It

It’s Time For Election Monitors To Back Off Maurice Iwu And Nigeria

Ibrahim Danlami

USA

This piece is intended as a sequel to two essays on Professor Maurice Iwu by one Aloy Ejimakor, writing out of Washington DC. The first essay published in the United States by a respected Web Journal of contemporary politics and the second which I believe I stumbled on while surfing through a Nigerian news weblog were both exhaustive on the controversy surrounding Iwu’s stint as Chairman of Nigeria’s Independent Electoral Commission. Let me confess that before I read Mr. Ejimakor’s superlative essays on Iwu and the last general elections, my views were mostly colored by all the bad press coming out of sections of the Nigerian and American media and I stayed that way until Mr. Ejimakor’s analysis and insights jolted me into doing what I should have done in the first place. What did I do? Well, I just did some research which took me back in time into the labyrinth of ancient histories of elections in Nigeria and other countries. I also studied the comments of Nigerian politicians from the period leading up to just about the time the elections began to hold; and then I juxtaposed all these to the 2007 polls by Iwu. After taking stock of the piles of historical data before me, it struck me that all the elections – ancient and modern bore some similarities in terms of their historical consequences, except for the few like the 2007 one which came with the uniqueness of either making or unmaking a nation on the throes of a transition from one (unwilling) civilian administration to another.

In the West where I have resided for several years now, I could not help but get seduced by this Western-made cynical habit of berating developing nations for always managing to screw up their elections. From most of the West, especially the European Union, there is this rampant tendency to rush to conclusions that elections held in countries that the West fears, loathes or does not understand are never free and fair. Forgive me for playing along all these years because it is but human nature that when everyone around you is condemning elections held, say – in Russia, I just join the bandwagon so I don’t get to look odd before the next guy in the neighborhood; and I never even cared a hoot about elections in Russia or Afghanistan in the first place because they held no pecuniary relevance to my daily drudgery of trying so hard to make a buck by day-trading and hedging on America’s blue-chip stocks. This brings me to the point that the recent elections held in Russia saw Putin’s party winning super majorities that should guarantee his party a good shot at forming the next government at the Kremlin.

But guess what? The West led by the European Union saw red in those elections through the prism of their election monitors – the sort of bunch that vilified Iwu, INEC and our Nigeria. And consider also that some of the monitors let slip their disapproval that pro-West parties lost out to Putin, not minding that the parties are probably just fringe, and the Communist Party also lost out big time– which I thought should have been celebrated by the West, given its traditional aversion to anything communist. But that didn’t happen because the parties that held promises of kowtowing to the West were routed and the heavens themselves must fall for this reason alone. If you don’t know by now that the West, especially the United States considered Atiku pro-West and Yar’Adua anti-West, then you have not been reading everything out there. And more to the point, Yar’Adua’s frugal agenda in Katsina when he was Governor troubled a West that looked forward to an Atiku they believed to be more malleable to drawing down Nigeria’s reserves to finance high technology acquisitions from the West. Get the idea? Well, hear this: Ever wondered why European monitors wanted to come back to Nigeria on Atiku’s invitation to testify at the tribunal against Yar’Adua and Iwu? Atiku already talked to them and they assured him that their testimony will sink President Yar’Adua. If you doubt this, go and ask any lawyer and he will tell you that no lawyer worth his silk or robe will ever proffer a testimony that will impeach his case. In my opinion, Atiku and all the monitors that wish to help him went too far to breach international protocols imposing a duty on foreign monitors to desist from interfering (or even appearing to be interfering) in the internal affairs of any nation they monitored. Therefore, the tribunal was right for denying Atiku’s request for all the reasons in the world, including a genuine concern for what such testimony will portend for the sovereignty of Nigeria and the perception that comes with it that testimony by an European is more credible than when it comes from a Nigerian. Don King’s interview on the NTA during his recent trip to Nigeria which I watched via a Korean share Network from right here in College Park USA contained enough advice to Nigerians on how best to cope with this disrespect from the West; and a brave pan-Africanist Mr. King minced no words when he praised Maurice Iwu for tackling the arduous task of taking Nigeria through the dicey path of transiting from one civilian regime to another. Thanks, Don – for always sticking up for your brothers in the mother continent.

