27 Apr 2007 |
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Notes on Nigeria's Elections (4) In my part of the world, we have a saying that the kingmaker is the first that the king kills. But it is only an unwise kingmaker that will allow the king he has made to kill him. As soon as the king is on the throne, you run - Olusegun Obasanjo, Financial Times, April 17, 2007 PLEASE read the quote from President Olusegun Obasanjo above. There are many Nigerians who are hoping and praying that the President will run, according to his own word, after his exit from power on May 29. He is not expected to run in a physical sense, and become a fugitive, but there are so many people who would rather have him keep himself away and out of the governance process. They are aggrieved that the elections of April 14 and April 21 2007 did not reflect the wishes of the Nigerian people; the majority however is willing to accept the blackmail that has been thrown onto their laps and move on with their lives. That the elections were ridiculous was obvious enough, hence the universal consensus that this was not democracy but a kangaroo process. An international observer group even announced that by African standards, the elections were a sham; its monitors had never seen anything like that before anywhere else in the world. President Obasanjo's response is that it would be improper to compare elections in the Western world to the same process in a developing country. He forgot that Ghanaians next door conducted elections two years ago which were considered free and fair by international standards. And what point was the President making about elections in a developing country? Did he by any chance mean that the theft of ballot boxes, the stuffing of ballot boxes, under-age voting, election violence should be accommodated because people in developing countries are sub-human, or not good enough to experience true democracy? His statement in this regard is a reflection of the compromises: of standards, quality and morality that Nigerians have had to live with in eight years. The President should be reminded that whereas it took Nigeria's Electoral Commission about 48 hours to announce the results of Presidential elections, it took France which had its own Presidential elections on Sunday, April 22, only a few hours to inform the French nation about the results. The French Presidential race had been reduced by popular choice to a run-off between Nicolas Sarkozy (Union for a Popular Movement) and Ms Segolene Royal (Socialist Party). Nobody burnt tyres, or wielded machetes on the streets of Paris. Ballot boxes were not stolen, and in the French process, nobody tried to impose his or her will on the people; democracy did not become a threat to the future destiny of the nation. In the ongoing 2007 elections in Nigeria, the votes should have been a referendum on the ruling party and President Obasanjo, but they weren't because both President and the PDP insisted that their will must prevail. President Obasanjo wanted the PDP back in power as the dominant political party. He has achieved that dream, and moved the country nearer the character of a one-party state. He told Nigerians that he will be succeeded by Governor Umar Musa Yar'Adua as President. He has now had his way. He has told the CNN that Nigerians will appreciate him after May 29. He may not count on that. His government's conduct of the 2007 elections is perhaps the biggest offence that will be held against him in the same manner in which General Ibrahim Babangida is yet to live down his abortion of the Presidential elections of June 1993. He says Nigeria's democracy is "very healthy, well and kicking". Is it? It is a coup that has been carried out against the Nigerian people. Some of the more recent revelations are sordid and mind-boggling. In Ondo State, the PDP was declared winner of a Senatorial election in which it had no candidate! Where did the figures spring from? In Osun state thumb-printed ballot papers favouring the PDP, are said to be littering the bush days after the elections. In the Presidential election results, Yar'Adua of the PDP was awarded 24.6 million votes, followed by Buahri, 6.6, and Atiku Abubakar, 2.6 million, 22 other Presidential candidates all managed a total of about three million votes bringing the grand total to about 35.3 million votes in the Presidential election. Where did INEC get 35.3 million votes from? This was an election in which voting never took place in many parts of the country, voter apathy kept many at home and in other places, voting did not start until 7 pm. There have been reports that ballot papers for the Presidential elections are still lying in the warehouse of the printers in South Africa, and that INEC deliberately refused to collect them in order to create an artificial scarcity of materials during elections. INEC has said it took delivery of all the ballot papers it ordered printed. Who is lying then: the freight company which reportedly brought this to public attention or INEC? INEC had earlier said that it printed 61 million ballot papers for the Presidential election. If it can account for 35 .3 47477 million votes, then where are the remaining 25.652523 ballot papers? Could they be the ones left behind in a South African warehouse? Again, here is another justification for a post-election probe of INEC and its operations. The