Every chance he gets, President Muhammadu Buhari claims he was cheated at the elections he contested in 2003, 2007, and 2011. These accusations are echoed by some members of special interest groups whom, one suspects, are joining Buhari on this because agreeing with the President on anything is strategic for their politics. Lately, Buhari repeated those claims when he met a delegation of foreign electoral observers, International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute, in Abuja. According to reports, Buhari said that before the 2015 presidential election that he eventually won, all Nigeria did during the election was to award votes to a pre-selected candidate. To him, his victory in 2015 was due to “God and technology.” Having experienced electoral fraud and subsequent litigation, he boasts that he would treat his opponents with an even hand in the 2019 elections.
First, if Buhari truly believes in the power of technology to guarantee credible polls, and he is convinced that his 2015 victory was due to technological intervention that reduced human interference in the process, then, why has he refused to sign the Electoral Act (Amendment) Bill 2018 into law? Buhari’s piety has always been the currency for governmental affairs (and the man never passes up a chance to demonstrate his peculiar virtues before the world). His Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, also recently stated that Buhari has so much integrity that he would rather lose the election than rig it. Again, if both Buhari and his spokesperson are certain that the path to building a culture of credible election is by instituting reforms, and that if such developments are implemented, it can have a roborant effect on other political processes we inaugurate, why give excuses for not signing the electoral bill?
Second, each time Buhari talks about his three previous electoral losses, he tends to portray himself as someone who demonstrated a religious forbearance and democratic courtesy in that trying period. But no, that is untrue. In his wilderness days in the Congress for Progressive Change, his followers’ impertinence led to the death of an estimated 800 Nigerians in the post-2011 presidential election crisis, as well as another 40,000 displaced. Even after the Sheikh Ahmed Lemu’s panel that was constituted to look into the killings blamed the “provocative utterances by many individuals and the widespread charge by prominent politicians including the CPC presidential candidate,” Buhari’s impoliteness continued apace with his thundering declaration that “the dog and the baboon would all be soaked in blood” if the 2015 election was rigged.
It is curious how this critical chapter of his personal history and that of Nigeria always manages to quietly disappear from his narration of the road that leads to February 16, 2019.
Third, in his desperation to make a show of his grandiloquent magnanimity, Buhari’s claims that he was cheated in previous polls are a de-legitimisation of his predecessor’s governments and a dishonest claim that credible elections only started in Nigeria in 2015. Buhari is, indirectly, stating that he would have been the President earlier if he had not been cheated of votes. But, was Buhari rigged out or even cheated in 2003, 2007 and 2011? Also, was the 2015 election genuinely free and fair? Should a poll be deemed free and fair only if it overthrows an incumbent?
I think the easiest way to evaluate Buhari’s claims about being cheated at the polls in the previous elections is to compare his earlier elections to the one he finally won. In 2003, he contested under the banner of the All Nigeria’s Peoples Party, and although he was one of 20 candidates, he was the only one who presented the biggest challenge to the incumbent, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. In that election, he ended up with 12.7 million votes as against Obasanjo’s 24.4 million. While the accuracy of the vote count – just like many events in Nigeria that have to do with counting – is debatable, it is open to question how he could have defeated the PDP’s national spread.
The bulk of his votes in that election came from northern states; he lacked the broad appeal vital to victory. The ANPP’s narrow-mindedness of 2003 was repeated in 2007 although, remarkably, Buhari had far lesser votes this time – 6.6 million. The 2007 election was also riddled with so much abuse that the winner, Umaru Yar’Adua, admitted in his inaugural speech that he was a beneficiary of stolen goods and would embark on a project of remediation by carrying out reforms.
In 2011, Buhari attempted to broaden his appeal by proposing a deal with the Action Congress of Nigeria, the party that dominated the South-West. The deal fell through, and his opponent, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan of the PDP, won the election. It is noteworthy too that in that 2011 electoral cycle, Buhari did not bother to campaign in the South-East and South-South. He was perhaps the first candidate ever in our history to snub a significant section of the nation.
Thrice beaten, by 2015 Buhari had learned to forge proper alliances. His victory in 2015 was perhaps based on many auspicious factors that dovetailed for him on many fronts: the APC leader, Bola Tinubu, had thrown his cap in with him; the incompetence of incumbent Dr. Goodluck Jonathan stank to the high heavens; the PDP was unravelling, and Nigerians wanted a different set of people in Aso Rock. Add to those factors, one more thing: money.
Money overflowed into his campaign from corrupt pockets, and they lavished it to give the man the necessary makeover. Thanks to the propaganda machine, Buhari went from being a revenant dictator to a reformed democrat; one with so much charisma and personal integrity that could singularly transform the murky Nigerian soul. This time, he won the election and with that victory has come with a sense of entitlement that he deserved to have won all along even though the factors he marshalled in his favour in 2015 were markedly missing in his previous attempts.
Buhari attributes his 2015 victory to “God and technology,” but what did God have to do with it? He won because of his alliance with the ACN, defections from the PDP, and much money. As for the claim of technology aiding his victory, this is merely being disingenuous. Coming in the wake of the contested report that a majority of the vote that Buhari received in 2015 came from those without biometric verification, such claims are a desperate attempt to pre-empt history and have it re-written in his favour.
No matter how much Buhari likes to skew it, the 2015 election was not the ideal as far as credible polls go. It is not enough for Buhari to claim he was cheated at the previous three polls without admitting the factors that also worked in his favour namely underage voting, manual voting, and the curiously large voting numbers that are “awarded” to him in his strongholds like Kano, Kaduna, and Katsina. If Buhari truly wants to ensure a level playing field as he promises, he needs to – like Yar’Adua did – admit that his victory was tainted with fraud. His insistence on staking the dubious claim that only the elections he lost were not credible is not helping anyone.
Elections in Nigeria are fraught with fraud for many reasons that include our lack of statistical sophistication. As a country, nobody has an accurate idea of our population. We lack a culture of empiricism, and that is why we have not yet learned how to organise ourselves like a modern society ought to run. How can any election contested in such a Nigerian context be ever free of fraud? Buhari should stop reducing all the complex issues hazarding electoral conduct to his self-absorbed personality by waving his victim card everywhere. He too has been a willing beneficiary of the same dysfunctionality that erodes the integrity of our electoral process.
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