So with Don King and Aloy Ejimakor in mind, I figured that I should make some effort to snap out of my lazy acceptance of everything being right about the Western view of the other worlds, their institutions and elections, including Nigeria – the country of my birth. The first thing I did was to deploy my abundant free will to go academic on all these and see things for myself. The second is that I am a native Nigerian and I will be damned if I should just continue to care less about what happens to my native country, her institutions and public officials, and the drag it imposes on Nigeria’s quest for a befitting diplomatic stature, good order and foreign investments. Now, let me give you my take on this and it is gonna be straight up: I don’t believe the election monitors any more than you do – both foreign and domestic when they try so hard to prove to the whole world that Nigeria is so rotten to the point that it cannot conduct elections acceptable to the vaunted strict Western standards. What about making some allowances for our own standards and the notorious difficulties confronting Nigeria as a young democracy. I guess part of the reason I don’t believe them has to do with what I have come to see as this consistent condemnation by the West of everything African, meaning everything Nigerian, and I just as soon reckoned that it is some kind of a perpetual put-down intended to make Africans or Nigerians feel that nothing good will ever come from their midst. After two decades in the US, I don’t believe that hype anymore, neither do I believe that the Western view is not independent of some terrible spin spurned by some of our brothers back home who continue to pander to them and their skewered view of the ways of Africans. Those are the guys we call ‘Uncle Toms’ back here because they have a tendency to never see anything good about them and their own race.

And when I pored over a rough electoral map of Nigeria and the standing of the parties back in 1999 and 2003, I discovered why things went the way they did with the 2007 election. I drew parallels with a similar map in America detailing where Republicans and Democrats are supposed to hold sway to the near-total exclusion of the other. In the US, during election time, we are used to seeing the national Networks using Red and Blue to assign electoral enclaves to America’s two political parties. ‘Red’ is for Republicans (not because they are rednecks) and ‘Blue’ is for Democrats (not because they are pacifists). In the same vein, most Americans can easily tell you where the Democrats are likely to outperform the Republicans and vice versa. For instance, in Bush versus Gore (a close call by any means), I called the election for the Democrats in Washington DC and New York, and called it for the Republicans in Mississippi and Wyoming, and when the exit polls from the last precincts were in, I found that I was dead right; yet I am not the Chairman of America’s election commission. I just know how to read and interpret colors and party persuasions and I live in America where Democrats always win in Washington DC and Republicans win in Wyoming. And you tell me that Nigeria is not the same way? No chance because when I looked at my rough draft of Nigeria’s electoral map and called my brother who lives in Sokoto, I reached certain conclusions that bore some uncanny similarity to what obtains in America, and here they are below.

In Imo, I called the elections for Ugwu of PDP but after the Supreme Court of Nigeria barred him, I then called it for Ararume (of PDP), and yet again after his party disowned him, I called it for nobody, simply because PDP just walked away from a victory that seemed open and shut. Get my drift? No. Well, let me explain. My brother in Sokoto who knows much about Nigeria told me authoritatively that PDP was the strongest party in Imo, seconded by APGA, and my electoral map confirmed that. So, I just went ahead and initially called Imo for PDP, citeris paribus. I then used the same method to go from state to state and called Ebonyi, Benue, Kogi, Ogun, Katsina, Plateau and a host of others for PDP simply because my information and guts told me that the party was the strongest in those places and held enough numbers and structures to prevail – fair or unfair. I called Kano and all the Buhari-loving far Northern States for ANPP; called Abia for Orji Uzor Kalu simply because he is an alpha male and he wasn’t gonna let a lame-duck OBJ to prevail, and Abians and Igbos appear to love him for real. I called Lagos for AC or PPA for the simple reason that the Igbo super majorities residing in Lagos will vote PPA, thus leaving the rest of the votes split unevenly between a beleaguered PDP and a hard-charging AC that saw Lagos as the final macho play for Tinubu and Bode George (standing in for OBJ). And as for Adamawa? Well it was too close to call because between Jibril Aminu and Atiku, I couldn’t quite figure out who the folks up there were really rooting for. After the results were finally in, I found that I was right for the most part. The parties won in the states where I reckoned they held better chances than their opponents. And just about every other party lost in areas where they couldn’t have won anyway, except for Imo where PPA won on the flailing coattails of a troubled PDP. So, Iwu struck the right cord when he insisted that the result reflected the will of the Nigerian people. Parties lost primarily because they lacked in any of the factors that assisted parties to succeed in elections. The opposite is also true.

