What They Didn’t Tell You About The 2007 Elections

By

Ibrahim Danlami

ibrahimdanlami@yahoo.com

 

 

This piece is intended as a presentation of the other view and a revelation of some real-world evidence that might have contributed to the tribunal verdict in favor of Iwu’s declaration of Yar’Adua as president. Let me confess that before Maurice Iwu went aggressive in defending the result he declared, my views about the elections were mostly colored by all the bad press coming out of sections of the Nigerian media. Besides, 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 (regardless of whether they did or not) and I stayed that way until Professor Iwu’s release of the report on the elections 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 2007 elections began to hold. 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 Abiola’s in 1993, and then the last one by Iwu which came with the extra uniqueness of either making or unmaking a nation on the throes of a transition from one (unwilling) civilian administration to another. The rest of what I learnt and the conclusions I drew from it? Well, just keep reading and you will get the whole picture.

 

The next thing I did was to deploy my abundant free will to go academic on all these and see things for myself. Before anyone forgets, 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 all that bad press 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 coming out of some of our brothers back home who continue to pander to this neo-colonialism and its skewered view of the ways of Africans. Those are the guys we call ‘Uncle Toms’ back here in the US because they have a tendency to never see anything good about themselves and their own race.

 

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 of 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) and Bush versus Kerry, 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 an 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 and my friends in the southern parts, I immediately recognized the following truths to be self-evident:

 

In Imo, I called the gubernatorial for Ugwu of PDP but after the Supreme Court 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 - meaning Ohakim’s victory would have defied the best bookmakers had the PDP not adopted him. I then used the same methodology to go from state to state and called Ebonyi, Benue (minus Young Alhaji’s enclave), 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. The tribunal there just confirmed my projections by holding that TA Orji polled the highest numbers. I called Lagos for AC, seconded by the PPA - all 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 that pitted a Tinubu against a 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; and it didn’t matter anyway because Bapetel stood disqualified to run on the tenor of a Court of Appeals ruling that upheld INEC’s power to exclude for cause.

 

After the final tallies were in, I found that I was right for the most part. The parties won in the states where I had reckoned them to hold 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 outcome of the election reflected the will of the Nigerian people. In other words, parties lost primarily because they lacked in any of the factors that assisted parties to succeed in elections. The opposite is also true. And I am certain that the learned justices of the Presidential Election Tribunal, being Nigerians themselves, must have had these real-world projections in mind when they came to the conclusion that any contrary evidence did not hold water. The presidential poll is the mother of all the polls INEC conducted in 2007. Thus any ruling upholding the results thereof makes it extremely harder to continue to fault Maurice Iwu for anything.