Election Rigging – When Will it End?

By

Anthony A. Akinola

 

Those wizards of Nollywood should now help us to laugh at our past by making a film on how elections have been lost and won in Nigeria. There was once a time when an opposition politician could wake up in the morning only to find a dead body deposited in his backyard! The alternative to being charged with murder and possibly facing the gallows would have been to switch political party allegiance without much persuasion.

 

Political intimidation and politics of thuggery were once like bread and butter. The politicians of old that were considered to be very powerful had those thugs who were prepared to kill or be killed on their behalf. Election rigging was not the sophisticated intervention it now has become but political thugs did play their own part. Sometime in the late 1950s an opposition politician in my constituency was very close to celebrating a rare electoral victory when suddenly the tears were forced from his eyes. As his victory was about to be concluded with not too many ballot boxes left to be counted, political thugs rushed into the hall and shuffled uncounted ballot papers with those already counted. A bye election was consequently arranged for the constituency but the ruling party had done its rigging homework to prevent a possible "upset". That episode, I must confess, revealed to me very early in life that elections in Nigeria were neither free nor fair.

 

In one particular region of the Nigerian federation we were told how overzealous party officials were able more or less to observe voters as they cast their votes. The officials would sit on raised platforms and monitor the direction in which prospective voters moved. If one was observed moving in the direction in which the ballot box belonging to an opposition party was situated, there would be an explanation to be made. It would have suggested to the officials that one did not vote for the party in power and punitive measures could be meted out.

 

Election rigging took a new dimension once Nigeria became independent in 1960. Ballot boxes were often stuffed with pre-stamped ballot papers. There were cases of women who appeared pregnant while going into the polling booths, having padded their tummies with ballot papers, only to re-emerge with their "babies" already delivered! In the old Western Region the leadership of the ruling Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) made voting almost irrelevant as electoral officials, on their behalf, declared rival politicians as having accepted defeat voluntarily by withdrawing from pre-arranged contests.

 

The current culture of "awarding" votes and seats to competing political parties became an additional innovation in 1983 when the ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN) imposed its candidates on constituencies where the party’s support base suggested otherwise. Twenty years later in 2003 the same rigging approach was witnessed by international observers who wrote honest reports about the shame of our nation. They reported on how recorded votes far outnumbered the names on registered voters’ lists and how the police, in their usual custom, became accomplices in the rigging exercise. Rigging has become something we have all come to expect as unavoidable in every election and the putative 2007 one is already blemished as an election that has already been rigged – an assumption that can hardly be refuted, with the discovery of voting machines in private

homes.

 

The consequences of election rigging have been grave. It should be recollected that violent protests over the rigged 1965 Western regional elections hastened the first military intervention in Nigerian politics. Similarly, in 1983, violent protests over the NPN’s incursion into "unfriendly" constituencies contributed in no small measure to the collapse of the Second Republic. If history is not to repeat itself, the forthcoming "transition" election must be approached with exceptional caution.

 

The stakes are high in 2007, and an atmosphere of bitterness already permeates the national environment. President Olusegun Obasanjo sees the 2007 presidential election as a "do or die" battle, not least because of his perception of it as a verdict on his own legacy. Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who has pitched his political tent with the Action Congress (AC) parades his part in the proposed contest as a show of strength between himself and his boss. An influential foreign magazine already assumes that political exile could be the best option for Obasanjo were his feuding deputy to be the next president. General Muhammadu Buhari of the All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP), on his part, believes the yet-to-take-place election has already been concluded in favour of the ruling party. He believed, rightly or wrongly, that he was cheated in 2003.

 

With so much at stake, and with so much bitterness around, a bitterly contested presidential election could claim a few casualties. The "speed boat" which Dr Reuben Abati talked about in a recent entertaining article could, in fact, be around the corner for the privileged few who might want to get out of trouble quickly. One has heard Nigerians living abroad warn friends to wait until after the elections before visiting Nigeria. What an irony!

 

Politics in Nigeria is big business. It confers instant prominence on quite a number of people who have little talent for other things. Those who today are at the helm of national affairs cannot contemplate life on the other side of the political fence. In some societies those who have lost out in the political game have other attractive options to fall back on but this is hardly so in the Nigerian society of today. The rigging culture is likely to continue to embarrass our nation and frustrate its development until politics becomes the game for those who have no cause to see it as a "do or die" battle. However, the process of taming an unenviable monster would have been set in motion if President Olusegun Obasanjo could view the pending 2007 election as an integral part of his own political legacy, regardless of

who the next president of the Nigerian federation is.