President Muhammadu Buhari repeatedly promised to leave a legacy of credible elections. Last year, at the 77th session of United Nations General Assembly (UNGA}, Buhari told world leaders: “I would leave an enduring legacy of free, fair, transparent and credible elections.” At home, he reaffirmed the vow several times. Yet, when the first major test of that promise came, he failed woefully. Last month, on February 25, he delivered the worst and most corrupt presidential poll since Nigeria returned to civil rule in 1999.
Truth is, Buhari gave Nigerians false hopes and pulled the wool over the people’s eyes. Last year, he signed into law an electoral bill that introduced two key technologies expected to make elections credible. The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, used for digital voter accreditation and electronic transmission of results, was seen as an antidote to election rigging. And the INEC Results Viewing portal (IReV) would enable the public to view uploaded results from polling units, ensuring the transparency of the process.
With the electoral act mandating the use of BVAS and IReV technologies, confidence increased on the electoral process, and some believed that President Buhari genuinely wanted to leave a legacy of free, fair, transparent, and credible elections.
But for me, the taste of the pudding was in the eating. After all, behind the operation of any technology are human beings, and if those individuals can be compromised, so, too, can the process. Furthermore, you can have the best electoral law in the world, but if it’s not properly implemented and enforced, and if it can be violated with impunity, then the law is a worthless.
Ironically, the first person to openly violate the electoral act was President Buhari himself. After voting in the presidential election, he displayed his marked ballot paper for the cameras to show that he voted for Bola Tinubu, his party’s candidate. First, that was a violation of section 50 of the Electoral Act 2022, which says that “voting shall be by open-secret ballot.” It’s “open” because you drop your marked ballot paper in the box openly; it’s “secret” because you should mark your ballot paper in secret, and the law prohibits taking a picture of your marked ballot paper. Yet, Buhari ignored the law.
Truth be told, President Buhari abused his incumbency power and distorted the playing field to favour his party’s candidate. He failed to demonstrate the neutrality he repeatedly promised
But Buhari’s action had a wider implication. He was campaigning for Tinubu on Election Day, contrary to section 94 of the Electoral Act, which says that “the period of campaigning in public shall end 24 hours prior to polling day.”
By openly displaying his marked ballot paper to show he voted for Tinubu, President Buhari was signalling to his supporters, to security agents and to election officials that he desperately wanted Tinubu to win. Well, to use a popular lingo, they “got the memo”, judging by the collusion of security agents and election officials with the ruling party during the presidential poll.
Truth be told, President Buhari abused his incumbency power and distorted the playing field to favour his party’s candidate. He failed to demonstrate the neutrality he repeatedly promised.
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Last November, Buhari defended the CBN’s currency redesign policy, saying: “Nigerians should vote for whoever they like from whichever party,” adding that “nobody will be allowed to mobilise resources and thugs to intimidate people in any constituency.”
Good words, but were most Nigerians freely able to vote for whoever they liked from whichever party? No, not with the widespread voter suppression through violence, INEC’s operational efficiency and the fuel and cash crises. The turnout of 27% is significantly lower than in any previous election. And did the naira redesign stop the mobilisation of resources and thugs to intimidate voters in the election? Certainly not. True, the naira shortage limited the ability of some politicians to bribe voters directly, but it didn’t stop them from bribing election officials, and mobilising political thugs.
It’s utterly disingenuous of President Buhari to say he wanted free, fair, transparent and credible elections when he was willing to appoint card-carrying members of his party as electoral commissioners, as he attempted to do with the nomination of the arch-Buharist Lauretta Onochie. Or when he’s willing to politicise the security agencies and turn a blind eye to the partisanship of the security agents for electoral advantage.
Yet, a universal test of credible elections is the absolute impartiality of electoral bodies and security agents. US electoral officials and security agents displayed such impartiality when they rejected Donald Trump’s attempt to manipulate the presidential election in 2019. Sadly, Nigerian electoral body and security agents lack the independence and impartiality critical for credible polls. They are willing tools in the hands of the incumbent government.
For instance, last month’s presidential election was marred by widespread violence, perpetrated by political thugs under apparent protection from security agents. In Lagos, we saw in viral videos how thugs invaded polling units and snatched or burnt ballot boxes, while security agents looked on, and how voters were brutally suppressed. In one polling unit, a notorious political thug audaciously said: “Anyone who is not voting APC should leave now,” adding: “This is an APC zone.”
In their book, Political Systems of the World, Denis and Ian Derbyshire stressed that the absence of voter intimidation or suppression is a critical test of credible elections. All adults, they said, should have the right to vote. But in Nigeria, eligible voters are frequently intimidated and disenfranchised, as happened during last month’s presidential election, which stripped the poll of any pretence of credibility.
But the voting is one thing, the counting is another. The British playwright Tom Stoppard famously said: “It’s not the voting that makes democracy, it’s the counting.” That’s true. People can vote, yes, but what if their votes are manipulated during the counting or the transmission of results? Sadly, in Nigeria, neither works: the voting is marred by significant irregularities, the counting is subject to systemic manipulations.
Think about it. Despite INEC’s promise and people’s expectations that, with the use of the BVAS and IReV technologies, the presidential election results would be transmitted electronically and uploaded on the IReV portal, that didn’t happen, creating legitimate concerns about the authenticity of the results INEC subsequently announced. This was a major breach of the process.
Understandably, election observers were very critical, saying the election “fell short of expectations.” Both the EU election observer mission and the joint election observation mission of the US-based International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute said the failure to transmit the votes electronically and INEC’s lack of transparency over the matter severely eroded the poll’s credibility and confidence in the results announced by INEC.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo went further. He said most of the results announced outside BVAS and IReV “are not true reflection of the will of Nigerians.” In an open letter, he said it was “no secret that INEC officials have been allegedly compromised to make what should work not to work,” and to revert to manual transmission of results, which were being manipulated and distorted. Consequently, he called for the cancellation and rerun of “all elections that did not pass the credibility and transparency test.”
Of course, Buhari and the APC have incumbency advantage and they exploited it ruthlessly, riding roughshod over every opposition and controlling every state institution, including INEC, which declared Tinubu “winner” of the presidential election, ignoring legitimate concerns.
But by declaring Tinubu “winner” of a deeply flawed election, based on deeply controversial results, INEC creates a legitimacy problem and has plunged Nigeria into the abyss of political instability. That, and the fraudulent election that underpinned it, would be Buhari’s enduring legacy, not a legacy of free, fair, transparent, and credible elections!
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