PEOPLE AND POLITICS

A most divisive election

Mohammed Haruna

In an open letter to President Obasanjo on these pages two Wednesdays ago, I promised that, God willing, I shall, on the subsequent Wednesday, explain why, contrary to the president’s view, the April/May general elections were not only unfree and unfair, but were the most divisive in the country’s history. In a nationwide broadcast soon after INEC’s announcement that he had won the presidential elections, the president had said, that he was “profoundly overwhelmed by the magnitude of the mandate in which the voting pattern has cut across ethnic, regional, religious and even partisan lines”.

Man, they say, proposes while God disposes; while I had proposed to examine the meaning of the general elections last week, God disposed otherwise and so it is that I am able to do so only today, one week after.

That there has been massive rigging of the elections by the ruling party is a matter of little or no dispute. Virtually all the election monitors, domestic and foreign, have said so. As a Returning Officer in Kaduna metropolis in all the series of three elections, I did not witness the kind of massive rigging so well documented and graphically described by, say, the European Union and the Catholic Church election monitors. But then, as I said two weeks ago, Kaduna metropolis was perhaps an exception to the rule of widespread electoral fraud.

However, even as an exception there were signs that the elections in Kaduna metropolis may not have been as free and fair as a first glance would suggest. First, during the Presidential and Governorship elections, handwritten supplementary voters’ registers about which the opposition parties knew little or nothing, surfaced at the polling centres. Second, at least in Gabasawa ward of Kaduna North Local Government, four or five more ballot boxes than the number initially distributed to the ward’s forty odd polling centres, were returned. Third, no one was fingered, let alone detained or tried, in a case of an attempt to disrupt the polls in Igabi Local Government during the National Assembly elections which was eventually lost by the PDP, using well-armed thugs. In sharp contrast, the governorship candidate of ANPP, Alhaji Sulaiman Hunkuyi was brutalised, arrested and detained for allegedly disrupting the polls in Hunkuyi Local Government, only to be released without charge, after the polls.

Last, but by no means the least, some of the election guidelines were changed midstream for some rather inexplicable reasons. For example, for the Presidential and Governorship elections, Electoral Officers (EOs), as INEC permanent staff, doubled as Local Government Returning Officers, contrary to the original guidelines which separated the two jobs. In this respect, my experience during the April 19 elections, spoke volumes; as the Returning Officer, I was refused entry into INEC headquarters by well-armed and fierse looking soldiers and mobile policemen even after showing them my tag and the INEC envelopes containing the election result sheets. They were, they said, under strict instructions not to let anyone in unless he was cleared by senior INEC officials. I managed to finally get in merely to hand-over my result sheets to the EO only after calling the Resident Electoral Commissioner from my GSM to explain my predicament. Many party agents and election monitors were not so lucky to get in.

All these are, of course, not in themselves irrefutable evidence of electoral fraud. They do suggest, however, that some magomago, subtle and not so-subtle, may have gone on undetected by inexperienced eyes like mine.

Naturally, PDP as the declared winner o the election, does not think any rigging has taken place. Its stalwarts including, of course, the president, believe the elections were free and fair. One such PDP stalwart, Chief Richard Akinjide – yes, he of the 12 and 2/3 fame – says he doesn’t believe there was rigging anywhere. “I come from the South-West”, he said in The Guardian of May 3. “I witnessed the election and I have no doubt that the elections were free and fair”. Rigging, he said, “was virtually impossible”.

Chief Akinjide’s proof was that security agents and party agents were present at polling centres, the voting was open, the votes were counted on the spot and then finally taken to the central collation centres. However, if only the distinguished Senior Advocate of Nigeria will be honest with himself, he knows very well that his proof is as tight as a sieve. Chief Akinjide, I am sure will very well remember that as the legal adviser of the NPN during the Second Republic, all these factors were present when, for example, his party insisted it won the Niger State governorship of 1983. Nearly twenty years later and one week after its governorship candidate died recently, the Supreme Court ruled that the actual winner was the NPP!

