Aw Shucks, Nigeria! Not Again

The question anyone interested in the affairs of Nigeria should be asking at this moment is this: what will be the unexpected consequences of the postponement – by one week – of the election that was to have been held on 16 February 2019?

On the face of it, the one week postponement doesn't matter too much. It was very inconvenient, of course, especially for people who had had to travel long distances to be at the locations where they had registered voters, and who had therefore needed to travel back there to vote.

Actually, the real reason why the postponement occurred has largely been hidden from the populace by the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC), despite the INEC's oft-stated pledge to be transparent with the electorate. (One of the foreign observers from the USA was interviewed on a radio station on Monday and confirmed my own suspicion that a lack of candour had occurred on INEC's part) The Commission says that it had discovered – very late – that election materials had not arrived at many of the centres from which materials were to have been transported to polling stations.

But that is not an unknown phenomenon in Nigerian elections: Nigerians are so politically aware that people would have stayed in queues for several hours for the materials to arrive. Everyone wants to vote to tell the politicians what they think of them. Neither was the burning down of a couple of INEC offices in a state enough reason to postpone the election in the whole country. Why not postpone it only where the trouble occurred?

What really happened is that in one major city, Kano, a car was seized by the police that contained RESULT SHEETS already filled in!! That meant that some voters had already “voted” and had their votes counted BEFORE polling stations even opened! The result sheets were intercepted as they were being taken to be used in the areas where voting was due to take place, to be switched for the authentic ones. If one car with such materials had been intercepted, how many others had evaded arrest?

The unauthorised possession of election materials is is not an unusual practice in Nigerian elections. I have seen it happen, myself. On the eve of an election I watched at a polling station at Ekpe, near Lagos, a very rich Otunba who was standing, paid a nice sum of money to anyone who had a voter's card and was willing to use it. The Otunba had had “access” to ballot papers (courtesy of Electoral Commission officers and policemen who were willing to take money and be of use to him!)

So word went round that if you went to the Otunba's luxurious home with your voter's card, you could vote there (eight to ten hours before voting officially started) and – be paid handsomely. Secret voting went on there all night, and thanks to the fact that the Otunba had bought all the electoral officials, polling agents (including those of his opponents!) and, of curse, the policemen on duty, he won with a great majority.

The Kano incident in the currently-postponed election means that such electoral malpractices have not stopped. Indeed, Nigerian politicians are aware of it, and at one stage, they tried out an electoral system whereby voters openly stood behind someone from the party of the candidate they preferred. Counting was then done in public.

But honest as the result was in that system, it begged many questions. It robbed the voter of his right to keep his vote secret. A Nd that's important, for a voter's wife/husband; his landlord; his boss at work and a host of “influential” people could intimidate the voter to vote one way or the other by threatening all manner of reprisals against a voter who went against their wishes/instructions. So the system was scrapped.

I am sure that as soon as the police made it known that they had caught someone in Kano with pre-used OFFICIAL election materials, INEC realised that people would put two and two together and conclude that despite its big talk, INEC had been penetrated by corrupt officials, who were selling authentic electoral materials to politicians, or who had agreed to collude with politicians to accept forged ballot papers. And, of course, that would have undermined the whole electoral process. So it had to be stopped. But INEC covered its backside by not sharing all f that information with the public.

But is INEC capable of detecting HOW the Kano incident was organised, and whether it has been replicated in other areas? INEC is very glib and may try to shrug off the Kano incident as an aberration that cannot be repeated. But it is extremely worrisome that such an incident could have occurred in a Nigerian election in 2019.

Also worrying is the fact that having become aware of difficulties in the process, INEC postponed the election for only one week. What can it do in one week that it had failed to do in the four years that it had had to prepare for this election?

The atmosphere created by the postponement is extremely problematic. For anyone who is not enamoured of democracy may claim that the result of the election, if and when it is held, would not reflect the true wishes of the people. What INEC should be doing is (1) establish an inter-party mechanism whereby all sensitive decisions regarding the election will henceforth be openly discussed and approved by the main parties, and some of the civil society organisations, before implementation.

(2) All the processes – voting, transportation of materials, counting and declaration of results – must be supervised by inter-sectoral security bodies, drawn up across the country and dispersed to areas with which the security personnel have no known affiliation.

Even such measures may not produce corruption-free results, but at least, they will make it more difficult for the election verdict to be hijacked by the moneybags. Nigeria owes it to Africa not to mess up things again. Most adult Nigerians do remember the terrible consequences that followed the annulment, by the military leader, Ibrahim Babangida, of the result of the June 1993 presidential election which Bashorun Moshood Abiola won.

Within about a year of the annulment, Nigeria was in the hands of a crafty military dictator, the brutal General Sani Abacha, who not only killed many dissidents but also stashed away in Switzerland and the UK, a personal fortune estimated to be worth at least 4 billion US dollars. All economic development was stunted while Abacha and his cronies fed fat on the nation's resources.

Those consequences must have shocked Babangida as much as anyone else. That is why nations' fates must not be played with. More unexpected disasters followed: five years after the election was annulled, Abiola was dead; his wife Kudirat had been murdered; Ken Saro-Wiwa was dead; Abacha himself was dead; Alex Ibru, publisher of one of the most literate newspapers in Nigeria, the Guardian, had been brutally injured by Abacha's butchers and had died later. Hundreds if not thousands of pro-democracy activists also perished.

As stated above, Nigeria's economic development moved into reverse gear. Indeed, most of the economic and social problems from which Nigeria is still suffering today, might have been far less acute – if that terrible period had not occurred.

Every Nigerian who loves his country, and indeed, every African who loves his continent, must hope that Nigerian politicians will not engage in hanky-panky this time round. For they can ruin the country again!

Is that too pessimistic a view to hold? I say Not so. Look at this – apart from the Kano incident, the current President, Muhammadu Buhari, has initiated a blatant process to sack the Chief Justice of the Federation – just as an election was in the process of being held! Who would have presided over the appointment of judges to settle any disputes over the results that occasioned the filing of election petitions? The sacked Chief Justice, of course!

That too has been ringing alarm bells.

Justifiably.