It’s not hard to know the mood of the nation since last week when the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof Mahmood Yakubu, in the wee hours of Wednesday, announced the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Ahmed Tinubu as the winner of the Feb 25 Presidential election. Sometimes, the key to telling a fraudulent joke is the timing. Since then, across Nigeria, and beyond our shores, it has been like an invisible, tormenting force had descended on the country. That’s the disquiet you see these days. The high-spirited and enthusiastic mood with which millions of voters, especially the young first-time voters, trooped out to vote have since evaporated. In its place, is a pain cry reminiscent of mourning as if the future had died in Nigeria.
A young boy in my neighborhood, including a family friend, Ndidi Ochem, were weeping profusely after Mahmood announced the result. They, like millions of Nigerians, were inconsolable. Never have Nigerians felt so deceived as the repeated promises of President Muhammadu Buhari and Yakubu, to bequeath a legacy of free, fair and transparent elections, turned into a farce, a sham of immeasurable, unforgivable proportions. The umpire’s explanations for failure are inexcusable. It’s scandalous. The fact that violence did not erupt across the country only attests to the level of maturity of Nigerians. It was not an acceptance of the outcome of the election.Undoubtedly, the Feb 25 Presidential election was highly manipulated to favour one man. The flawed process made it so, and he has to bear the burden of illegitimacy. From field reports, it seems INEC worked from the answer, a predetermined outcome. As late maverick politician and senator, Francis Arthur Nzeribe would say, in Nigerian election, the “magic is win first, (by whatever means), and let the losers go to court”. It’s a strategem that has worked for many Nigerian politicians. Those close to the APC presidential candidate say it’s a playbook from which he has won all his political battles. They argue that he is sure this one may not be different. It may be his last battle, and the most consequential of them all. After all, didn’t he forewarn that “it’s my turn( Emi lokan), an ambition of a lifetime?. Of course, having a larger end has always been more important for political leaders than anything else, but nobody knew that the presidential election was going to be so flawed, so compromised that the wounds inflicted on the people will take a pretty long time to heal.
When the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Matthew Hassan Kukah, in January, raised the alarm that the good intentions of the President and INEC “would not be enough” until the final assessment of the process, all the president’s men descended on him. They called him names, “a partisan priest”, who should better drop his cassock and go into politics. But the events of the past week have more than vindicated him. The truth is that, the story of Buhari presidency, and the actions and inactions, of the INEC Chairman, have taken a lot of stormy elements of drama and broken hearts in the country. Here is a president who assured the citizens and international community that he was committed to leave behind a legacy of free, fair, credible and transparent elections, and an election umpire who, time after time, promised real time, online electronic transmission of results across the country, as provided in the Electoral Act 2022. But he ended up delivering the most messy, flawed and compromised election in the nation’s history. For them, shame has become a passé, nothing to be ashamed of, no conviction to hold on to. No ennobling virtues to be proud of. As historians will tell us, a president is like a shepherd who knows what stirs the hearts of his people, and takes concrete measures that will work in their best interest. Such challenges like a transparent election process and its outcome are like milestones around any President’s neck who cares about how history will remember him. How he solves them, often determines, to a large extent, how history will remember him, kindly or harshly. For Mahmood-led INEC, no matter how Saturday’s governorship and Houses of Assembly elections go, he has failed the crucial test of strength of character and sincerity of purpose. It’s sad, that as an accomplished historian himself, history will judge him harshly. Many foreign countries, including the United States, have said that the presidential election failed to meet the expectations of Nigerians. If the latest report that INEC has approached the Court of Appeal, to give its approval to reconfigure the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) for Saturday’s governorship and Houses of Assembly elections is true, it will add to the blanket of suspicion that, indeed, the BVAS was compromised during the presidential election to achieve a particular political end. Who compromised the BVAS on Feb 25? Nigerians need to know.
For Buhari, the Supreme Court judgement last Friday, that the old banknotes would remain legal tender till the end of December, is a damning verdict on his presidency. This can be found in the apex court’s description of his action to disregard, and disrespect the earlier order of the court, as that of a “dictator”. That, perhaps is the worst parting gift for a sitting President about to leave office. But the President Buhari brought that upon himself. I don’t think we have witnessed anything like that in our democracy where the highest court in the land had to lash out at an elected president like a schoolboy as it did to Buhari last Friday. Justice Emmanuel Agim who delivered the lead judgement had this to say about the President’s disobedience of the Court’s earlier order. “The rule of law upon which our democratic governance is founded becomes illusory if the President of the country or any authority or person refuses to obey the orders of the court in a constitutional democracy”. This, he said, “is a sign of the failure of the constitution” , and that democratic governance has become a mere pretension, and replaced by autocracy or dictatorship. The Supreme Court’s action is even late in coming, because Buhari’s disdain for the constituted authority like the Supreme Court didn’t start with his willful disobedience on the naira redesign.
I agree with the Supreme Court that it was not the action of the CBN that was challenged by the plaintiffs in the suit, but the willfulness of one man- Buhari. His unlawful use of executive powers has inflicted unprecedented economic hardship on Nigerians and businesses in the country. And you may ask: how did President Buhari sleepwalk into other things, taking his eyes off the ball on the promise he made to leave behind a legacy of free, fair and transparent elections that Nigerians would be proud of? Sometimes, a question like this is asked in every democracy, especially when the government in power has not lived up to expectations. Such a question becomes inevitable when the present leadership has failed to provide solutions to the problems confronting the country. If you have read Charles Ford, author of: “Lies, the Psychology of Deceit”, you would understand the playbook from which this government and its officials take their briefs from. For them, lies don’t have a lifespan. As Ford explains, for such people, lying to gain advantage is like the difference between lying as a legal issue and a moral one. That was how the Attorney General and Minister of Justice Abubakar Malami, deceived the President, that he could flout the order of the Supreme Court and nothing would happen. It comes close to St. Augustine’s number 5 category of Lies, that is, a lie told to externalise blame. That’s how low we have come as a nation.
The mood of the country today is that of anguish. And the pain that this administration has inflicted on Nigerians is an unforgettable lesson in power. The lesson is that, what a leader does when he’s trying to get power is not necessarily what he does after he had got it. As his presidency is on a home stretch now, with just three months to go, I guess Buhari should be asking himself the following questions: how will I want to be remembered? A preserver of my country’s peace and unity or a president who polarised his nation and its people? A president who promised a legacy of transparent polls but ended up bequeathing a sham election? Let’s be clear on one thing. Buhari did one wonderful thing by signing the Electoral Act 2022 that was supposed to bring sanity in our electoral process. But he did some terrible things within the same time, and all came out of the same place, from the same man.
What Buhari gave, Yakubu has destroyed. The INEC Chairman has lost the breastplate of integrity and right standing with the Nigerian people who came out with enthusiasm on February 25 to cast their ballots. For what is obvious now, the umpire can no longer be trusted.
The judgment of history doesn’t come fast, but historians do. And be sure that their verdict on Yakubu, in particular, will not be kind. The truth is that every government in power is judged by the success or failure of the promises that it made on assumption of office. Altogether, it is not unkind to say that in every sector of our national life, the Buhari administration has compiled a dismal record. What would have redeemed this abysmal performance would have been a free, fair, credible and transparent elections. But Yakubu messed up the opportunity that would have assured President Buhari a decent place in history. It was an opportunity that history has given him in time and circumstance. Buhari may help us write his memoir on what exactly went wrong.