PEOPLE & POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

 

2007 Elections: On The Horns Of Dilemma

kudugana@yahoo.com

 

 

Last Sunday’s edition of Thisday quoted President Olusegun Obasanjo as saying that conducting credible elections in Nigeria has thrown up new challenges for Nigerians. “Ballot paper and ballot box have become challenges that require our attention”, the president reportedly said after casting his vote at the rescheduled election of the National Assembly in his ward last Saturday following INEC’s cancellation of the April 14 poll in the ward.

           

This is the closest, so far, the president has come to admitting that this year’s general elections were a debacle. Himself and some of his political aides had admitted to lapses here and there but had nonetheless given pass marks to the elections using the excuse that no election anywhere can be perfect. The president’s honorary political adviser, Otunba Akin Osuntokun, for example, said in an interview in the Weekly Trust of last Saturday that the lapses in the elections were not enough to change their declared outcome.

           

“Malpractices that people are talking about,” he said, “were not of sufficient magnitude to significantly alter the results that were declared.” To describe this year’s general elections as barely flawed, the way both Osuntokun and his boss have tried to, is to commit the greatest perversion against the English language. What took place from the middle of last month was worse than vote rigging; it was shameless vote stealing.

           

According to INEC figures, 35,365,752 Nigerians voted in the April 21 presidential elections. Because of INEC’s thoroughly incompetent and fraudulent handling of the voters’ registration exercise in the run-up to the elections, no one knows, within possibly a huge margin of error of at least 20%, how many voters the country has.

           

But let us, for argument sake, be charitable to INEC and accept its estimate of about 60,000,000. This means a voter turn-out of nearly 60% for the April 21 presidential and National Assembly elections. Any one with half an eye can see that this, to put it mildly, is a big lie.

           

Given the apparently deliberate confusion INEC created on the polling days, coupled with the almost nationwide violence that hired thugs unleashed to scare away voters, it is unlikely that even a quarter of them turned up. Indeed estimates by foreign and domestic observers are that no more than a fifth of the voters turned up for the April 14 poll. And as we all know, the subsequent presidential and National Assembly poll of April 21 was much worse.

           

What this means is that most probably no more than 12,000,000 Nigerians voted on each of the first two elections. My experience in last weekend’s rescheduled elections in 27 states suggests that no more than 5% of the voters bothered to turn up; driving along the roughly one and a half kilometer stretch of Isa Kaita Road in Kaduna GRA and a similar stretch along Maiduguri Road/Ibadan Street in mid-town Kaduna, I did not see a single cue at any of the dozen odd polling stations along the two roads.

           

If, as is probably the case, no more than 12,000,000 Nigerians voted in each of the April 14 and 21 elections, it means INEC’s figure of 35,365,752 was a monumental fraud.

           

Needless to say the greatest beneficiary of this fraud can only be the ruling party whose poodle INEC appears to have turned itself into. According to INEC, 24,638,063 Nigerians, or nearly 70%, voted for PDP, with a comparatively paltry 6,605,299, or nearly 19%, voting for the ANPP and an even more miserable 2,637,848, or nearly 7.5%, voting for AC.

           

To appreciate the enormity of this statistical fraud, compare these figures to those of 2003 elections when INEC said out of 30,280,052 Nigerians who reportedly voted, 18,738,154, or nearly 62%, chose PDP while 11,110,87, or nearly 37%, chose the then APP and a token 34,295, or 0.11%, chose AD which did not field a candidate. And remember also that until this year’s elections those of 2003 had been widely regarded as the most fraudulent in the country’s history.

           

Clearly, what we have here is not a barely flawed election but a case of shameless day light robbery. This explains why, in what seems to be a classic case of Freudian slip, the president would admit that the ballot paper and the ballot box pose serious challenges to Nigerians.

           

The president would, of course, be the first to reject such an interpretation of his remarks, but it does not stand to logic that an electoral system which is credible, even if barely so, will task the mind and the will of Nigerians.

           

Not to put too fine a point to it, what we have had as general elections this year was plain evil. And evil, as the president himself said some 13 odd years ago, is simply not reformable. “Evil” he preachified as the keynote speaker at the national workshop on Nigeria: The State of the Nation and the Way Forward, organized by Arewa House, Kaduna, in February 1994, “is not reformable. And that that was what happened to the last military administration.” He was referring to the administration of military president, General Ibrahim Babangida.

           

“Babangida,” he went on to say during his speech, “is a great master of intrigue, mismanagement, corruption, manipulation, deceit, settlement, cover-up, self-promotion at the expense of almost everybody and everything else.”

           

Thirteen years after Obasanjo spoke those harsh words and eight years after Nigerians first gave him the mandate and the opportunity to practice what he preached against Babangida, Obasanjo proved himself to be the most disastrous leader Nigerians have ever had.

           

The best antidote Obasanjo could have provided against all the ills he had often accused not only Babangida but all other Nigerian leaders of was to have laid a sound foundation for Nigeria’s democracy to grow. Of course he needed to fight poverty and corruption, but then even dictators can fight these twin evils. However, no dictator, by definition, can give a people the freedom of speech, of choice, of association and of action they need to build a truly happy and prosperous society.

           

More than even the military regimes we have had what Obasanjo did in 2003 and repeated on an even more gargantuan scale this year, was to kill the freedom of Nigerians to seek for happiness and prosperity. And to make matters worse, by almost universal consent, his fight against corruption turned out as highly selective and therefore hypocritical. Again his economic reform has brought only misery to most Nigerians while enriching himself and a few of his cronies at home and abroad. As the well-known economist, Professor Sam Aluko, said recently in his assessment of Obasanjo’s economic policies since 1999, “The economic charity of the federal government begins and ends abroad and ignores the home. It is the huge unpaid domestic debt, plus unpaid pensions and gratuities and the withdrawal of government from actively promoting the economy that had led to the increased miserations of Nigerians.”

           

Yes, the president couldn’t be more right when he said last Saturday that conducting a free and fair election poses a serious challenge to Nigerians. He was wrong, dead wrong, however, to argue at the same that the simple solution to the fraud he perpetrated is not to throw the baby with the bath water. In what was clearly a verbal gaffe – assuming Thisday quoted him correctly – the president said at the polling station in question, that “We must not throw away the bath with the baby,” an obvious inversion of the predicate in the well known proverb about not throwing the baby away with the dirty bath water.

           

This baby that the president midwifed is so deformed it is difficult, if not impossible, to resist the great temptation to throw it away with the bath water. As many pundits have argued, if this election stands, it is almost impossible to see how Nigerians can ever conduct a free and fair election again, at least in the foreseeable future.

           

Unfortunately rejecting the election also poses its own dilemma. Such a rejection poses the danger of a military intervention in our politics once again. It also poses the even greater danger of Obasanjo manipulating the rejection to achieve his life-presidential ambition.

           

Faced with these two evils, I think the lesser one is to live with that of the electoral fraud. This is without prejudice to the plans by the opposition to register its disgust at the elections by peaceful demonstrations. The declared president-elect, Alhaji Umaru Yar’adua, himself, is probably not an innocent beneficiary of the fraud, gauging from its scale in his home state of Katsina. However, there is a chance, no matter how slim, that Nigerians can persuade him to repudiate those legacies of his benefactor that have brought nothing but misery to Nigerians. I think it is a chance Nigerians should take, assuming, that is, that they have a choice in the matter.