President Muhammadu Buhari recently said that he would leave a legacy of free, fair and credible elections in Nigeria. He was no doubt in a self-congratulatory mode, basking in the afterglow of what he believed to be a successful general election. Sadly, Nigeria is a country of low ambitions. What most other nations would regard as failures and beat themselves up about, Nigeria would consider as successes and toot its own whistle over. How would anyone describe elections so marred with irregularities and abuses as this year’s polls were as credible?
To be credible, an election must be free, fair, transparent and peaceful. This means, as Dennis and Ian Derbyshire point out in their book, The Political Systems of the World, the absence of voter intimidation, vote-buying, vote-miscounting etc. Yet, according to international and local observers, this year’s elections were characterised by heavy militarisation, widespread voter intimidation, political thuggery, extensive vote-buying, ballot-box snatching, disruption of the voting process and interference in the vote count. It’s a long list of electoral abuses. But they all produced the worst outcomes in this year’s general elections: widespread violence, unprecedented low voter-turnouts and high incidence of inconclusive elections.
Take the violence. According to one source, over 500 peoplewere killed between the start of campaigns on 16 November last year and the state elections on 9 March. Thirty-nine people died during the rescheduled presidential and National Assembly elections on 23 February, and, of course, the state elections were more violent than the national ones. On voter turn-outs, well, another analysis shows that the turnout for this year’s presidential election, at about 36%, is the lowest since 1999. Although there were 82m registered voters, only 73m collected their Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs), and only 29m of these voted in the presidential poll. Voter turn-out at the state elections even went down on the abysmally low level at the presidential election, due to voter apathy and heavy military presence at the polling units, which an international observer group, Pan-African Women (PAN) project, said “scared voters”.
Then, there was the phenomenon of inconclusive elections. Eight senatorial elections and six governorship polls – in Kano, Sokoto, Benue, Plateau, Bauchi and Adamawa – were declared inconclusive. Under the electoral law, an election must be declared inconclusive if the number of votes separating the frontrunner and his or her closest rival is lower than the cancelled votes. It’s interesting that the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) was leading in five of the six states. In another state, Rivers, where the PDP was also leading, the election was suspended, due to violence and disruptions. Surely, there must be concerns about whether the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is trying to rob the PDP of victory in those states.
Of course, inconclusive elections are often orchestrated by the losing candidates who deliberately disrupt elections in order to force re-runs, with the intention of marshalling resources, including the federal might, for the re-run elections to manipulate the results. We saw this in the Osun State governorship election last year, which was declared inconclusive, even though the PDP was leading. By the time the re-run took place, the ruling APC had exploited its incumbency and the federal might to lure influential opposition leaders with inducements and indulge in vote-buying. The APC eventually won the supplementary elections, thereby flipping the final outcome. Tweeting recently, Matthew Page, a senior fellow with Chatham House and an expert on Nigeria, said: “I am unsettled by the inconclusive results in several states. They mean that politicians can target a smaller set of polling units with an intense beam of rigging, vote buying and thuggery – or seek to spoil matters completely and seek victory from pay-for-play judges”. It’s hard to disagree with that damning assessment.
Sadly, all of this undermines the integrity and credibility of the electoral process in Nigeria, a point that’s not lost on several foreign governments. In a statement, the EU observer Mission noted an “urgent need to rebuild faith in the electoral process”. The Canadian government emphasised the “importance of strengthening democratic practices” in Nigeria, and both the US and the UK decried the militarisation of the elections.
But what are the reasons for what The Economist magazine described as “the rottenness of state politics in Nigeria”? Well, the first reason is precisely because politics in Nigeria is rotten. There are intense, medieval-type, power struggles in virtually every state as politicians want to turn their states into personal empires. For instance, in Rivers State, it’s a do-or-die power struggle between former governor Rotimi Amaechi and the incumbent Nyeson Wike. In Kano State, it’s fight to the finish between former governor Rabiu Kwankwaso and his former deputy and current governor, Abdullahi Ganduje, with each amassing cult followers, the “Kwankwasiyya” and the “Gandujiyya”, who would kill and die for their masters. The fear of losing power or control in a state is so strong and morbid that politicians engage in desperate, violent and criminal behaviour.
However, the second, even more disturbing, reason is that the state-level power struggles are accentuated by the abuse of federal power. All politicians use political thugs, but those whose party runs the federal government have the security agencies at their beck and call. The federal government control the security agencies and can unleash them in any state in “the pursuit of law and order”. But the security forces are not neutral, and politicians whose party control the centre enjoy the advantage of their complicity.
For instance, it’s difficult to believe that Rotimi Amaechi is not using the security services, with the tacit approval of the federal government, to influence the outcome of the elections in Rivers State. Following a court order, the APC fielded no candidate for the governorship election in Rivers State, yet Amaechi, who is backing a stooge under a new party, African Action Congress, is so desperate to unseat his arch rival, Wike, that he is alleged to have co-opted the security agencies to cause violence and disrupt the elections in the state.
Recently, the UK High Commission in Nigeria tweeted expressing concerns about the military’s role in the governorship elections. Predictably, the Army responded, warning against foreign interference, and blaming“hoodlums dressed in military uniform” for the violence. But hoodlums dressed in military fatigue are politically-linked and protected by the military. And, of course, politicians from the party controlling the centre are more able than opposition politicians to use state security forces to cause disruptions in elections they fear losing to influence the outcome.
Surely, it’s not mere coincidence that five of the six states where elections were declared inconclusive are those in which PDP candidates are the frontrunner and where there is a heavy military presence. Few can deny that abuse of incumbency, abuse of state power, is involved. It’s difficult to accept that the APC-led federal government is not using its federal might to give unfair advantage to its party and candidates in those states.
President Buhari says he wants to leave a legacy of free, fair and credible elections. But that legacy is already tainted by the blatant abuse of state power, of incumbency, in this year’s elections. And it will be destroyed completely if his government handles the re-run elections in the six states and the situation in Rivers State badly!
Olu Fasan
