Nigeria’s 2023 elections: The ballot or the bullet?

The assumption that what Nigeria needs in 2023 is another round of general elections, in keeping with the spirit of democratic practice —to slake the ‘internal stability’ thirst of the political class and the ‘regional stability’ thirst of the West — is both a quietist misguidedness on the part of the millions, and an absolutist disdain on the part of the political class.

The one, staggering about in mass confusion, is by virtue of this assumption, planning to remain a perpetual victim of organised hocus-pocus; the other, by virtue of its historical constitution, perpetuates this assumption as a critical fundamental of its own survival and fulfilment.

By skipping the reality for the illusive, the tangible for the intangible, which is what general elections in 2023 posits, these social forces are once again burrowing the deep of irreversible tailspin.

Hence, we are compelled to trail the path of Malcolm X in 1964, when he delivered a vatic speech at a symposium on Black Nationalism, titled, ‘the Negro Revolt: the Ballot or the Bullet?’

The almost hackneyed but irreducible effusion of Chief Obafemi Awolowo that Nigeria is ‘a mere geographical expression’ remains potent and instructive today. As a geographical expression the fundamental hermeneutics of a nation eludes Nigeria, for the simple reason that it wants the representational ideals of a homogeneous collection of humanity.

‘Nations are not merely multicoloured patches in the atlas,’ asserts the Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka,‘ they answer to some internal logic and historic coherence, and an evolved tradition of managing incompatibilities.’

To the wheeler-dealers of Nigeria PLC, however, this verity is undoubted sacrosanctity which, alas, is also a bitter pill to swallow. As a result, the Northern feudal C-suite and its allied peers in the South continually dredge up ways to sustain the corporation, of which ‘democratic’ elections remain an injunctive ritual of self-perpetuation.

The character and goal of elections in Nigeria

There has been no radical departure from the character and the goal of elections in Nigeria at independence and the character and the goal of elections in Nigeria now; if anything, the struggle is between the depth of decadence in the past and the depth of decadence now.

The character of elections in Nigeria embodies the very pit of ‘absoluteness and arbitrariness,’ by which Claude Ake described the colonial project in Africa; and which is the adopted mode of electioneering and politicking, and the precursor to misgovernment in present-day Nigeria.

In its absolute form, election is a political warfare for and within the political class (the incumbent power, the ruling party and the farcical opposition, political careerists and political patrons), wherein democratic will is malignantly manipulated or truncated if deemed unfavourable, and boosted if deemed favourable.

Hence, what should be a peaceful expression of social forces becomes a scene of gory hostilities, leaving in its wake carcases of old and young—like Acheju Abuh, the woman who was burnt to death or Daniel Usman, the teenager who was gunned down in Kogi State, or the dozens who were similarly liquidated during the general elections in 2019—and countless disenfranchised citizens.

Electoral violence and its blatant political liquidation concomitant—whether before, during or after elections—is thus the instrument of entrenching political absoluteness, and the mode of achieving and legitimating political power in Nigeria.

In 2019, the outgoing governor of Imo State, Rochas Okorocha, after eight years of decadent rule and unlimited human rights violations, held the INEC’s Returning Officer for Imo West Senatorial District, at gunpoint to declare the result of the election in his favour; he would later assume the Senatorial office after he was declared to have duly won the election by Nigeria’s electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission.

Rather than being an exception, this is the norm by which the political class emphasises the gameness of democratic elections in Nigeria. Between 1999 and 2019, statistics show that no fewer than 2000 election-related deaths were recorded in Nigeria, though a trend that is by no means exclusive to Nigeria on the continent. To Nigeria’s political class, however, political power is won and maintained through violence, and the citizens are mere fleas to be immolated at any moment for its sake.

For the political class, the use of violence as an instrument of democratic accreditation and legitimation, is an indispensable component of the character of elections in Nigeria. This character, for the political class, is the entrenchment of absoluteness: the Hydra-headed manifestations of raw political power, and the emphasis of domination through intimidation and appropriation of ‘legitimate’ democratic processes.

Thus, to entrench absoluteness, any and all acts of arbitrariness cease to be scarce, leading to a fully repressed society—which is what Nigeria is, in theory and in practice. The millions, therefore, exist under a grip of absoluteness in which the cost of democratic resistance is perceived to be too steep to undertake: for instance, the brutal reaction of government to the peaceful EndSARS protests.

Thus, in such a society where arbitrariness and absoluteness are the norm, the millions begin to suspect that neither negative peace—which is the absence of direct violence, nor positive peace—which is the absence of structural violence (according to Galtung), is probable under the existing political system.

The goal of elections, therefore, becomes the perpetuation of the status quo.

The knackered electorate

Since the character of elections is underscored by brutality and fatality, political power—assumes the millions—is the preserve of the political class; and any act of democratic resistance or subversion of such decadence should be minimal, if at all; but entirely not radical.

Hence, while the political class on the one hand sees hordes of fleas to be cajoled through vote-buying and manipulated by fielding kleptomaniacs and gerontocrats as authentic candidates, or wasted through brutal violence in its ‘democratic game’ during elections; the millions on the other hand either see a bazaar, where the ballot is sold to the highest bidder, or a predicament wherein one must decide between the devil and the deep-blue sea.

