I was at the recent African Studies Association conference in New York where one of the panels deliberated on the April elections and the on-going election reform process. The roundtable discussion was rich and insightful, each speaker analyzing what led us to this democratic quagmire and what should be done to extricate us from it.

The discussion got me thinking about the committee set up by Yar’Adua to reform the electoral process. Can it deliver a workable, problem-proof electoral formula to Nigeria ? Is its mandate broad enough? I have also been reflecting on the limits of electoral reform. I am doing so not because it cannot be a panacea to our electoral problems but because I suspect that electoral reform is being gradually advanced as a stand-in for other kinds of reforms and because it seems that we are investing so much of our democratic hope in a reform of the electoral system that we have not stepped back to take stock of its limitations.

There is no doubt that the electoral system and other institutions of democracy need to be deepened and made less amenable to manipulation by politicians. Such institutional reforms could render the self-interested and illegal interventions of powerful politicians, especially the president, less injurious to our democracy, if not completely impotent. I would argue, however, that no electoral reform can stop a determined president from engineering the kind of electoral outcome that they prefer, at least not under our current political structure of overbearing executive supremacy.

And this is where I must begin. We seem to assume that a credible reform of the electoral system will remove the underlying motivation for rigging and electoral manipulations. It will not. Rigging and other forms of election fraud come from a political desperation that, if backed by executive power, cannot be stopped by the most formidable of electoral laws. Some politicians’ only province of expertise is finding creative ways around laws that stand in the way of their political interests. This is true not just for Nigerian politicians but also for politicians everywhere. A desperate, determined, and conceited politician is a good match for any good electoral law.

Let us not forget that what got us here is not just a bad electoral system, although that has played a role in our democratic challenges. More than bad electoral laws and systems, the democratic setbacks that we have suffered in the last eight years were largely result of the machinations of a group of narcissistic politicians led by Olusegun Obasanjo. This group of people had no qualms about breaking, ignoring, or strategically misinterpreting electoral laws. Many members of this group are still active in politics at the federal executive level. If they had no hesitation in participating in the abuse of porous electoral laws, why should they behave any differently with better electoral laws and a better system? My cynical instincts tell me that a better electoral law will simply bring out the best of these politicians’ criminal ingenuity.

The quest for a credible, enduring democratic culture must then go beyond electoral reforms, laudable as these reforms are.

We must devise a mechanism for preventing politicians with executive power from rubbishing the electoral conventions of the land, or at least make it unprofitable for them to do so. To do this, we must remove the basis of political desperation, of political do-or-die. This entails preventing any group of people from having too much power and access to national resources, privileges which they then hesitate to relinquish and would rather preserve than respect any electoral and institutional conventions. We must prevent a group of politicians from becoming too invested in the national political system to the point of doing illegal, unconstitutional and unconscionable things to keep and nurture these investments.

The example of Olusegun Obasanjo and his allies who hijacked the Nigerian state in the last eight years is instructive. Part of Obasanjo’s perverse brilliance is his ability to deploy a discourse of “economic reform” to seduce the West and to engineer international consent and admiration while destroying democracy at home—the same democracy that the West is purportedly committed to nurturing. How did Obasanjo manage to achieve such an incredible feat? Simple: he initiated a set of reforms palatable to the IMF and the World Bank and recruited Nigerian technocrats committed to the visions of these organizations to superintend the reforms. To go along with this, a stable rhetorical diet of “reform” and respect for “technocratic competence” was served to the West.

This political sleight of hand muted and mitigated Western democratic vigilance, allowing Obasanjo and his allies to subvert democracy and free enterprise locally, while pretending to be committed to the free market and democracy. Without international outrage and repercussions, Obasanjo was able to break and manipulate our admittedly faulty electoral laws and institutions to his heart’s content.

My fear is that even if the on-going electoral reforms succeed in fashioning an electoral system that is formidable, future presidents may simply deploy Obasanjo’s playbook, initiating pro-Western reforms to deflect Western criticism and to extract Western consent, while concocting electoral outcomes of their preference in disregard for Nigeria ’s electoral laws. If future presidents choose to be good students of Obasanjo’s perversely brilliant politics of winning international admiration while shrinking the democratic space at home, Nigeria ’s democracy is doomed, no matter how sound our electoral system may be.