South African authorities should also investigate how their country has become a launch pad for electoral fraud in other African countries. The last word on the elections is that they make short-shrift of the Obasanjo government's avowed commitment to transparency and accountability. In its twilight hours, the government is being accused of running a fraudulent and flawed electoral process. Civil society groups, many of which had observers on the field are angry. They have vowed to register their protest on May Day, and later call out the Nigerian people to embark on the equivalent of the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003, and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004/2005. The planned civil society protest will be useful, and the more robust that it is, the more significant it could be. But there are two issues. One, the civil society coalition is not as united as it seems. The opposition political parties in Nigeria lost the opportunity for solidarity and self-assertion even before the elections. The results of the Presidential elections made them look like non-starters. They lack a rallying, central figure. Some of the groups may succeed in making the right statements and gestures on May Day or subsequently, but a national protest will be near-impossible. In many of the states, civil society leaders have been trooping to the homes and offices of the newly elected leaders to pay homage, and these include even members of the progressive camp. What we may well get (I hope not) is the NGO-nization of the fall-outs of the 2007 elections. Two, it may be difficult to mobilise the people, the long suffering people of Nigeria who have taken the outcomes of the electoral process with accustomed cynicism. That is why life appears to have continued as if no crime requiring citizen action, has been committed. Some rescheduled elections will take place tomorrow, I doubt if many of our compatriots will bother to participate in them. Eight years of sustained abuse and dispossession have made the Nigerian at home so cynical, he or she is ready to rationalise anything and live with it. He is tired of hitting his head against the wall of official insensitivity and getting clobbered always. As dim as the situation in the country appears to be, there are in fact Nigerians who are already trying to rationalise it all. They say that the PDP would have won the elections anyway, it is just that the PDP rigged in a desperate manner. So? This argument is not proven. They also argue that whatever may be the flaws of the electoral process, one thing at least has been achieved: President Obasanjo will leave on May 29. To get Obasanjo out of Aso Villa, some Nigerians are willing to accept anything at all. The President should be concerned that he has evoked this kind of feeling among the people. When those who hold this view are reminded that Yar'Adua is Obasanjo's anointed President, they insist that Yar'Adua will soon end up as his own man or that it is difficult for the President of a country like Nigeria to take directives from a Godfather. "Don't worry, Yar'Adua will Ngigerize Obasanjo", one fellow boasted. All of a sudden Ngige has become a reference point. But can Obasanjo be caged, and forced to "run"? He calls Yar'Adua, now the President-elect, Umoru whereas the man's name is Umar. A friend has opined that the first Presidential act by Yar'Adua should be a special order that President Obasanjo should get his name right: Umar not Umoru. In a country with a different kind of moral order, there should by now be a general outrage against the 2007 election results. But the people have travelled through that path before and they have seen how in the long term, the people's voice again gets muzzled. And this is why there is such a triumph of cynicism. Yar'Adua is already receiving congratulatory messages. Ethnic associations are trooping to his office to pay homage. There have been reports of a big scramble for Ministerial positions, under the umbrella of a necessary sharing of the spoils of electoral victory according to each man's contributions. Some newspapers are in fact already prescribing economic and foreign policy agenda for Yar'Adua. And the man is also beginning to play the part. In the states, a similar drama is going on. Out-going Governors are planning a meeting with newly elected Governors. The jostling for political appointments and contracts has started. No matter how challenging a situation may be, the average Nigerian has a way of finding an opportunity. On the question of propriety, standards and morality, it is a sharply divided country. There has been much talk about the election petition tribunals too. The mess that the state has created, we expect the tribunals to clear them up. Even President Obasanjo has said that he expects the tribunals to treat all the cases before May 29. He obviously was speaking tongue-in-cheek, because he had the opportunity long before now to lobby for a review of the Electoral Act to this effect but he did nothing. The wheel of justice grinds slowly, in the matter of election petitions, where much will depend on the furnishing of evidence, the tribunals may be handicapped by the process, and by the doctrine of necessity. But must we give up? No. Let those who have a voice continue to speak up.
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