But of course, the latter analyses the political situation only tangentially, that is, at the befogged level which the political class has programmed the millions to analyse the political situation: that any political decision must be between the political class and the political class. Hence, when in 1993 the millions veered off its quietist track, the political class (in its military fatigue) was swift to invalidate the election, in keeping with its fashion.

And so was the popular will subverted in 1999, 2007, and 2019 by the political class. In the same way, the ongoing political conversation about 2023 among the millions on the one hand, and lousy analysands on the other, is gradually becoming misted with candidates from the slush of the political class.

And yet, the popular opinion among political analysands in Nigeria at the moment, is that there has been a rude awakening of the millions from quietism since the EndSARS protests in 2020, and that voter registration, more voter participation, fielding of youth candidates, and so on, should constitute the nucleus of political action towards a paradigm shift in 2023.

In reality, however, the problem is not so much about voter registration—84 million voters were already registered for the elections in 2019 (although 13% or 11 million did not claim their Permanent Voter’s Card)—as it is about voter participation, voter confidence, a robust electoral process, and such.

But again, far from being an exception, low voter turnout—in fact an ever-dwindling voter turnout—particularly in comparison with total registered voters, is the norm in Nigeria.

Nonetheless, the folly in this thinking is easily exposed when these analysands are confronted with: one, the financial costs of elections in Nigeria, both for the candidature and the country; two, the rigid monopoly of the political class on private and public institutions that are used to underwrite these costs; three, the political economy of the country, particularly in relation to private and public lending institutions, which disfavours political neophytes who are not sprigs of the political class.

Effectively, the necrotic socio-political system in Nigeria precludes any random neophyte and renders his or her political toil the doom of Sisyphus, regardless of paternalistic concessions by the Mighty Folks who make up the political class—such as the in utile Not Too Young to Run Act or the Electoral Reform Bill which has become a chess-game between the Ninth National Assembly and the Presidency.

Thus, one need not the noetic prowess of Einstein, nor the wisdom of Athena, to understand that the problem is not so much about voter registration and voter turnout, as it is about the knackered electorate and the decadent electoral process, which altogether are symptomatic of a fictitious democracy, and more aptly, a chronically diseased nation being.

The unremarked dimension

In clear view of these misguided political analyses, however, is the unremarked dimension of Nigeria’s true existential condition, which threatens anything but another round of undemocratic elections to legitimate the status quo. And this is where we are compelled, alas, to apprise Nigeria’s political analysands of the words of John Stuart Mill, that ‘the future of mankind will be gravely imperilled, if great questions are left to be fought over between ignorant change and ignorant opposition to change.’

For, our political analysands, surely,would know that the most pungent question in Nigeria today, is the very question of statehood. They would know, to be sure, that Nigeria has yet to resolve that riddle which Soyinka posed years ago, which is again gaining palpable traction among the millions—that is, ‘When is a nation?’

Surely, the mouldy view of our analysands cannot be so grim that they would be oblivious of the reality that, even by standards set by the Montevideo Convention, the very idea of sovereignty is, like-never-before,currently flimsy in Nigeria!

The temporal pact of historic amity, by which the arbitrary boundaries of Nigeria were tenuously carried forward by the sovereign nationalities in Nigeria, following independence from metropolitan Britain, has now splintered into potentially explosive fragments of disillusioned entities.

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These fragments, however, are consequences of the horribly managed strains that have from embryo been always latent in Nigeria.Thus, that barometer of statehood which was so elegantly assembled in 1933, has judged Nigeria very harshly.

But the political class, and the feudal C-Suite of Nigeria PLC, in response to these growing resistances, are convinced that self-perpetuation—under what Soyinka calls the ‘principle of inviolability,’ which is the absolutist philosophy under girding the Nigerian contraption—through ‘democratic elections’, is the only national priority. And worse, our political analysands, in their palpable state of confusion, are ostensibly convinced that increased voter participation will keep Nigeria in its divine shell of inviolability!

But, again Soyinka cautions: ‘only a community of fools will entrust its most sacred possession—nationhood—yet again to a class that has proven so fickle, so treacherous and dishonourable.’

The Ballot or The Bullet?

Democratic elections ought to emphasise a people’s will for constant stock-taking, and their desire for positive transformation. The want of this quality in the electoral process of any society is sufficient to inspire a people to initiate a different kind of stock-taking; one that, in the sense which has become critical in Nigeria, must shatter the untruths which Nigeria concretely symbolise.

As a failed state, the purposelessness of another round of ‘democratic elections’ in Nigeria is obvious: it will only provide another ‘democratic’ opportunity for the political class to engage in public sabre rattling, ruthless violence and heaps of hapless cadavers, leaving us with the sole conclusion that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. History has shown in Nigeria’s socio-political realism, that with or without the ballot, the bullet is constant.

As recent developments reliably suggest, Nigeria’s awkward run towards another round of elections, is a kind of palliative strategy by the political class, to defuse the nationalist volcanoes threatening to explode the contraption. Those who have dared, to sound the gong of this looming explosion, have either been gaoled, like the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra in Southern Nigeria, or forced into exile by the Gestapo of General Buhari’s regime.

Thus, the goal of the ballot for the millions in Nigeria, this time, must be different. A decision, to embrace the ballot, not as a habitual democratic act in a necrotic system, but as a radical act of historic stock-taking, has become a historical necessity. ‘Sometimes,’ forewarns Nelson Mandela, ‘there is nothing one can do to save something that must die.’