From An American To Nigerians

From An American To Nigerians: My Takes On Your 2007 Transition

Al Clinton, USA

I am an American – Caucasian, suburban, center-left, and ‘Afro-philian’. The last one means simply that I love Africans (and Nigerians) to the point that I married one from central Nigeria. We are a happy couple with three wonderful kids that I like to adorn in rich Nigerian fabrics, take to Nigerian balls, feed Nigerian dishes (no pepper, though) and I have taken them to Nigeria four times in a row. My children bear American as well as Nigerian names and I would like them to be accepted as Nigerians of full blood and given as much opportunity as everyone else, including the opportunity to be president someday – which, by the way, is a desire burning deep inside the innocent soul of my first son, who fancies himself being the first Obama of Nigeria. So, with this kind of attachment to the country of my wife’s birth, I am naturally a sucker for everything Nigerian – the food, the music, the laughter, the oil windfalls, and of course, the needless running battle Nigerians are having with each other over matters coming out of their 2007 elections (which I like to see more as an historic transition). That means that I have read it all or almost all – the Blogs and hardcopies, but certainly enough to form some strong opinions to the point of feeling pretty confident to share same with my in-laws on the national scale. Trust me, I don’t mean to hurt anybody; I write from the heart - no malice, no fear, no favor, no bull –well, now that you get it, below is the rest of the story.

Regarding whether Nigerians held an election or not, I am convinced that they did. If they did not hold an election, then they held a peaceful transition, which is somewhat enough for majority of Americans, especially our black folks who are sick and tired of hearing about failed elections and violent transitions in the mother continent. For Americans - with hindsight, the Nigerian elections did not produce ethnic bloodletting like in Kenya where the umpire could not defend the result he declared; nor did it produce suspense like in Zimbabwe where the umpire did not have the guts to declare the result. Whether the election met or even surpassed acceptable standards for emerging democracies, you bet it did. Whether it met the highest standards set by European monitors, no it didn’t and couldn’t have – because, even in the US, the presidential election between Al Gore and Bush did not meet the lofty absolutes set by the Europeans. What this means is that EU, except for former Soviet Union, embodies the highest standards for elections, higher than we Americans, but still, we are not ashamed of our elections, rather we strive to do better with the next election. Nigeria is no different, and so, although elections in Nigeria may still be contentious for a while for reasons related to how free and fair they are, the people of Nigeria need to get real about it. And just how do you get real about your elections and their outcome? You get real by using pre-election/exit polls or other unique Nigerian methods that can predict the outcome of elections. For Americans, polls and informed predictions work some to reduce post-election tensions because we figured that if you knew you had no chances of winning, then you shouldn’t be complaining afterwards just because the election board failed to comply with one technical rule or the other. That means that Nigerian politicians (and some tribunals) may be taking the right of petition too far, including the one that might undo everything you have achieved – the presidential election.

Take Florida and California – two states with very large native Hispanic populations. There, it is commonplace to see unqualified foreign Hispanics who just as much crossed the border the days earlier voting in elections that determine who gets to rule America, a democracy much more advanced in matters of elections than Nigeria. Some get caught before they vote but vast majorities just go on to beat the system anyway and vote, mostly, well – for Democrats. In America, you can’t vote unless you are a citizen, and these guys are not even legal residents; they are what we call: illegal aliens or undocumented immigrants. So, if you are one of those unauthorized aliens and you vote, you have broken the law, but no result is gonna be nullified for anybody just because of that; and the umpire that oversaw the election doesn’t get harassed for a whole year-long as if he went across the border to procure illegal voters on behalf of Democrats. There are many other violations of America’s electoral regulations; but we know from commonsense that electoral umpires are not to blame because they are not the ones that rig elections. If we lay blames at all, we stop the buck with the political parties. The only thing an electoral umpire can do to affect election outcome is to cook the numbers or make mistakes. I don’t believe that Nigeria’s umpires cooked any numbers, but they may have made a few mistakes. In the US, the usual reaction of the law to irregularities (or mistakes) is two-fold: the guys that voted when they are not supposed are prosecuted and sent to jail and then deported if they have no legal claim to live in America; and umpires get down to the business of correcting their mistakes so that the occurrence of similar violations is reduced, not necessarily eliminated. Nigeria should be no different.

