OPINION: Victors, victims and villains

THE much vaunted presidential election of 2023 has come and … it is going, and by the time you read this it could have gone. But this scenario is for the millions of the electorate. Given the nature of our electoral contests these past 24 years, the final word on the presidential election may not really be heard this week. The courts have the final VOTE. Here, the courts are like our own equivalent of America’s electoral college where the winner does not have to be the candidate who won the majority of the plurality of votes And since last weekend’s was a presidential election, seven justices of Nigeria’s now highly controversial and seemingly politicised Supreme Court, will have the final say. If the case goes to the court, and we will be damned if it does not, a unanimous decision of the seven persons of the court or their split decision will confirm or override the ballots of 20 million, 30 million, 40 million or whatever number of Nigerians who voted last Saturday and Sunday.

We could claim that the election was better than previous elections in Nigeria because of the introduction of the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System [BVAS] technology. However, we cannot say by any stretch of the words that it was free, fair, transparent and credible. That is because election is not an event, it is a process. And so an election’s credibility is impacted if at any stage there were issues of tardiness.

The voter registration for this round of elections was untidy. The Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC] was ill-prepared for the exercise. Their machines were slow and frustrated many potential voters. Some of those who managed to register failed to get their voters cards which would make them eligible to vote. The more frustrated citizens were the people who registered to change their polling units on account of their relocation. Many of them were left stranded.

For some the relocation was effected and their new details were duly posted online on INEC’s portal. But their voters cards could not be traced in spite of repeated visits to relevant INEC offices. INEC said categorically that noboby would be allowed to vote without voters card including those who downloaded and printed information about their personal details and new polling units. Many stayed away on election day. But guess what? Some dared and went to their new polling units armed with their printouts. Some were allowed to vote, others were denied.

One was so denied in my polling unit in Lagos while a relation in another part of town was allowed to vote. If there was a rule it was not uniformly applied. On elections themselves, the INEC touts BVAS as a game-changer.

It probably is. But there are so many ugly sides to our elections that are beyond the reach BVAS. Some of these downsides include violence, voter suppression, corrupt election administrators at all levels, vote buying, militarization of the process, insecurity, activities of armed non-state actors such as in the south east where they routinely declare sit-at-home and forbid voting, among others. And all these ills manifested during the presidential election last weekend. They will also be there on March 11 during the governorship and state assembly elections. For the last election, the candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress [APC], Alhaji Bola Tinubu wins the award for setting the tone for violence. On more than one occasion, he was reported to have charged his supporters to slam and snatch anything and anyone in their way to ensure he becomes the President.

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For him, winning the presidency was a do or die affair. Earlier, he had told his supporters especially those of his Yoruba ethnic stock that the presidency this time was for the Yoruba and that since it was the turn of the Yoruba, it was his own. Elsewhere while campaigning, Tinubu had said in Ekiti state or so that there was a conspiracy among elements in his own party in the Presidency who were working with the opposition to stop him. He then went on to say that the Yoruba were no slaves in Nigeria and would not allow themselves to be treated as such by denying him the presidency. He was really making a thinly veiled reference to the ruling political elite of northern extraction who have been in power for almost eight years.

The ordinary meaning of Tinubu’s charge to his Yoruba supporters was if I don’t win the presidential election, we would need to rethink our place in the Nigerian union. It has to be stated that not all Yoruba subscribed to his warmongering and his call to pull down the roof if he lost the election. Then Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party [PDP] who claimed to be seeking the presidency as a ‘unifier’ turned himself to a flame thrower. In Kaduna late last year, he told Northern Elders Forum [NEF] and indeed Nigerians, that northern voters should cast their ballots solely for him because he was one of them. He said that other candidates from other nationalities such as Peter Obi [Igbo] and Tinubu [Yoruba] were not deserving of the northern votes. Before then he had destroyed his party by subverting its constitution that provided that the southern part of the country should produce the presidential candidate in this election cycle. For Alhaji Rabiu Kwankwaso, flag bearer of the New Nigerian Peoples Party [NNPP] he was pointed and unabashed in his divisive and shameless claim that the Hausa, Fulani and Muslims of the north would not vote for the presidential candidate of the Labour Party [LP], Mr. Peter Obi.

His crime? He is Christian and Igbo from the south east of Nigeria. When candidates seeking the highest office in the land speak in the manner that Messrs. Tinubu, Atiku and Kwankwaso spoke ahead of a consequential election, they were only passing an unmistakable message to their followers: the election is do or die. And the country harvested the usual whirlwind in the form of tears, blood and sorrow. Voters suspected of having sympathies for other political parties were locked out of polling units including those located in an ivory towerLagos State University; a political roughneck was heard loud and clear in a video on Saturday at a polling unit in Lagos that prospective voters who would not vote for his preferred APC should leave the polling zone if they still valued their lives. Days before the election an audio message went viral where the palace of a traditional ruler in gbara in the outskirts of Lagos was made a staging post to threaten residents and businesses in the area of the fate that awaited them if they failed to vote for the APC. There was nothing new in the latest threat anyway. After all the Oba of Lagos had in a different dispensation threatened to supervise and superintend the drowning of the Igbo in Lagos if his preferred governorship candidate failed to win his election. When elections are turned into do or die affairs, we all become losers. Voters are discouraged from exercising their franchise and this leads to lower and lower votes for every election which impact on the legitimacy of the government the low voters turn out produces.

As it is typical of Nigeria, there are heroes and heroines even in the face of despair. In Lagos last weekend, a woman was stabbed in the lower part of her right eye and elsewhere at a polling booth. She was rushed to hospital, her profuse bleeding was arrested and her wounds sutured. Now wait for this: she returned to the polling unit where she was stabbed and ensured that she cast her ballot. There were others like this woman. Some provided their Wi-Fi gadgets to ensure uploading of election results to INEC server; some others volunteered their power generators in polling zones where balloting were extended into the night; and yet many more provided refreshments for INEC adhoc staff who were mostly national youth service corps members. The sad conclusion from the presidential election last weekend is that in spite of improvements in technology, our country is still very far from delivering a national election which result would approximate the will of the majority of the voting population.

AUTHOR: UGO ONUOHA

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Articles published in our Graffiti section are strictly the opinion of the writers and do not represent the views of Ripples Nigeria or its editorial stand.

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