In today’s Nigeria, the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof Mahmood Yakubu, cuts the most perfect image of the devil, whose appearance could be white or dark depending on which of his two sides you are looking from.
To the All Progressives Congress, which has just been re-elected to govern Nigeria for another four years, Yakubu is the very example of a worthy national asset, a man able to stand his own irrespective of the quantum of pressure brought on him. But that cannot be so for the Peoples Democratic Party and the loads of other opposition parties who lost out in last Saturday’s elections. To this group, the INEC chair would be nothing more than a conniving weakling, who has abused his office and handed over a stolen mandate to the APC. To each party and its supporters, nothing anyone says would change the perception formed by the experience of what they believe to be their reality. But it is really nothing that the electoral umpire should lose sleep over, unless of course, he has truly got something to hide.
Generally, holding public office in Nigeria is not a walk in the park.
First, you will be contending with a system, which rather than assist you accomplish the task set before you, literally does the opposite. Except it changes in years ahead, the Nigerian system is built to frustrate and irrespective of the idealism that you bring to the table, you will most certainly encounter roadblocks that contradicts what you stand for, especially if that is reformative.
Second, upon your appointment, you are automatically thrown into the wilderness of communal dependence; you become the meal ticket to hundreds, if not thousands of those with whom you have associated all your life. Your family, friends and village people will swarm around you like ants about to feast on sugar. This, as subtle as it sounds, is indeed the albatross of many political office holders. This home-based pressure is at the root of most of the temptations that breed the corruptive and nepotistic tendencies that have become identical with public trust in Nigeria.
What is worse however is that for a variety of reasons, public office in Nigeria is largely thankless. There is, to start with, an almost consequential perceptual injury that attends the mere pronouncement of people’s appointment. The country has seen enough of such appointees abuse their offices for personal enrichment, so they tar everyone with that same brush.
This is irrespective of the fact that pervasive poverty in the land has imposed a suppliant mentality which has turned the mass of the people into dependents. And on his score, there is no going away unscarred. It is heads you lose, tails you lose, at least as far as reputation is concerned.
When you choose to be circumspect and ignore demands that usually precipitate compromises, you lose face in the very place where you should be most loved. You are sneered at and ridiculed for not taking advantage of the opportunities presented to you and treated as a pariah in the place of your birth. When you choose to submit to pressure and dip your hands into the commonwealth of the people, the end result is usually equally disgraceful. Public service is therefore, most often than not, a thankless endeavour to which everyone called to national service should brace themselves.
Possibly more than any other place across the world, Nigerian politicians are an impossible lot. Ready to do anything to win an election and never noble enough to concede defeat. As a matter of fact, losing a contest fairly is not in the vocabulary of the average politician here, which is why former President Goodluck Jonathan’s voluntary concession of his loss of the 2015 election still remains a wonder to many till date.
Now, because the Nigerian economy is largely dependent on government patronage, politicians have a mill of willing instruments for the manipulation and even perpetration of violence in an army of unemployed cum frustrated youths who have become political thugs across the country.
Not just that, INEC organises elections in a trust deficit country, where election is a matter of life and death and electoral materials have to be kept thousands of kilometres away from the point of usages until the last day, just so they don’t fall into the wrong hands; and even then, elections are conducted far ahead of the real elections by criminal politicians all across the country!
Yakubu presides over an electoral body, which hires hundreds of thousands of ad hoc staff who do not nurse any form of loyalty whatsoever to their fatherland and have been brought up to see elections as avenues to make quick money.
The system further subjects the elections to manipulations by neglecting the welfare of its ad hoc staff. Just as Nigeria fiddles with the welfare of its law enforcement agents thereby literarily reducing them to street beggars, INEC pays members of the National Youth Service Corps peanuts, provides no accommodation for them but leaves very sensitive documents on which the success or otherwise of these elections depends in their custody. Little wonder there have been endless stories of electoral officials thumping loads of ballot papers in favour of one political party or the other.
Then, INEC is assisted by a crop of security forces whose loyalty is to any government in power rather than the nation that commissions them. So, rather than ensure the sanctity of elections by safeguarding the electoral officers, materials and processes, policemen and soldiers, have been used to subvert the will of the people for years.
So, if things are this way, how exactly does any country expect one single man to be able to make any significant change in its electoral process, no matter how well such a man may mean? For starters, he cannot be everywhere in the country at the same time and while he may have convinced himself that the foolproof processes have been put in place, how does he deal with the machinations of desperate players who want to “deliver” their constituencies by all means?
Yet, guaranteeing the sanctity of the electoral process is critical to the development of Nigeria and any democracy for that matter. The truth being that good governance will elude Nigeria until politicians realise that the votes of the people count and that they can be removed from office strictly on the strength of the people’s voice in another round of election or even by impeachment.
But one of the most heartwarming occurrences of the past two weeks came from Yakubu’s press conference penultimate Saturday. In the course of discussions that followed his prepared speech, he spoke about the need for a national conversation around our elections. That, is one event that Nigeria cannot do without if it is serious about democracy.
That intervention by Yakubu, which may actually have passed unnoticed by many Nigerians, suggests that he must have given some thoughts to the myriad of problems that election administration faces in Nigeria. He must have seen the loopholes that politicians would want to explore ahead of the elections and how these tricks will continue to be clogs in the wheel of authentic democracy. He must have realised that electoral fraud, which only foists illegitimate governments on the people, is the father of all forms of corruption and that Nigeria’s democracy will go nowhere with it.
The 2019 elections have manifestly reversed Nigeria’s democratic progress decades back. The primitive thumb-printing, voter intimidation and sheer audacity displayed by criminal politicians, to say the least, are shameful. But to put the ridicule of it all on Yakubu’s INEC would imply that the nation is still unready to tell itself the truth. Political actors in Nigeria must engage in honest conversations as to the end democracy should attain in Nigeria. Politicians must shed the do-or-die toga that they have forever adorned themselves with, while the people must learn to defend their choice. Nothing but the entrenchment of such values that promote electoral sanity will guarantee Nigeria’s development.
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