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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
The Presidential Election and its Tragic Aftermath
The announcement of President Goodluck Jonathan as the winner of last Saturday’s presidential election should have been a cause for universal celebration that the country has, at long last, ended its long history of jinxed elections. Instead, the announcement has provoked widespread unrest right across the North by supporters of General Muhammadu Buhari, the leading contender, sparked by their apparent belief that, all the looks to the contrary, the elections were in the end neither free nor fair.
As far as looks go the elections couldn’t have been freer and fairer. The sack of the unlamented Professor Maurice Iwu and his replacement by the widely acclaimed Professor Attahiru Jega as chair of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), was seen as a strong signal that the authorities were indeed committed to a free and fair 2011 election after the 2007 electoral debacle. This signal was reinforced by the timely approval and release of every kobo Jega requested for to conduct the election.
On his part Jega proceeded to put in place all the things needed for a free, fair and credible election. Among other things, he produced a plausible voters’ register, in sharp contrast to his predecessor who set a near-universal record of conducting an election in the country without a voters’ register of any description. Jega also adopted the so-called open-secret voting system whereby all voters at a polling unit got accredited first then lined up to vote in secret before finally dropping their ballot papers in a transparent ballot box placed in open space at the polling unit.
Also in spite of intense pressure from the authorities, Jega stood his ground that voters were free to remain at their polling units, with their mobile phones and all, until the results have been declared, provided, of course, they behaved themselves.
In a normal country where politicians do not engage in do-or-die politics, all this would have guaranteed a free, fair and credible election. The truth is that the transparency of the National Assembly election, and even more so that of the presidential election, was more apparent than real.
Unlike with previous elections people, generally speaking, lined up peacefully at their polling units alright, voted freely and the results were declared with few incidences of ballot box snatching, intimidation by thugs and security forces, etc. Certainly the elections of the last two weekends were, in their transparency, a universe away from those of 2007 and even of those before.
The problem was that the results of the presidential elections that were finally declared by Jega were a gratuitous provocation of the opposition by a ruling party that was determined not merely to win the elections but to do so by a landslide. Gratuitous provocation, because the combination of the disarray, weak organisation and little funding within Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), the absence of internal democracy within virtually all the opposition parties and the historic opportunity that Buhari inexplicably blew of forming an alliance with Chief Bola Tinubu, PDP’s nemesis in the South-West, that could successfully challenge the PDP monster – in itself a subject matter for another day - were almost guaranteed to hand over victory to the PDP, in spite of the massive and near-cultish youthful following of General Buhari in the North and the belief among almost all Nigerians that his reputation of being as clean as a whistle was what the country needed to stop its rot.
Predictably, a PDP afraid that its terrible record of the last 12 years – no security, no electricity, no jobs, but so much mind-boggling venality, etc, - might catch up with it, did not want to take any chance with a truly free and fair election.
This time, however, instead of using mostly sticks to intimidate voters, especially those in opposition strongholds, they used a combination of more carrots, lots and lots of carrots, and fewer sticks, to buy off and/or intimidate their leaders – traditional, religious, business, political and professional. The most glaring manifestation of this change in strategy was the way traditional rulers, especially in the North, fell over themselves to welcome President Jonathan to their palaces on his campaign trail and even to give him titles but conveniently fell ill or otherwise became indisposed whenever General Buhari requested a similar visit.
In the history of this country’s elections I don’t think the national treasury has, as a result, bled so much from the distribution of patronages as seems to have been the case in this year’s.
In spite of all this - and more - the PDP still stood in fear of its own shadow. Apparently its chieftains then decided that in addition to buying off the leadership in opposition areas it should also buy the cooperation of the minor but crucial staff of INEC and even of opposition agents in the tallying of votes.
This can only be the explanation for the pattern of the results that Jega, with his hands tied since the figures he was given seemed to have technically satisfied the requirements of law, read out on Monday and relied upon to declare President Jonathan the winner of the weekend elections.
This pattern reflected the country’s historically low voter turnout only in opposition strongholds. In sharp contrast it suggested incredibly high turnout in the ruling party strongholds all over the country but especially in the South-South and the South-East. Yet on the spot media reports of the election all over the country showed voters did not turn out anywhere near the huge percentages that were returned in those areas.
For example, whereas, my little arithmetic showed that Kano, where Buhari had his greatest margin of victory over the president, had a reasonable 52.3% voter turnout, Bayelsa, the president’s home state had a voter turnout of an incredible 85.5%. Except for Anambra (57.3%), Ebonyi (47.3%) and Edo (37.2%), none of the states in the South-South and South-East had a voter turnout below 60%. Imo came a close second to Bayelsa with 83.3%, while Akwa-Ibom and Rivers tied for the third place with 76.3%.
The history of elections in Nigeria - and in much of the world - given the widespread disaffection of people with politics and politicians, suggests that these figures were simply untenable.
Indeed a league table of the average voter turnout in 140 countries throughout the world between 1945 and 1998 by the Stockholm, Sweden, based Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), placed Nigeria at number 118 with a 47.6% voter turnout, below the United States at number 114 with a 48.3% voter turnout.
It was not surprising then that Dr. Jibrin Ibrahim an election expert, who, by the way, is a Hausa Christian with a record of being anti-Northern Establishment that goes all the way back to his student days in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in the seventies, dismissed the figures as not credible in an NTA discussion programme on Sunday which analysed the results of the elections as they rolled out.
It is instructive that when the programme resumed on Monday it was stopped barely five minutes from its start, apparently on “orders from above.” Since then Ibrahim has been accused, obviously implausibly, as an instigator of the violent protests that have followed the declaration of the results.
The in-your-face scale of PDP’s victory, however, cannot justify the mindless attack on Churches and Christians by Buhari’s supporters. Neither can it justify the near wholesale attack on the property and persons of PDP officials in many Northern states. The fact is that most of them probably had nothing to do with the way the results were manipulated.
Happily Buhari has since condemned and distanced himself from the violence. Unfortunately this may have come a little too late; as at the time of writing this piece there are reports already of massive retaliatory killings and the burning of mosques in Southern Kaduna and in mainly Christian neighbourhoods in Kaduna town itself, in spite of the 24-hour curfew that has been imposed on the state.
How President Jonathan and the relevant governors of the states involved handle these tit-for-tat killings would, in large measure, determine the way his government is perceived by those who have lost the election. If his handling of the situation confirms their fears that the principal agenda of a Jonathan presidency is “to teach those Northern Muslims who think they have the right to rule this country in perpetuity a lesson,” then we can all kiss the very existence of this country goodbye – with, of course, dire consequences for all, including those who think they have nothing to lose if the country breaks up.
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