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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA The Killing Of Nigeria’s Democracy
When the history of the post-independent struggle to establish democratic rule in Nigeria comes to be written, I have no doubt in my mind that President Olusegun Obasanjo will go down in it as its chief villain, with Professor Maurice Iwu, the chairman of the so-called Independent National Electoral Commission, the supporting villain.
To begin with Iwu, it is hard, if not impossible, to match the capacity for self-delusion of this professor of whatever. Anyone who will look the Nigerian public straight in the eye and, without battling his own eyelids, pronounce last Saturday’s elections as a success, as Iwu has done, must be suffering from a delusion worse than that of Alice in Wonderland.
As the Alices-in-Wonderland of this world are wont to, Iwu has sought to persuade the rest of us that the concrete evidence before our very eyes of bare-faced rigging in favour of the ruling Peoples Democratic (?) Party is an illusion and his own version of events is the reality. Watching him talk on the NTA programme, “Nigeria Decides” – the programme should have been called “PDP Decides” or even more accurately still, “Obasanjo Decides’ - the other day, I had this urge to smash my television set, especially when he made the sanctimonious appeal to the mass media not to go “fishing” for hitches in the elections and blowing them out of proportion. His insinuation was obvious; the problem with the April 14 poll was not its handling by his commission but the way the media chose to report it. Talk of shooting the messenger instead of accepting responsibility for creating the message!
By now, the mess that INEC made of the April 14 election is too well known to need recounting. Suffice it to say that there is a near-universal agreement that it was the most shambolic election in the country’s history. The hope, however forlorn, was that INEC would improve on it in the subsequent election last weekend.
Instead INEC made an even messier job of the election. On the spot media reports showed that the election started very late everywhere. I arrived at my polling station in Kaduna at about noon on that day. By then a fairly decent cue had formed at the station and at two others nearby. However voting could not start because the ballot papers were either short supplied, or in the case of the senatorial election, they were not supplied at all.
Lacking the patience of Job, I left to attend to my other affairs with intention to return at 3pm. Three hours later the materials had not arrived. Again I left with intention to return before 5pm when the polls were officially supposed to close. I got back nearly an hour later, having learnt that an allowance had been made for the late start. Finally I was able to vote at exactly 6.10pm. It is a comment on the credibility of the election that first, the ballot papers had no serial numbers and, second, like every one on the cue, I voted openly because INEC did not provide for secret balloting. It was equally telling that ordinary inkpads were used instead of ones with the stipulated indelible ink. Little surprise then that incidences of multiple voting were widespread.
Late as the poll was at my station, we were even lucky. At one of the two neighbouring polling stations the materials had still not arrived by the time I voted. Later at about 8pm I drove past the station and found it closed. Chances were the voters at the station, at least most of them, could not vote.
Talking to some local observers later and monitoring the media’s on the spot reporting of the election, including that of the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria, it seemed my experience was similar to what happened all over Kaduna State. Elsewhere the experience was far worse, especially in the South where most voters were scared from coming out to vote at all by the widespread violence during the April 14 poll and by INEC’s misconduct in declaring results even in states like Gombe and Rivers where everyone knew elections hardly took place as well as by the commission’s reversal of results in states like Ekiti, Edo and Ondo where opposition parties seemed clearly headed for landslide victories.
The voting was comparatively peaceful in the North with the exception of a few pockets like Daura, the hometown of General Muhammadu Buhari, the leading presidential contender, where violence broke out because there seems to have been a deliberate attempt to short supply opposition strongholds with election materials. However, that there was relative quiet in the region was no thanks to INEC. It seems the commission had a special brief to provoke violence by seeing to it that all three leading presidential contenders, namely Buhari, Vice-President Atiku Abubakar and Governor Attahiru Bafarawa of Sokoto State, were shown to be incapable of winning their home states.
Next to Atiku Abubakar, whose Adamawa State seems to have attracted PDP’s special attention, Bafarawa was the worst victim of the ruling party’s apparent conspiracy with INEC to steal the mandate of Nigerians. To start with, Bafarawa made history as the first governor who, in spite of his constitutional immunity, had his residence ransacked without a search warrant by security personnel ostensibly in search of the chairman of his party whom they had declared wanted. The violation of the governor’s immunity - and dignity - happened a few days before the April 14 election.
