securing a total of 22,342 votes to beat his major opponent, Joe-Kyari Gadzama, who got 10,842 votes.
The candidate who came third, Taidi Gunu, clinched 380 votes, representing four per cent of the total 34,554 votes that were collated for the position.
But the credibility of the election which commenced at 12 noon on Saturday, July 16, and ended at 12 midnight through electronic voting, is being challenged by Mr Gadzama.
Allegations
Prior to the Saturday election, Mr Gadzama said his agent at the polls, Andrew Madaki, “tested the vulnerability of the website to conduct the election” and found out that “the website was susceptible to manipulation.”
He noted that the concerns were brought to the attention of the Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association (ECNBA).

Call for audit
In his post-election assessment, Mr Gadzama said he engaged an IT specialist to test the server that was used for the polls.
“The report of the specialist which was dated Monday, July 18, 2022 also shows that there is a high likelihood that the system could be hacked and manipulated,” he alleged.
Calling for an audit of the election, he said “auditing the election will permit independent parties and agents to discover if there were any technical interferences to usurp the will of the electorate.”
Mr Gadzama appealed to the ECNBA to allow an immediate audit of the election and server, adding “it is clear that the technology adopted was highly vulnerable and most susceptible to electronic fraud, rigging and pre-programming of votes.”
Mr Gadzama’s alleged ‘electoral fraud’ in 2016
In August 2016, the last time the NBA presidency was zoned to the northern part of Nigeria, Mr Gadzama vied for the office but lost to Abubakar Mahmoud.
This newspaper reported that Mr Gadzama polled 2,384 votes to emerge runner-up behind Mr Mahmoud, the eventual winner, who got 3,055 votes.

But Mr Gadzama rejected the election outcome, and called for its cancellation.
“We hereby reject the results of the elections and call for the immediate cancellation of the same for failing to be credible, transparent, free and fair, and for failing to comply with the provisions of the NBA Constitution and the Electoral Guidelines,” Mr Gadzama’s campaign group led by Garba Gajam had said in 2016.

In the build-up to the election, Mr Gadzama’s campaign team had accused Augustine Alegeh, the then president of the NBA of a “brazen show of preference” for promoting Mr Mahmoud.
The group accused Mr Alegeh of colluding with the ECNBA on election day to ensure Mr Mahmoud’s emergence as NBA President.
But Mr Alegeh rebuffed Mr Gadzama’s claims, saying the maiden electronic election was the best polls in the history of the association.
He recalled how Mr Gadzama alleged Electoral fraud in 2010 after he lost the NBA presidential election.
“When (Mr) Gadzama also lost the election in 2010, he made similar allegation, that the election was moved to Ibadan just to deprive him of the chance of winning,” Mr Alegeh recalled.
History of controversy
Since the NBA commenced electronic voting in 2016 to ensure universal suffrage for all its members and stopped its traditional election by delegates, the integrity of the association’s polls have been questioned particularly by presidential candidates who lost out.
In the previous election in 2020 which produced the outgoing NBA president, Olumide Akpata, one of the presidential candidates who came third in the three-horse presidential race, Dele Adesina, a SAN, raised a number issues with the poll and called for its cancellation.
He alleged, among other things, that the appointment of the service provider for the electronic voting was done solely by the then NBA President, Paul Usoro (SAN).
He also said the voter list for the was not released by the election committee until five hours to the election, in violation of the NBA Constitution.
He alleged, among others, the loading of “predetermined data on the election site and disenfranchisement of about 14,000 prospective voters”, and the “manipulation and padding of voters list in that it contained 4,464 names of purported lawyers without branches”.
He also complained about the errorneous tagging of 86 names of lawyers under the category ‘lnternational Diaspora’, inflation of list at some branches, among others.

But responding to Mr Adesina’s complaint, the Board of Trustees of the association, rejected the petitioner’s call for the cancellation of the widely criticised poll.

The NBA BoT admitted that Mr Adesina’s August 2, 2020 petition raised issues of serious concerns about the conduct of the election, but urged him to overlook the failings of the exercise in the spirit of cohesion of the body of lawyers.
The BoT’s reply dated August 19, 2020 and signed by its chairman, Olisa Agbakoba a senior advocate and former president of the NBA, noted that although the election was not perfect, the BoT could not advise that the election should be cancelled “in the overall interest of the Bar”.

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