PEOPLE AND POLITICS

The general elections, the YCE and Ige’s prophesy

By

Mohammed Haruna

Nearly two years ago on April 30, Tell magazine published an interview with the late Chief Bola Ige as its cover story. The interview was quintessential Ige – his excellent turn of phrase, his personal and ethnic superiority complex, his self-contradictions, the lot. Ige displayed them all in the interview which covered many important topics from the deeply divided Alliance for Democracy and its prospects to the equally deeply divided Yoruba leadership; from the Sovereign National Conference to Sharia criminal law.

“I like people to look at politics” Ige told Tell about halfway through the interview, “not in terms of sentiments, but what is on the ground”. Going through the interview, it was apparent that Ige did not heed his own counsel. But that is hardly the most interesting thing about the interview. For me the most interesting thing is how the interview has turned out as very prophetic – in the reverse.

Ige’s reverse prophesy started with a question from Tell about what it perceived as “disarray” in the West. “There is no disarray in the West”, he said dismissively. “It is only a little problem.” However, when Tell refused to be dismissed about “the little problem in the West” and pointed out that there has been serious rift between Afenifere and YCE, Ige conceded that Afenifere did indeed need some restructuring and this had been a source of misunderstanding between himself and other leaders in the organisation. There were the Young Turks in Afenifere who wanted the restructuring of the organisation, he said, but that his reformist camp has had to contend with “those who think the younger ones and I are moving too fast”.

Anyone familiar with Ige’s central role in the founding of YCE as a rival Yoruba leadership group to Afenifere, knows that Ige was not being factual when he insisted the leadership divisions in Yorubaland was merely “a little problem”. Either that, or he was not being honest with himself. For, it was an open secret that he had become so embittered with Afenifere’s choice in 1998 of Chief Olu Falae as AD’s presidential nominee vis-à-vis himself, that he seemed hell-bent on ending its stranglehold on Yoruba politics.

Ige seemed to have adopted a two-prong strategy for ending Afenifere’s domination of Yoruba politics, first, by advocating its restructuring to make it “truly representative and democratic”, and second, by quietly founding the rival YCE, presumably knowing fully well that the first option may take a life time.

Recently Justice Adewale Thompson, the gerontocratic Secretary-General of YCE, gave the readers of The Comet (March 24, 2003) an insight into how the YCE came to supplant Afenifere as the mobilizer of Yoruba support for President Obasanjo. Unlike Afenifere, said Thompson, YCE chose, from the word go, to rid itself of any pretence to Yoruba puritanism, defined as belonging to AD only. Yorubas in other political parties, he said, were most welcome so long as they were for the defence of Yoruba interests.

Proceeding from this liberal position, said Thompson, YCE, which, according to the retired judge, was formed on October 21, 2000, was the first to urge Obasanjo to go for a second term when it first met with him on November 14, 2000. In welcoming the YCE members, said Thompson, Obasanjo had informed them that he would only serve one term and retire to his Ota farm. “At that point,” said Thompson, “Michael Omoleye stood up, he is one of you, a journalist, and said the Yoruba will not accept any other race to rule them again. That we won’t accept it… That was how the whole thing started. He was not ready but we told him, look, go and do it because we know he was trying to implement certain revolutionary policies and as soon as he leaves, those who will succeed him will turn everything down. And then we will go back to square one.”

Whether or not Obasanjo agreed with Omoleye that the Yoruba will never again accept any other race to rule over them, he apparently heeded YCE’s advice to run for a second term. The result of last week’s presidential election suggests that he and the YCE have succeeded well beyond their wildest imagination, assuming, that is, that the elections were free and fair.

The big question is were they?

Before we examine this question, let us turn briefly to what Ige in his grave could be thinking of Obasanjo’s incredible “success”. I imagine that like Obasanjo and the YCE, he too is probably finding it too good to believe, especially since his prophesy about how the Yorubas will vote massively for Obasanjo has been so accurate that it has succeeded in virtually wiping out AD as a party – contrary to what he said in an earlier interview with the Vanguard (November 10, 2000) that “AD is going to be in the centre of a realignment of forces. AD is going to give direction to where Nigeria will go positively and progressively.” Obviously if the near-death of AD has proved anything it is that, regardless of all their claims to the contrary, for the Yoruba elite, ethnicity and the pragmatism is thicker than ideology.

In the Tell interview, Ige had been categorical about how the Yoruba will distinguish between Obasanjo and the PDP. “Yoruba people” he said, “will not vote PDP to run their governments. Yoruba people are not stupid. Yoruba people are the most politically sophisticated and for you to tell them to change their allegiance, they are going to ask questions. Secondly, at the risk of being misunderstood, Yorubas are going to vote one way. If Yorubas are going to change any parties, we are going to change en-mass. If we leaders in Yorubaland decide to support Obasanjo, we will also go and tell the people that we are supporting Obasanjo not PDP and Yoruba can understand that. They can easily understand the difference between Obasanjo and PDP.”