After taking a harder look at the data before me, I discovered that the election monitors listened too much to reports filed by Nigeria’s biased ‘political’ NGOs, both pseudo and real. The pseudo NGOs – those I see in the halls of American public charities shaking down testy Americans for charity dollars that they knew they don’t have to account for; and the real ones who can demonstrate evidence of some real charitable spending, are both biased without even knowing it. The reason for this is because most of them like the one headed by Agbakoba have activist background dating back to when the military was in power. And they have not yet shaken off their instinctive distrust of anything establishment, in this case represented by a powerful Iwu and INEC. Call it post-traumatic stress disorder or a hangover from the Abiola election annulled in 1993. The second reason is that a whole lot of strings come with these grants Nigerian charities or NGOs receive from the West. The strings are buried in the purpose for which the grant maker donated the monies, and if it is for something having to do with defense of democracy and promotion of credible elections, then your guess on what is expected from the NGO is as good as mine. Chances are that if the NGO should at the end of the day come up with a report that indicates that the elections were credible, then it can kiss goodbye to any future grant because it will be deemed to have lost its purpose for any new monies. No pun intended to other Nigerian NGOs who have a record of real charitable works.

Thus, NGOs are assured of receiving election-related foreign grants provided they continue to bring bad news about our Iwus and INECs. In other words, you have to condemn elections in Nigeria in order to justify further grants theoretically geared to promotion of democracy because once you admit that credible elections are finally in place, grants dry up because there is no more reason to continue the funding. So, with all these in view, some (not all) Nigerian NGOs receiving foreign grants tied to monitoring elections just swallowed the dummy and turned in reports that did not tally with the truth. In plain terms, they just lied against Iwu, INEC, and the people of Nigeria. And the final damage was done when the Western monitors just about based their assessment of the election on what the NGOs fed them. My brother told me that he didn’t see any white dude in any of the booths in Sokoto and his friends from around the country confirmed the same thing for majority of the polling centers. I believe it because I have it on good authority that some political parties could not even afford to send agents to all the booths. Contrast with the fact that the foreign election monitors were very few in number compared to the expansive terrain of Nigeria. For instance, how many polling booths or precincts did Madeleine Albright physically monitor?

And to think that both sides of the aisle did not want the elections to hold for different reasons makes me want to give Iwu a national award for defying all the grand conspiracies. Those rooting for declaration of state of emergency wanted Iwu to back off the elections so they can continue in a new government of martial law headed by an Obasanjo that they pigeonholed into believing that the game was not yet up. Those who wanted Ken Nnamani to head an interim government hated Iwu for frustrating them by forging ahead to conduct the elections. They forget that some other powerful cabals had a plot in place to upstage Nnamani for daring to think that he can put the South East at the helm. Those that sold the dummy to Atiku that he would win if only Obasanjo was not in place to conduct the elections wanted Iwu’s head by all means for conducting the elections under OBJ’s watch. And some young Turks who wanted Buhari to cross over to PDP as a consensus candidate found some ways to blame Iwu for Obasanjo’s determination to have his way by drafting a Yar’Adua they were not familiar with. So, looking at all that criticism against Iwu and the deck stacked against the man, I did not have to be a NASA rocket scientist to surmise that much of the motivation for harassing him has to do with Iwu daring to conduct elections that most frontline Nigerian politicians did not want for their own different selfish reasons. So, besides the common folks, Iwu was the only man in the country amongst the titans who truly intended to have the elections to hold on schedule. Next is President Yar’Adua, maybe.

What the polity lacks now but which it needs so badly is some fireworks from the Presidency. Yar’Adua should go heads-up to deflect some of the darts being hauled at Iwu and INEC – coming mostly from angles that either don’t wish Nigeria well or don’t know any better. One way the President can do that is to show more verve in defending his mandate. To Professor Maurice Iwu – the man who left us here in the Diaspora and went on to garner a job most Diasporans envied from up here in the States, I say: hang in there ‘brotherman’. If only we knew what you were going to pass through. The good news is that you didn’t back down, and to me and the others who saw through all the smoking mirrors, you are probably the greatest Nigerian of our time for daring to accomplish what the army, with all their mortars and bazookas could not do in 1993 when they failed to deliver a transition Nigerians so much desired at that time. Thank you, Maurice, The Great. I promise you that once I hit motherland Nigeria in the next couple of years or less, I will come by to give you a huge pat on the back for a job well done. And I mean it, if only I can locate you.