At an appropriate time, Professor Humphrey Nwosu’s place in the annals of Nigeria’s stride for a foothold in the democratic space will be recognised and adequately commended.
He was appointed chairman of the National Electoral Commission (NEC) at a momentous time in the country’s political life when the military had their finger not only on the trigger but also their jackboots on governance and other facets of the nation’s life.
Nwosu took over from his mentor, Professor Eme Awa, and was directed to participate in former military President Ibrahim Babangida’s re-engineering policy. This policy covered economic restructuring and political reformation designed to reintroduce democracy after years of dictatorship.
The entire gamut of that deception by the then military junta ended as planned. It plunged the nation into both economic paralysis and political upheaval that threatened the corporate existence of the polity.
Nwosu, a first-class graduate in political science at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, had an intimidating intellectual presence, which he brought to bear on the job he was assigned to execute. He introduced spectacular innovations that the nation bought into in its earnest desire to do away with military dictatorship and its penchant for power through the barrel of the gun, preferring a return to government through the ballot box and popular franchise.
One of the innovations he introduced into the procedure for electing political leaders was the famous Option A4, a voting system that gave rise to the open ballot system as opposed to the former secret ballot system. The Option A4 was a direct queuing behind candidates of choice during either party primaries or general election.
The beauty of that system was its transparency and participatory nature. Voters were part of the counting and collation and had the result of votes cast at every polling booth real time. It made electoral manipulation near impossible. The process and outcome of that election is, till date, considered the freest and fairest in the history of elections in Nigeria.
Nwosu was on his way to releasing the results of the June 12, 1993 election when the military regime ordered him to stop further announcements. Before this unfortunate development, Nigerians knew that Chief Moshood Abiola had won. The authenticity of that result, which was common knowledge in the public square, was never denied, even by those who upturned it.
In 2008, he published a book claiming that Babangida was not to blame for annulling the election. Of course, he was right. Babangida was under pressure to do what he did to fit into a plot. The book was severely criticised for failing to accurately account for what happened. In that book, Nwosu said what he knew about what happened and needed others to provide their perspectives to present a complete picture.
Before Nwosu’s tenure as the electoral body’s head, elections in Nigeria were an all-comers game fraught with crises that were dangerous in their divisiveness.
For the first time, the losers accepted the outcome of an election, and there was no recourse to the judiciary for adjudication on the veracity or otherwise of the processes and procedures. June 12, 1993, was a landmark event, epochal in its intensity. Its annulment has continued to haunt the nation to this day.
Nwosu was born on October 2, 1941, in the Ajali community of Orumba-North local government area (LGA) of Anambra State. He finished his primary education in 1955 at Presbyterian Primary School, Abakaliki, in today’s Ebonyi State.
In 1963, he began his tertiary education at the newly established University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), where he studied political science and finished in 1966 as the second-best graduating student.
Upon graduation, he was employed by Shell British Petroleum (BP) in Port Harcourt, Rivers State. When his contract with Shell ended, he took up an assistant lecturer job at UNN in 1970.
He won an Agri Fellowship to the United States (US) and the Commonwealth Scholarship to the United Kingdom (UK) at the same time. He opted for the former and pursued a doctorate at the University of California. He became a professor of political science at UNN.
Nwosu served in the cabinet of Group Captain Emeka Omeruah, governor of the old Anambra State, where he helped traditional rulers gain their staff of authority, receive salaries, and settle intra- and inter-community land disputes. He also served as chairman of a Federal Technical Committee on the Application of Civil Service Reforms in the local government service.
Such was Nwosu’s strength of character that, in a tribute, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu described him as “a bold and courageous administrator as well as a patriot and national asset”, who played a significant role in shaping Nigeria’s democratic journey.
Posterity would be kind to Nwosu, who ran an independent electoral commission, even though his commission was never formally empowered to act independently. His was an electoral body set by the military and ran with decrees. It is hoped that although the president of the day, Ibrahim Babangida, took vicarious liability for the unfortunate annulment of the June 12, 1993 election, memoirs and books would emerge sooner or later to expose all those who played ignoble roles in the development.
As Nwosu, the unsung hero of Nigeria’s democracy, goes home, we join his family, other relations, friends and associates in bidding him farewell and wishing him eternal rest in the bosom of the Lord.
