PEOPLE AND POLITICS

The Worst Democracy Money Can Buy?

By

Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@yahoo.com

Two things inspired this article you are now reading. First, was my experience as the Returning Officer of the Kaduna Central Senatorial District, a job I offered myself for as a result of an interview Dr. Hakeem Baba Ahmed, the diligent and independent minded Secretary of INEC gave Daily Trust the other day. In the interview, which I haven’t seen yet, except, of course, if it has escaped my attention, the INEC secretary lamented the aloofness of many a middle-class professional from the electoral process at the same time that they often blamed INEC for flaws in the process. If only such professionals like doctors, lawyers, engineers, journalists etc will offer their services to INEC during elections, he said, the elections will be so much the smoother and as rig-proof as possible.

As a journalist, I felt challenged by Hakeem’s remarks and decided to pick up his gauntlet: in one of my several meetings with him, I offered to serve during the on-going elections.

There are several adhoc officials in charge of the elections from the polling centre all the way to INEC headquarters in Abuja. As a Senatorial District Returning Officer, I am in charge of receiving the results from the collation officers for the governorship, Senatorial and presidential elections and declaring the results of the Senatorial elections. The Resident Electoral Commissioner will declare the results of governorship elections while the Chairman of INEC declares that of the president.

Other participants in the electoral process include party agents who are there to protect the interest of their various parties, the observers, local and foreign, the security agents who ensure peace and order during the period of the elections and the media men and women who publicize the events.

As you can see from my explanation of the list of some of the election officials – I hope I haven’t succeeded in confusing you – the integrity of the electoral process depends much on the adhoc INEC officials like myself as a Returning Officer. However, by far the greater responsibility for the system’s integrity, still lies with INEC, for, INEC officials by definition, are in a much better position to check crooked adhoc INEC officials than the other way round.

As Returning Officer for Kaduna Central Senatorial District, last Friday, Saturday Sunday, and Monday morning were some of the busiest and most exacting days of my life. On Saturday virtually all the electoral officials including myself and the party agents and the security agents, worked or waited 24 hours flat out to get out the results of the National Assembly elections. Actually I slept at the collation centre on Saturday, first, in the back of my car and later on a mat in a mosque on the premises of the centre.

The results started trickling in by 5.30am on Sunday and we all thought that we will be finished with both the House of Representatives and the Senate by noon. We did finish with the House of Representatives by 1pm on Sunday but couldn’t start with the Senate until well after 5pm. In the end we finished with the Senate only in the wee hours of Monday.

My heroes in all this were the Nigerian Police and the agent for the PDP, Engineer Namadi Musa. The policemen, both officers and men alike, at all the polling and collation centres I visited, were simply wonderful. On a number of occasions when some senior party officials tried to interfere with the smooth running of the proceedings, the police dealt with them very firmly but courteously. For three days most of these officers and men couldn’t even leave their posts for a change of their uniforms.

My other hero was Namadi. As you all know by now, his party lost the Kaduna Central Senatorial District heavily to the ANPP and yet this district is the home of local PDP heavyweights like Alhaji Idi Farouk, the Deputy Director-General of the Obasanjo/Atiku Organisation, and before then the Chief of State of Governor Ahmed Mohammed Makarfi. The district is also the home of other local heavyweight like Alhaji Hussaini Jalo, more than twice the Chairman of Igabi Local Government, Alhaji Sadiq Mamman Lagos, twice the controversial Chairman of Kaduna North, and Alhaji Rabiu Bako, a Commissioner of Information in various cabinets of the state. Alhaji Rabiu is actually my not-too-distant neighbour on Nupe Road, Kaduna, where my family house is. 

More important than the PDP membership of these Kaduna heavyweights, is the fact that the district has always been a stronghold of conservative politics in the state and indeed in the north. PDP, perceived widely as a distant legatee of the conservative Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) of Sir Ahmadu Bello, had been expected to hold sway in the district. That it lost the district to the less conservative ANPP in 1999 was mainly due to internal rifts within it.

This time it lost again to ANPP probably due to popular disaffection with the performance of the PDP, –  “no fuel, no electricity, no school, no water” – and the personal popularity of ANPP’s presidential candidate, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, widely regarded as the conservative North’s answer to President Obasanjo’s policies and strategies that were seen to have alienated the region from power at the centre.

Inspite of the clear lead ANPP had over PDP, Namadi remained at his jovial best with his ANPP rival, Alhaji Abdulazeez Mohammed. Any outsider dropping by at our collation centre throughout Saturday, Sunday and Monday morning would be forgiven if he thought Namadi and Abdulazeez, both of them very active young men, belonged to the same party. Actually, they did until Namadi decided to move over to PDP at the behest of the state governor, Ahmed Mohammed Makarfi.  His conversation to PDP was all the more reason to commend Namadi, because new coverts are often the most difficult people where it concerns their old beliefs.

For me Namadi was a model of a politician who is gallant in defeat. By the time the last result came in from Chikun Local Government by about 12 midnight on Sunday, the ANPP was already leading the PDP by over 50,000 votes. The arrival of the men from Chikun Local Government nearly marred what until then had been like a carnival atmosphere at the collation centre.

