Many dictatorships are known for shutting down channels of communication used by civil society to express alternative viewpoints. That is precisely what Nigeria’s ruling political party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), has been doing to citizens who dared to raise their voices against the injustices that marked the presidential election of February 25, 2023, and the governorship election of March 18, 2023.
Right from the day the chairperson of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mahmood Yakubu, announced the results of the presidential election that are still vigorously contested, the public sphere has experienced little or no peace. Voters who condemned the fraudulent election results were chided with the dubious and repressive phrase: “If you don’t like the results, you can go to court”.
In 2014, former President Goodluck Jonathan foreshadowed what was to come in Nigeria when he warned: “I am the most abused and insulted President in the world but when I leave office you will all remember me for the total freedom you enjoyed under my government.” How prophetic.
Jonathan saw the lurking danger in the authoritarian credentials and high-handedness of the politicians who plotted to shove him out of office, as well as the gullibility of citizens who accepted uncritically the change mantra promised by the APC and Buhari during the 2015 election campaigns. Today, Jonathan is the wiser. We can only regret how badly we were conned and misled during the 2015 presidential election.
Following the government’s overbearing style of governance, coupled with unbelievable propaganda and so many instances in which opposition politicians were abused, threatened, intimidated and shut down or denied their rights to express their views, rights that are guaranteed in the Constitution and in Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is not surprising that many people now feel offended by the Gestapo-style attempts to shut down public opinion regarding the elections.
Nigeria is supposed to be a democracy but there are now clear traces of dictatorship all over the place.
It has not yet dawned on tyrannous politicians and government officials that general elections are designed to allow citizens to choose their political leaders in a free environment without intimidation, without fear of punishment, without threats and without violence. Similarly, elections are not organised to allow the courts to determine the winners and losers. Unfortunately, in Nigeria, outcomes of elections have been handed over to the courts to adjudicate.
There is no confidence in the electoral process or in the so-called independent entity known as INEC that was set up to organise free, fair, credible and transparent elections across the country. Therein lies the Nigerian absurdity or paradox.
Consider these instances. The presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, is outraged by the outcome of the presidential election and attempts to shut him down. The Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, and his vice-presidential candidate, Datti Baba-Ahmed, are indignant. They are adamant that the flawed elections and the widespread electoral robberies that took place during the elections made it difficult for them to emerge triumphant.
But to threaten opposition presidential candidates with arrest, with legal action or to intimidate them with violence in order to get them to keep silent rather than complain about how the mandate given to them by voters but stolen by a combination of evil men and women symbolise the installation of the rule of tyranny, repression, despotism, authoritarianism and absolutism.
It looks like the ruling party is determined to send the opposition parties and their candidates into political extinction. There is a proverb in my part of the country that says you cannot bash a child and deny the child the right to cry. Obi and Datti were denied victory by criminal forces through audacious electoral misconduct and use of violence against voters. Ironically, Obi and Datti were informed petulantly by Yakubu, the INEC chairperson, that they could go to court, if they didn’t like his verdict on the winner of the presidential election.
Obi and Datti adhered to the principles of the rule of law and took their grievances to the election tribunal. Now, they are being threatened in a roguish manner to withdraw their legal action and to quit their country or to disappear from the surface of the earth. How disingenuous. When politicians plot to win elections by fire or force or violence, they show their contempt for the rule of law and the procedures that guide free and fair conduct of elections. It is only in Nigeria that politicians can declare it is their turn to be President or governor or parliamentarian and do everything illegal to achieve their ambition.
The 2023 brand of political candidates who contested offices across the country can be classified as insensitive, unlawful, unhealthy, hateful, contemptible and ethnically biased. Their actions, their pronouncements, their schemes and the flagrant use of money to influence election outcomes have fractured a broken country.
This year’s elections were conducted in a climate marked by electoral abuses, unprecedented violence, mutual suspicion, tension, threats directed at voters and rancorous exchanges between the ruling party and opposition parties. Predictably, the elections were sullied by fundamental flaws and criminal violation of the rules. These infractions were encouraged and perpetrated by lawless political candidates, political parties that are not guided by moral principles, and crooked senior officials of INEC.
These violations provide the platform through which we must examine the elections and why many people are outraged by the way the elections were conducted. These abuses occurred because INEC officials paid little attention to the election rules and the due processes that ought to be observed. Unsurprisingly, in the free-for-all environment in which the elections were held, the provisions of the Electoral Act were desecrated. These violations have steered Nigeria dangerously closer to the edge of disintegration and anarchy.
In 2015, Nigerians elected Muhammadu Buhari on the assumption that he had renounced dictatorship and become a democrat. When we shunned the voices of reason during that year’s presidential election and accepted the hype that Buhari and the APC represented positive change for the country, we took a huge gamble. Unfortunately, every political gamble comes with two possible outcomes. It is either you win, or you lose. Buhari and the APC won in 2015 but the entire country lost.
No one can say they are better off today than they were eight years ago. The sad and hard evidence is staring all of us in the face. Many people who voted for the APC in 2015 are now chewing their fingernails regretfully. APC leaders who could not hear any evil and could not see any evil are laughing at all of us now because we allowed ourselves to be fooled so easily yet again.
The decision by the INEC chairperson, Yakubu, to announce the results of the presidential election that was still in progress and to issue a certificate of return to the so-called winner of that election within hours of announcing the results have created fears about the likelihood of the outbreak of violence sooner or later.
No one knows how civil society representing various interest groups would react after the swearing in of the presidential election winner on May 29, 2023, or how the courts would rule about the petitions filed by the Labour Party and the PDP.
Whether Nigeria would be the same again after the swearing-in ceremony in six weeks’ time, or how soon the wounds inflicted on citizens by the rigged elections would heal, or whether the country would see a semblance of peaceful coexistence remain in the domain of conjecture.