Let’s give Obasanjo credit for successfully deflecting Western criticisms while he systematically ruined our democracy by excluding and including people and tendencies according to his whims and interests. But let’s recognize the reason why he and his allies were so committed to holding on to power, to excluding their opponents from the democratic space, and to ignoring or breaking electoral and constitutional conventions in the process. The reason is quite simple: Obasanjo and his allies captured the Nigerian state and its resources and were determined to hold on to it. Backed by the overreaching executive power of the Obasanjo presidency, the PDP and its corporate allies sought to inaugurate a political dynasty, with some of them even gleefully declaring that the PDP was set for a hundred year rule.

To be sure, any other political party or political class would have done the same thing. This includes the ANPP, the AC, or any other political tendency. They would also probably have sought to subvert the electoral process and the laws of the land to retain their privileged perch in power.

The problem then is not the electoral system or laws per se, but the fact that, 1) the federal executive government is too attractive, and 2) the federal executive government is too powerful. The two facts reinforce each other. The attractiveness of federal executive power is a function of the immense access to resources that it bestows on those who wield that power. In the same vein, executive power enables the power wielder to subvert the electoral system and to undertake unethical and undemocratic acts in order to preserve their access to resources. It is a depressing duo, a perfect recipe for political desperation, the type that can make nonsense of any electoral laws or system no matter how well-crafted.

In such a climate, power and the access to resources that it confers must be maintained at all cost. This is the source of the resort to the sort of reform talk and the repressive and unconstitutional acts that characterized the Obasanjo presidency. A lot of people were too deeply invested (literally and figuratively) in power to let go; to let the electoral laws and conventions hold sway; to let the constitution mediate the electoral process. From PDP chieftains to pro-Obasanjo business moguls dependent on state patronage, to political appointees, to international lobbyists—a whole slew of interests and groups of people became so invested in the Obasanjo presidency and/or its reforms that they either participated in or acquiesced to the wanton dismemberment of the electoral system in the quest for so-called continuity.

Continuity and reform became intertwined slogans authorizing the most brazen electoral frauds and the most insensitive subversion of democracy in Nigeria . The culmination of this process was Obasanjo’s undemocratic declaration that he would not hand over power to anyone not committed to continuing his “reforms.” Curiously but understandably, this scandalous declaration did not attract even a whimper of criticism from the self-appointed monitors of democracy in the West. “Continuity” and “reform” were deeply implicated in the electoral fraud of April 2007 and in the numerous undemocratic and unconstitutional actions that led to it.

To recap, electoral reform is laudable but it is powerless in the face of a dogged determination on the part of a political group to maintain the status quo and their privileged access to state resources and power.

This is why electoral reforms must not skirt or precede the fundamental issue of the structure of the Nigerian state: the fact that the federal government controls too much resource revenue and has too much power over its distribution. This is the root of political desperation, which has doomed our presidential electoral contests till date.

Without reducing the attractiveness of the presidency and of other elective federal offices through the institution of fiscal federalism and without the devolution of control over resources to Nigeria’s constituent units, electoral contests will remain contests for access to resources, and the desperation and greed that fuel these contests will continue to undermine our electoral system.

Along with fiscal federalism, a comprehensive constitutional review should whittle down the power, reach, and influence of the presidency, devolving power, developmental initiative and the most consequential electoral contests to the local levels where the Nigerian people can best mobilize to counter the election-rigging and democracy-subverting actions of politicians. Because people have a direct stake and investment in the politics of their constituencies, the determination of politicians to rubbish electoral laws and conventions are unlikely to succeed at those levels.

It is hard to imagine how electoral reform can succeed when an overarching executive power fueled by the desperation and greed that follow logically from the enormous resources controlled by the state can override any electoral convention.

We seem to be putting the cart of electoral reforms before the horse of constitutional reforms. The latter, if carried out properly to reduce the economic attractiveness of public office, especially of federal elective office, can constitute the most important electoral reform and thus make the type of electoral reform that was recently initiated by President Yar'Adua either unnecessary or simply complementary.

Robot  Villager

# 1 ...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 23.10.2007 21:13