In saying all this, Ige’s self-contradiction was obviously lost on him. Clearly it was self-contradictory for the Chief to claim that Yorubas are the most politically sophisticated people in the country and say at the same time that they will vote like sheep – “We are,” to use his own words, “not going to allow any sheep stealing”. Which is why he is probably marvelling in his grave right now at how as sophisticated as the Yorubas are supposed to be, they have failed to distinguish between the president and his party so woefully that they decided to endorse the PDP virtually lock, stock and barrel and, by the same token, throw out their traditional party, AD, again, virtually lock, stock and barrel. And along with AD, the YCE, as Ige’s creation seemed to have vanquished Afenifere as the pre-eminent factor in Yoruba politics.

To return to the question of whether the elections have been free and fair. In the sense that there were no widespread intimidation of voters’ by security agents or by party thugs, except in the South-East and South-South where such thugs seemed to have operated freely, the elections can be said to have free and fair. Certainly, they were much more peaceful than anyone had expected.

However, freedom and fairness in elections is not merely the absence of official or criminal intimidation of voters. The situation, where the ruling parties at various levels of government could fill their campaign chests with patently illegal donations from ministries and parastatals and from willing and not-so-willing contractors, as was the case in these elections, could hardly be described as free and fair. And money, it is glaringly obvious, has played the most central role in who won and who lost the elections. Next to money was also the fact that most of the Resident Electoral Commissioners in the states, like National Electoral Commissioners in Abuja, are card carrying members of the ruling PDP.

Money and PDP RECs, however, were not the only things that seemed to have led to PDP’s “success”. Other important factors obviously, included prejudice on the part of the media and sentiments on the part of the voters.

From the word go, the media apparently decided to paint Buhari, Obasanjo’s main rival, as an incorrigible dictator, a sectionalist and a religious bigot, while giving the impression that Obasanjo is the opposite, even though Obasanjo’s reputation for intolerance is legendary and even though he has also repeatedly shown that he is not averse to manipulating religious and ethnic sentiments to retain power as was clearly the case during last year’s impeachment saga as well as in his bid for a second term.

As for people allowing sentiments – religious, ethnic or otherwise – rather than their heads to rule them as they went out to vote, this is obvious from the fact that no party, least of all the ruling PDP, delivered on the promises they made to the electorate four years ago. On the contrary, they have all left Nigerians much poorer than they were four years ago – and this, inspite of a mind-boggling 3.24 trillion Naira the federal, state and local governments shared among themselves between June 1999 and February 2002 alone, according to a publication by the Office of the president’s Chief Press Secretary, titled A New Deal: Three Years of Obasanjo and Atiku.

Of this amount, the PDP at the centre had 1.5 trillion Naira. Yet this incredible amount could not, among other things, provide regular electricity for Nigerians or eliminate the seemingly perennial petrol shortages which had returned with a vengeance on the eve of the elections. One reason for this mismatch between government revenue and expenditure, on the one hand, and what is on the ground, on the other hand, was provided by no less than the Minister of Finance, himself, Malam Adamu Ciroma, when he told a gathering of PDP chieftains in Abuja on August 19, 2002, that “As at 30^th June 2002, 92% of all Federal Government revenue are devoted to recurrent expenditure. Only 8% is therefore available for capital expenditure.” The standard universal ratio between recurrent and capital expenditure is 30 per cent to 70 per cent. Obviously any government which would more than reverse this ratio does not deserve a second chance. But then the last elections were much more about cash and sentiments than about performance.

Obasanjo and his PDP were, of course, not alone in exploiting people’s sentiments to win votes. Others too did, including Buhari and his ANPP. However, in exploiting religious and ethnic sentiments, Obasanjo clearly had the advantage that he was the only plausible political choice for Christians all over the country and for his Yoruba kith and kin in the South-West, whereas Buhari had to contend with a powerful and well-endowed vice-president for the votes of Muslims and the votes of his “Hausa” kith and kin in the North. Little wonder then that while the mainly Christian South voted (?) overwhelmingly for Obasanjo and his PDP, the North was divided between ANPP and the PDP.

Because of the central role of money in our politics and of media prejudice and other factors that have worked to Obasanjo’s advantage, Buhari may contend that the elections were not free and fair. He should, however, think twice if he wants to base his rejection of the polls on charges that they were rigged in the sense that INEC may have connived with the PDP to overturn the popular will. Unless, that is, the local and foreign observer pronounce the election as a fraud. My little experience in serving as a Returning Officer in the elections suggests that ANPP, and other opposition parties for that matter, will find it difficult, if not impossible, to prove the elections as fraudulent.

This is for the simple reason that most of the ANPP party agents I saw at polling centres I visited were more passionate than intelligent in carrying out their roles. Indeed, in many polling centres, there were no polling agents at all. My suspicion is that what was true in the places I saw was also true nation-wide, possibly because ANPP did not have the money to employ intelligent and street-smart agents. As such ANPP is unlikely to gather the kind of evidence that can stand the test of proof in our courts. Therefore it may be unwise of him to seek redress in our courts.

It will be even more unwise for him to take his protest to the streets because I doubt if any party in this country is organised and disciplined enough to face down the security forces that those in power would unleash on defenceless protesters.

The wise thing for ANPP to do is to focus its mind on how to make the states it controls models of good governance, keep the National Assembly from being a mere rubber stamp for the presidency, and organise to wrest power from the PDP in four years time when the two-term constitutional limit for the more contentious executive arm of government at all levels, will make the elections freer and fairer than they were last week-end.