By Dan Onwukwe
It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, to forget the great expectations with which Nigerians went into the just concluded general elections. Indeed, if people are to take the trouble to vote as they did in February 25 and March 18, they expected something that will change the course of their lives and the country, for the better. At a minimum, they believed that elections must offer valid choices. Also, the voters expected, to paraphrase the words of former President Goodluck Jonathan, that ‘democracy is not just about fulfilling all righteousness by treating the people to the ballot box that you bring out on Election Day’. “Democracy”, Jonathan had argued in his memoir: ‘My Transition Hours’, “boils down to legitimacy and ensuring that the people have the necessary dividends”.
But was that what we saw in the Presidential election on February 25, and even in some of the results declared in the governorship and State Assembly elections? Truth is, nothing became of the 2023 elections like the ending of it. It was a sham, discontented, highly disputed and flawed, non-exciting elections, lacking in free, fair, credible and transparency measurements. Simply put, the electoral umpire (INEC) and President Muhammadu Buhari, promised much, but delivered little positive results to be proud of. Recall that days leading to the elections, a sense of history in the making seemed to hang over the country: that the 2023 elections in Nigeria would be a turning point without any inconvenient drama. The outcomes are none of that.
As it turned out, the entire exercise was a mess, a horrifying spectacle, a harvest of thuggery and deaths, violence, ballot box snatching never seen in decades. Elections are supposed to be a celebration of democracy. But what we got was the opposite. Never in my adult life have I seen such beastly acts of attacks, killings, thuggery, suppression, harassment and incendiary comments as we experienced in Lagos, Rivers, Ebonyi, Abia, Ondo and Kano states. The fault lines that divide us have been widened in these elections. In Lagos, Igbonophobia remains a frightening fallout of the elections. The expression of hostility, hatred and discrimination against the Igbo in Lagos last Saturday, was unheard.
If threats to the lives of Igbo in Lagos by Musiliu Akinsanya(a.k.a MC Oluomo), the APC thug-in-chief, was not troubling enough, the combustive comments by a supposed literate mind and spokesman of the Tinubu campaign organisation Bayo Onanuga , has shown that been educated is not enough. He exhibited the characteristics of an unsound mind qualifies him as a seat -of-the -pants politician with little tolerance for tedium. You need a course in neuroscience to know that it is easy to reason poorly through hatred and propaganda. All you need is look into the eyes an ethnic bigot or an irredentist.
These are the rough tackles that many Igbo went through in Lagos during the elections. But it must be said that some of the nicest folks I have met in my life are Yoruba. Pa Ayo Adebanjo has shown us in words and deeds, the morale compass to be detribalised and stand by the truth, always. But it’s a shame to see the likes of Onanuga to be fanning the embers of hatred against a particular ethnic group. How low can we go as a nation? Perhaps what APC cannot destroy doesn’t exist. Just because of politics. We need to remind ourselves that there must be life after politics. Things will continue to go wrong in our politics essentially because Nigerian politicians are always one step ahead of whatever technological innovations that the electoral umpire must have put in place to ensure free and credible elections. And with some mischievous INEC staff, it has become easier to manipulate the results to favour the highest bidder. This is evident in some of the results in the governorship and State elections of last Saturday. It was Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States( 1801-1809) who said that “politics is such a torment” that he would advise every one he “loves not to mix with it”. Jefferson was only lamenting the raw, unadorned nature of politics, the terrible things some politicians can do for the sake of power, forgetting the nuanced essence of leadership at the highest level, that is, to serve for the greater good of humankind.
Taken together, what we have witnessed in the elections is an abhorrence of how not to conduct a democratic governance. Nigeria’s reputation in the eyes of the international community has been tarnished. The outcome is that Nigeria will now be harder for its friends to like, and even much harder for its foes not to hate. If things don’t change for the better, what we saw in the elections could prove no redeeming effect for our politics, democracy and governance. Perhaps except for Mr Peter Obi, the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party who has proved time and again that, with the right message, a candidate with no war chest, or so-called “structure” or machine behind him, can truly be a rallying point for the good things we desire in our politics and in our country. Unfortunately, the election was rigged against him. But it has thrown up a lot of questions on the process and even the burden of illegitimacy on the man who has been declared the President-elect, by INEC.
The outcome of the election has also raised many questions, one of which is: Did Mahmood Yakubu-led INEC mortgage Nigeria’s democracy to return favour done him by someone in the past? One thing is clear: Prof Yakubu has done some wonderful things as the chief electoral umpire and he has also done some terrible things, and all from the same place. His conduct of the 2023 elections is something only history will judge him. As a historian himself, he’s aware that though the judgment of history may take time, but it certainly do, perhaps harshly. Only recently, the former Minister of Transportation Rotimi Amaechi alleged that Yakubu earned his reappointment as INEC Chairman in 2020 through a crony of Bola Ahmed Tinubu. It was a master strategy that may have paid off now, according to Amaechi.
That aside, Amaechi whose run-in with Gov Nyesom Wike is well known, has also alleged that the INEC Chairman developed a chummy relationship with Wike way back when Wike was Minister of state for Education during Jonathan presidency and Yabuku as the Executive Secretary of TETFUND , an agency under the supervision of the Minister of state for Education. Could all of this have made Yakubu to mortgage his conscience in this election, as alleged? The PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar has also made same allegation. In the words of Atiku, “INEC under the leadership of Prof Yakubu is inside the deepest corner of Bola Tinubu’s pocket”. This is a weighty drape of allegation. All of these allegations, though unproven, have found their perfect expression in what is believed to be the worst elections since 1999. This is not a good report for an umpire who holds the most powerful and difficult job in keeping the democratic process safe and transparent, and from being hijacked by politicians who believe in their-way-or-the-highway, blood-and-thunder politics that collapsed the first Republic.
Whatever adverse criticism Yakubu continues to get in the days and weeks ahead, he brought it upon himself. When the history of these elections will be finally written, historians will record it that Prof Yakubu could not withstand the pressure when firmness of character was needed. He became a jellyfish and unhappy warrior when strong conviction was required. All this has brought out some deep-rooted weaknesses in a man many of us garlanded as a moral compass that will direct our elections to safer ground. Sadly for him, he has broken his own pledge to conduct a transparent democratic election that Nigeria and the rest of Africas would be proud of. The pain of Nigerians who desired free, fair, credible and transparent elections, but got sham and shambolic election outcomes, will be tied around his neck.