And yet by every index of credibility and integrity the 1983 general elections were way above this year’s. First, President Shagari never contemplated sneaking any clause into the electoral law for the 1983 elections, a la the much discredited and deservedly aborted Section 80(1) of Electoral Law 2001 which President Obasanjo explained away as the printer’s devil. Second, Shagari’s electoral law was enacted one full year before the elections, unlike this year’s which was ready only several weeks to the elections and remains a subject of litigation up till today, thanks to the bad faith with which it was manipulated through the legislative process. Third, and most importantly, the voters’ register for the 1983 was ready for use nearly one full year to the elections. In sharp contrast, we never got a definitive voters’ register for this year’s election, what with senior INEC officials giving conflicting figures of the final tally.

On these points alone, no objective observer of the political scene will deny that this year’s election was far worse than that of 1983. Yet sensible and respectable people like Chief Akinjide want the world to believe that this year’s elections were free and fair.

The elections were peaceful certainly, but they were neither free nor fair. Perhaps even worse, they were the most divisive election this country has ever seen. Of course, they were not the first elections in which ethnicity, religion and regionalism and other partisan tools were used to win votes. But at no time before now have such tools been deployed as systematically and as openly as we have seen in the last four years, particularly in the run-up to the elections.

As far as I can remember in all the over 50 years of my life, I do not know of any elections in which religion played such a pre-eminent albeit, surreptitious, role as we saw this year. I cannot also remember an election in which a candidate would stake him claim to the presidency, as President Obasanjo did, partly on the ground that only his election can prevent his kith and kin from seceding from the country. Again I can’t remember any election in which a traditional ruler came out publicly, as the Ooni of Ife did, to tell his people who they must vote for.

It is, of course, an open secret that traditional rulers often engaged in partisan campaigns, but until this year, they have always done so behind one smokescreen or the other. You may call their supposed non-partisan postures hypocritical mythology but then even mythologies do have their uses.

The result of this open and systematic use of ethnicity, religion, and region, etc, was an election in which people voted overwhelmingly for sentimental reasons. Those in the PDP who think their “victory” is a factor for unity, because their party has near total control of the centre and the states, kid themselves for the simple reason that PDP is merely a confederation of strange bedfellows united only by venality of the worst kind. It is a confederation that can hardly inspire people to give the country of their best or check the centrifugal forces at work in the country. Instead, it is more likely to plunge the country into economic depravity and political disunity and instability.

If you think I am being a doomsday prophet by saying all this, take a trip back in time with me to February 7, 2002. This was the day President Obasanjo declared open a Presidential Retreat on Electoral Process and Violence at the International Conference Centre Abuja.

“We all”, he said on that day, “can predict the behaviour of a person who gets into an elected office through manipulation of the electoral process and related democratic rules: he will proceed to dig himself into office with further manipulation of the political system through the instrument of power at his disposal. The scenario rapidly deteriorates when we remember that anyone who abuses the rules encourages everyone else to do the same, and, with political violence in particular, no one can claim exclusively or monopoly”.

The irony of the president’s remarks is that he apparently does not think they apply to himself. That can only be the explanation for his most recent trip to Zimbabwe to try and sort out that hapless nation’s flawed general elections of last year.

Which reminds one of former U.S. president, Bill Clinton’s lecture late last year at the ECOWAS Secretariat at which President Obasanjo was present. During his speech, Clinton lamented the situation in Zimbabwe and urged Nigeria to do something about it.

“I want to thank President Obasanjo”, Clinton said, “for his tireless and often thankless efforts to keep working to the right result in Zimbabwe. In the end President Mugabe must be held to the African Union standard of free and fair elections, so that Africa can send a clear message across the continent and around the world that no matter how heroic one’s past actions, no matter how great the solidarity one feels from fighting past battles… it is simply no longer acceptable to inflame racial divisions, to intimidate opponents, to rig elections or manipulate their results. The essence of democracy is not just winning power legitimately, it is also knowing when to let go… So I urge Nigeria to continue to be a leader for democracy in Africa”. (Emphasis mine)

Given what has just passed for general elections here, Clinton might just as well have been talking about Nigeria. After all, our president too is a war hero, as the general who accepted the instruments of surrender from the Biafrians. He is also a peacetime hero as the first military ruler in Nigeria to surrender power voluntarily. Isn’t it ironical then, that the president’s idea of being a leader for democracy in Africa is to run around putting out the fires in his distant neighbour’s backyard while his own backyard is on conflagration?