It turned out that elections did not hold on Saturday in one of the 12 wards in the Local Government. Some PDP leaders from Chikun wanted to cash in on this to disrupt our collation exercise and the eventual announcement of the winner. They wanted the result of the elections in the other 11 wards rejected outright because of the problem in one ward when it was obvious that even if PDP won al the votes in that ward, the party had no chance of catching up with ANPP, much less of winning. One fellow even tried to snatch the collation forms from the Chikun Returning Officer.

For a brief moment Namadi lost his cool and joined his party leaders in a hot exchange of words with the ANPP agents over what to do with the Chikun results. However, in the end the police, the Electoral Officer, Alhaji Bala Shittu, a very calm and quiet person, and myself, managed to cool down tempers. The police then gently but firmly escorted out the PDP men from Chikun and beefed up the presence of policemen at the centre. In a matter of minutes Namadi and Abdulazeez put their altercations behind them and our carnival atmosphere returned.

Finally, the chaps from Chikun returned at midnight with the results for all the 12 local governments. However, on learning that the election for the 12^th ward was conducted on Sunday and only in the presence of PDP officials, I rejected its results because that was clearly illegal if not outrightly criminal. Besides, even if PDP won all the votes, which was highly unlikely, the party would still have lost to ANPP by a wide margin.

And so it was that at about 2.30am on Sunday, about 32 hours after the polls opened the day before, I was able to announce the ANPP Senatorial candidate Alhaji Mukhtar A.M. Aruwa, as the winner of the election in Kaduna Central Senatorial District with a total vote of 252,695 as against that of Dr. Bashir Balarabe which was 206,536. Here I must also give praise to Abdulazeez, the ANPP agent. By 10.30pm Sunday we had all given up that the chaps from Chikun would return, and I had then decided we call it off for the day and resume at 9.00am on Monday. Alone, among all of us, Abdulazeez advised we should see the job through before we disperse because he said he was sure the Chikun chaps will return. He was proved right in the end.

I said at the beginning of this piece that it was inspired fist by my two-and-a-half day experience as the Returning Officer for the Kaduna Central Senatorial District. The experience of those two days has given me some insight into the enormous problems INEC officials encounter in conducting elections. Some of these problems seem due to sheer incompetence and inefficiency on the part of the officials. My experience suggests, however, that on balance even these and other internal problems of INEC would have been easily cancelled out if INEC had not been made to work against the clock by deliberate delays in releasing money to them for carrying out their work. INEC had, for example, asked for money early in 2000 to conduct a computerized voters’ register for the first time in the country’s history. It got the money from the presidency only in July 2002, and even then with all sorts of strings attached as to who got which contracts.

Not only did INEC get its money nearly too late for a smooth exercise, it also suffered delays in getting the Electoral Law which, not only got held up in the National Assembly because of dubious politicking between the legislators and the presidency, but also because it became the subject of all manner of litigations by political parties all the way to the Supreme Court.

All of which brings me to the second inspiration for this article, namely the book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast, a book which I referred to on these pages last week. The book is a collection of Palast’s articles in various newspapers and magazines in Britain and America, articles which have exposed the truth about so-called virtues of globalisation and also exposed the tricks of political and high finance fraudsters.

In Chapter 1 of the book, Palast, for example, exposes how the neo-Conservatives in the Republican party conspired for two years before the last American presidential election to racially cleanse the Florida voters’ register of blacks. Using his investigative skills and good old persistence and perseverance, Palast uncovers how Jeb Bush, Florida’s governor and President Bushe’s kid brother, employed an outside information and computer company, DBT Online, to purge 57,700 people from Florida’s  voters’ roll, over 90 percent of them blacks and poor whites, supposedly because they were criminals legally barred from the poll. Most of them, it turned out were innocent and both Florida and DBT Online knew it. Palast got on to the story because he thought something was fishy about the contact being given out to the company for $4 million when a local company had offered to do it for – hold your breath – less than $3,000!

However, while Palast succeeded in exposing what was apparently a grand neo-Conservative conspiracy to deprive blacks and the poor whites, who normally vote Democrat, of their voting rights beginning from Florida, all the major news media studiously ignored the story until it was too late to stop Governor George Bush from stealing the election – with, of course, a little help from the Conservative Supreme Court which deliberately took its time to pass its judgement on whether or not what Jeb Bush did was wrong.

The Florida voter fraud shows how ease it is to rig an election well ahead of schedule. Obviously then, it is not outrageous for opposition elements here to express fears about the possibilities of fixing our voters’ register. It was such fears that apparently led some sections of the country to reject the Federal Government’s initial insistence of combining the voters’ registration exercise with the totally unrelated National Identity Card project.

In the end I don’t think anyone did a Florida here in Nigeria. But then fixing the voters’ register is only one, albeit a very important one, of many ways to rig an election. Soon enough we will be swamped with charges and counter-charges of vote rigging and outright vote stealing.

I cannot speak about the rest of the country, but for Kaduna Central Senatorial District, I can say the National Assembly elections couldn’t be freer and fairer, thanks to the wonderful work of the Nigeria Police, the vigilance of other security officials and the camaraderie of the agents of the major parties in the district especially the PDP and the ANPP agents.

The big question is, shall we see a repeat of last Saturday in next Saturday’s governorship and presidential elections where the stakes are much higher? The stories of vote rigging and vote snatching in many places already making the round suggests otherwise.