The only election irregularity in recent memory that merited a petition that moved for a re-count (not even nullification) was that of Gore versus Bush. And you know what? The only reason that the Courts in Florida and the Supreme Court of the United agreed to consider the petition was because, according to polls and predictions, Al Gore had equal chances of winning as much as Bush had. That means that the election was close, and the judges and justices of the United States, being citizens first and judicial men second, knew that already; so they applied their common human discretion, not arguments of slick lawyers that danced around technical violations that had nothing to do with who should have won or lost. Even then, getting the Supreme Court to agree to a re-count was real hard, which was why Gore had to quickly concede victory and get on with his life and his passion for global warning and the ozone layer. And by winning the Nobel, Gore has proved that doing good deeds and forgetting his electoral nightmare was the most important decision he has taken in his life. In other words, the US presidency is not the most important pursuit in life, after all. That means that Atiku and Buhari should just move on just like Orji did, if only to prove that they have other things to offer except being fixated on being president of Nigeria at the cost of defaming the country. If you think that’s hard to do, just consider that a Hillary Clinton who has plotted from her college days to be president is now under pressure to quit for Obama (a half-African like my son) who was still in high school when Hillary was already in play and looking to be anointed. The didactic lesson from this is that it is bad politics to insist on being president when everyone else knows that the other guy has better chances than you do. That means that if you don’t quit when you should, you begin to lose respect and appear desperate, sour and selfish. Americans don’t like it one bit and I don’t think any humans should, including Nigerians.

Back to Nigeria’s 07 transition, I looked everywhere for any possible clue that Atiku, Orji or Buhari could have won the presidency. I found none. The plain truth is that the PDP which Atiku helped to build into a strong party possessed all the characteristics that must be present before a party can win national elections; the others did not even come close. Think the Libertarian Party or the Reform Party holding America’s presidency hostage to technical violations of the electoral statute when everyone else knows that they had no chance to win anything, not to talk of the presidency. Their petitions will surely be laughed out of court. Atiku and Orji knew that it was the PDP only that possessed the requisite electoral strength and that’s why they fought real hard to remain in the party; but Atiku stayed on too long even when all decency demanded that he should have left the party from the moment he lost the trust of his president. In my reckoning, I knew right off from the very beginning that Atiku and his party had no fighting chance – not because he was disqualified – but because his party was new and held no recognizable national spread, if not the many troubles he had with the law in Nigeria and right here in the US. So, for Atiku to continue to claim that he lost because he was excluded, and then included (and then frustrated by Maurice) makes no sense. If he was popular with the electorate, he remains popular throughout, excluded or frustrated. And his popularity was bound to soar on account of the perception from the voter that he was being persecuted. That happened in America with Martin Luther King who became more and more popular with Americans – white and black alike, simply on account of the perception that Jim Crow South was persecuting him and what he stood for. That was the single factor that led to his meteoric success as a civil rights leader. British persecution of Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa was responsible for catapulting him into international celebrity that the British could not subdue when the Mahatma took his struggles to his native India. Nigeria’s Azikiwe is another internationally known leader who soared on the same account.

Coming to the other two major parties – the PPA and ANPP, it appears the young politician - Orji Kalu ran for respect. He kind of knew that his time was yet to come but he wanted to prove the real man he is by telling PDP off and founding his own party. To his eternal credit, Orji is not contesting the presidency in court. Americans respect him for that and considers his generous concession of victory a statesmanlike and sportsmanly conduct that advantaged Nigeria within the comity of nations. Buhari of ANPP ran on a spartan and fundamentalist agenda that paled against a Yar’Adua who ran on the huge coattails of Obasanjo and what looked like a better national appeal for his party, if not the establishment appeal that remains vital in determining who rules Nigeria. As naïve as people may think we are, Americans were in the know of all these calculations and that’s why there was a groundswell of pride in the fact that Africa's largest democracy was able to overcome the bogey of failed elections in Africa. I believe that Nigeria has much to celebrate over her historic 2007 transition; and for good measure, Nigeria's national election board should serve as a reference point for other African countries still struggling with elections that can stick. I have noticed these unfair attacks at Nigeria’s INEC, especially its chairman, Prof Maurice Iwu. That should cease forthwith. I think the man has taken enough and he seems to be paying the price for a victory that the PDP was poised to win anyway. And for the PDP to remain silent while Nigeria is taking a beating from opposition partisans that include one terrible Weblog called saharareporters.com smacks of some kind of cowardice that should not arise with a party in government. In the US, liberal Democrats have learnt the hard way not to suffer the Republican far- right critics lightly after a rampaging neocon Republican Party gained control of Congress for the first time in forty years following a bewildering Democratic timidity in the face of Newt Gingrich’s low-ball contract with America. Nigeria’s PDP is just about coming to the same pass. There is a huge political price that comes from playing dead or wimp when your opponent wishes to take no prisoners. Therefore, the best defense for Nigeria must include one in which her ruling party is at the frontlines of defending the electoral process that brought it to power. There is no other way. Trust me.

Al Clinton, Germantown, USA al.clinton@yahoo.com