Howsoever one chooses to look at this matter, it is certain that our Nigerian politicians do not rig elections. Neither do their party agents whose job is to stand, observe and countersign whatever is written by those entrusted with the authority. The politician and his agent may plan the rigging but certainly do not execute it. The dirty deed of execution is left for us, the people on whom they inflict maximum suffering. And we know ourselves, those of us who carry out this murky task for the politicos.
We are police officers whom INEC and the law invests with implicit trust. Any election result we push forward is deemed more acceptable in the eyes of the law than any presented by party agents. Some of us collude with party agents to alter the results.
We are also military officers that are sometimes commissioned to forcibly organize an outcome that disrespects the wishes of the people. We use our guns and uniform to enforce a different outcome from what the people wanted.
We are National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members serving as INEC ad hoc staff during election cycles. INEC gives us the primary job of capturing votes in polling booths either with forms or in devices that they provide. Like one of us, the girl caught last week at Abakpa Nike Enugu altering votes to favour Rabiu Kwankwaso, we are in a vantage position to alter the figures for politicians.
We are hungry village thugs and over-pampered university cultists working for dirty money to disrupt elections, snatch ballot boxes, and sometimes shoot or maim our neighbours so that politicians can return to inflict more suffering on our families. We give protection to youth corps members and other youths ready to deaden their conscience in performing their duty.
We are also university lecturers – most of us professors – who accept bribes to alter election results. We are the chief returning officers that allow corruption access to power, again and again. When we finish the dirty job, we return to our campuses to plot ways of fighting the same politicians we empowered because they refused to improve our conditions of service. It never dawns on us that we cannot punish the politician that we helped to inflict pain on us. We turn our anger on ourselves and our children, and we do not care.
We also work like Mafia bosses at state and national levels of the INEC. In many election cycles, we are seen actively altering results to enthrone those that the people rejected and reject those that the people want.
This is us, the people that carry the can, we who are the backbone of politicians. So, do not blame the politician. We the people are the problem with us the people, with ourselves. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it. At least not for now.
Poor Labour Party
The February 25, 2023, presidential and National Assembly elections are almost concluded, and the Labour Party is in pains. The party’s distress is a reminder of the disease that afflicts those who regard elections as the people’s will, expressed through their ballots. These gentlemen often do not plan for alternative strategies and iterations from the polling to the collation centres.
Labour, it seems, is warming up to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, given what is beginning to look like political naiveté on its part. If the tables were turned and either Jagaban Borgu or Waziri Adamawa was in Obi’s shoes going into the election, the difference would have been obvious. The world would have seen and felt a tsunami that washes away the MKO Abiola’s 1993 magical performance.
The imminent defeat of Labour through INEC announcements is symptomatic of what ails Nigeria. Desperation is the elephant in the room. When Shakespeare wrote that “ambition should be made of sterner stuff,” he could not have captured better the desperation demonstrated by political actors at election cycles.
I have observed eight Nigerian election cycles since the Second Republic. There is a discernible pattern to the madness that dogs each election. In all eight cycles, two things remain constant. One is honest and genuine efforts to restrain electoral malfeasance through the laws and through punitive actions. The other is concerted efforts by politicians to audit the electoral law in search of new loopholes to exploit. It is a political hide-and-seek between the bureaucrats and the political class.
When votes are counted after an election cycle, there are always great efforts to deter politicians from compromising future elections. These efforts range from prosecution of corrupt politicians (when the military takes over) to tinkering with electoral laws in civilian-to-civilian transitions.
The Nigerian legislature has reviewed and changed the Electoral Act eight different times since 2001! This averages a change in the electoral law every three years. The reasons for change remain the same – an almost desperate effort to stop the politicians from discovering and exploiting loopholes that challenge the integrity of every election conducted since the current Republic took off in 1999. INEC has also been experimenting with technology since the past four years. This year, 2023, the agency announced that it has finally found the perfect solution to frustrate every effort to rig elections. But has it?
Serving punishment to corrupt politicians ironically began with Gen. Muhammadu Buhari when he took over as military Head of State in 1994. His military tribunals handed sentences running into hundreds of years to politicians for corrupt enrichment. However, before the next election cycle supervised by his successor, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, those who survived Buhari’s jail time jumped into the field to warm up for a new contest. This sparked national outrage that forced Babangida to forcibly prevent them from contesting; he selected and banned a slew of First and Second Republic politicians.
At the end of the punishments and tinkering, citizens believed the politicians had been caged and would thenceforth behave themselves. The expectation was that they would respect the wishes of the people expressed through the ballot. But do they ever? Our experience is that the physical restraints and disincentives built into the amended law never succeed to curb malpractices in subsequent elections. Politicians find a way to overcome their temporary adversities and forge ahead with more creative or crude strategies to identify, circumvent or exploit new loopholes.
Have we discovered the antidote to the misbehaviour of our politicians? I don’t think so; many of us do not think so.
Withdraw youth corps members
How many more National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members will die or be maimed for life before we stop using them for election duties in Nigeria?
Luckily, we are yet to see gory pictures of corps members in theatres of election conflict. But we have seen some of them in a pool of blood, pleading for dear life, while gun-toting thugs loomed menacingly over them. In other social media videos, we saw one willingly rigging the votes for Rabiu Kwankwaso in Enugu, of all places! How far can anyone go to rig the man into up to 1 per cent of the vote in that State? We also heard a state governor on tape threatening to kill those he presumably paid to frustrate the ambitions of the Labour Party in his state.
Haven’t we seen enough to yank youth corps members off from election duties?
It is heartbreaking that our children are deployed to be used as cannon fodder by politicians. It is equally painful that election duties bring them face-to-face with corruption in its glorious rot, getting their first work experience from contact with dirty money. Most of all, it is unpardonable that the labours and resources that their parents invested in them for four or five years are sometimes wasted in the field where the problem of Nigeria begins.
Aren’t we grooming integrity-challenged youths and unleashing on the nation each time we allow them to participate in our habitually compromised poll processes?
It makes sense to consider withdrawing our youth corps members from Nigerian election duties.