As if that was not enough, his party reportedly lost the April 14 governorship and House of Assembly election by an incredible margin to the much-less fancied PDP. And then to add insult to injury, he came a distant third in the presidential election itself right in his home-town! It all reminded one of how the PDP tried to humiliate Chief Bola Ige even in his grave in 2003, when Chief Iyiola Omisore, the PDP chieftain who was implicated in his murder, was said to have won his senatorial seat even in Ige’s village in Osun State.
In the light of all this, to say that last weekend’s election was a massive electoral fraud is to understate the gravity of the travesty of democracy Nigerians have had to endure in the last two weeks.
One foreign reporter friend of mine described it as a PDP coup. Even that does not begin to describe how far PDP, working hand-in-glove with INEC and the security services, has set our democracy back. With the real coup you knew the soldiers will leave sooner or later, especially if you made enough noise against them. With those who steal your vote, as the world has seen in countries like Egypt and Zimbabwe, you never know when and from where salvation will come.
If Iwu is the first supporting act in all this melodrama of electoral fraud, the chief villain, I dare say once again, is President Obasanjo himself. As president and commander-in-chief of our armed forces the last eight years, he wrote the script of the melodrama itself and, whatever anyone may say of him, one has to give him credit for being smart enough to get each and everyone of the major and minor actors in the drama to accept their roles. That is until they discovered too late that they were merely being used only to be dumped when they had served their purpose.
Whether it was Vice-President Atiku Abubakar who alienated himself from his immediate Northern constituency on account of his initial blind loyalty to his boss, or former defense minister General T. Y. Danjuma whose image as the most fearsome army chief in Nigeria’s history kept the soldiers in check, or former minister of information, the voluble Professor Jerry Gana famous for his combative defense of Obasanjo and his administration, right or wrong, or Chief Solomon Lar the pioneer chairman of the PDP and self-styled emancipator of the Middle-Belt, or Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, who, as the Nigeria Labour Congress president, was among the first to endorse the rigged 2003 election as free and fair, or even the grandmaster of Nigeria’s military politics himself, General Ibrahim Babangida who first sold Obasanjo as a born-again democrat and the country’s messiah, Obasanjo used them all and eventually dumped them.
That Obasanjo was able to use and dump all these otherwise intelligent people speaks volumes about the integrity and conviction of the generality of our political class. He was able to use them because every one of us has a price and Obasanjo was smart enough to tell what the right price was for each and every one of those he used. He judged accurately that for most Nigerian politicians the right price was not the opportunity to serve the public but the opportunity to wield power or amass wealth or both.
To remain in power, he was apparently more than prepared to sacrifice anything and everything. Hence the incredible neglect which the welfare and the security of Nigerians suffered under him in spite of the unprecedented revenue that accrued to government in his eight years in office. Hence also the terrible damage he inflicted on the prospects of our democracy. Not only did he impose “garrison democracy” on his ruling party and, by extension, on Nigerians, he effectively neutralized the opposition by infiltrating their leadership with closet PDP members. According to the Washington Post of April 20, quoting Afrobarometer, a polling service that measures African public attitudes, the faith of Nigerians in democracy plummeted from 84% during the early years of Obasanjo’s first term to a miserable 25% in 2005. Neither military president Babangida’s cancellation of the June 1993 presidential elections, nor President Shehu Shagari’s flawed 1983 elections, nor even General Sani Abacha’s terrible tyranny between 1993 and 1998 come near the damage Obasanjo has done to our democracy since 1999.
After the electoral debacle of last Saturday, the faith and hope of Nigerians in democracy can only plunge into a new low. It will take more than a miracle for that faith and hope to be rekindled. But then with God nothing is ever impossible. Not even when a president has succeeded, as Obasanjo has remarkably done, in sending an otherwise politically irrepressible people like Nigerians to sleep these past eight years.
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