The 2023 presidential poll was predicted to be the keenest to be ever conducted in Nigeria, and political pundits weren’t disappointed.
By Tiko Okoye
The 2023 presidential election was predicted to be the keenest to be ever conducted in Nigeria, and political pundits weren’t disappointed. Reactions to the announcement by the electoral czar were expectedly fast and furious, particularly by the LP candidate, backed by his teeming supporters – more popularly referred to as ‘Obidients’ – who, although coming third, immediately rejected the results, while announcing himself as the actual winner of the election. And there are many who believe him. The embedded irony in Obi’s case – a third-placed candidate seeking to be declared the winner of an election by judicial fiat, was completely lost on a doting mob who had given no quarter to the governor of Imo State, Hope Uzodinma, who followed a similar trajectory.
These supporters who took extreme pleasure in openly ridiculing Uzodinma as a “Supreme Court Governor” never gave a thought to, or simply refused to afford themselves the luxury to mull over, how having their preferred candidate equally emerge as “Supreme Court President” through the judicial process rather than the ballot box would sound to men and women of good conscience. The new battle cry became “All is fair in peace and war”!
A lot has been said – and is still being said – about the grounds canvassed in his lawsuit by Obi to make his case. An African proverb avers that “If you say something is sweet, you must of necessity disclose what is sweet as in order to properly contextualise the comparison.” My intention in this piece isn’t to debate the logic and rationality of largely seeking to overturn Tinubu’s victory on the grounds of his being an alleged drug dealer who supposedly committed perjury by not disclosing his dual citizenship and who immensely benefited (no actual number is mentioned) from votes cast for Obi that were allegedly fraudulently transferred to him.
From the comments being made by Obi’s principal aides, majority of Obidients and several eminent Nigerians, who are either in the opposition or find themselves under daunting pressures to exhibit parapo tendencies, one can glean other reasons why Obi is contesting his defeat. These include: an extremely low voter turnout (they claim it is “about 10 – 20 per cent at best”), the failure of INEC to follow the rules and guidelines it set for itself (read the failure to electronically upload results to the IReV “as promised by INEC”), judicial partiality, voter intimidation and suppression, religious bigotry, ethnic profiling, open threats, violence, a growing threat to the right to free speech and results that were not in sync with some public opinion polls conducted during the run-up to the election.
READ ALSO: Peter Obi and the Obidients: And the beat goes on!
My major concern, therefore, in this and the next three articles would be to analyse the series of elections right from the first elections since the annulment of the 1993 presidential poll and the first elections of the Fourth Republic in 1999 as a framework for ascertaining the veracity of the claim in some quarters that the 2023 elections are the worst ever conducted in Nigeria, if only because facts are sacred and records must be kept as straight as possible for posterity.
Let’s forward to the past: the 1999 elections. Three major parties were involved, namely: Alliance for Democracy (AD), All Peoples Party (APP) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The results of the presidential election, as declared by INEC Chairman Justice Ephraim Akpata, showed that the PDP ticket of Olusegun Obasanjo (presidential candidate) and Atiku Abubakar garnered 18.7 million votes (63% of the total valid votes cast), while that of the joint AD/APP ticket of Olu Falae (presidential candidate) and Umaru Shinkafi received 11.1 million votes (37% of the total valid votes cast). The total voter turnout was said to be 52.3%.
In the parliamentary elections, PDP carted away 60 of 109 Senate seats (55%) and 206 of 360 House seats (57%), with the AD and APP winning 20 (18%), 68 (19%) and 29 (27%), 74 (21%) respectively. The voter turnout in the parliamentary elections was said to be 42.1%. Of the 36 gubernatorial seats contested for, PDP grabbed 21 (58%), AD won 6 (17%) and APP carted away 9 (25%).
But, the major foreign election-monitoring team comprising officials from the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the Carter Center – both of the United States of America – had some very interesting things to say about the elections.
Among those who witnessed electoral abnormalities in person was Jimmy Carter, a former governor of the State of Georgia, ex-US president and founder of the Carter Center, who reportedly “saw a stack of ballots neatly placed in one ballot box in precise numerical order.” In some states, particularly in the South-South, the delegates estimated that “less than 10% of registered voters cast ballots, but official turnout rates for these same states exceeded 85%”! “Almost all polling units,” continued the report, “recorded that all 500 registered voters (maximum set by law for each polling unit) had cast ballots when both the Transition Monitoring Group (TMG – the main group of domestic observers) and us saw fewer than 100 people during the entire voting period.”
The team went on to say that there were instances when NDI/Carter Center observers recorded low numbers of accredited voters at polling stations (units) – “sometimes less than 10%, only for the same stations, during counting and/or the collation process later in the day, to report considerably higher numbers, sometimes even 100% of registered voters (meaning that the bedridden and the dead all voted)”! As a matter of fact, their polling specialists had estimated the voter turnout in the presidential poll to be about 25% only to be “utterly amazed” by the figure of 52% announced by INEC. Team members were left in no doubt that the reason for the atrociously high false voter turnout rates was “chiefly attributable to voter tally inflation.”
After writing their final report, President Carter wrote an open letter to the INEC chairman and to the political parties stating his “grave concern about the significant irregularities” that manifested themselves, “including ballot box stuffing, inflation of results and outright intimidation of voters,” urging that they “take immediate corrective action.”
The NDI/Carter Center team held separate meetings with then-Head of State, Gen. Abubakar Abdulsalami, and both Obasanjo and Falae, to discuss their findings which ended on this cryptic note: “There was a wide disparity between the number of voters observed at the polling stations and the final results that have been reported from several stations. Regrettably, therefore, it is not possible for us to make an accurate judgement about the outcome of the presidential election.” Quite shocking!
On his own part, Falae latched on that admission to announce that the entire process had been “a farce” and informed the delegation that he was planning to appeal the results. The co-leaders of the team – President Carter, former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Secretary of State, Gen. Colin Powell and President of Niger, Mahamane Ousmane – urged Falae to channel his grievances through the court system rather than to the streets and he agreed to abide by the legal route specified by INEC. Falae, a one-time merchant bank CEO, former finance minister and Secretary to the Federal Government, later told the Associated Press that “voter fraud was so monumental as to make nonsense of the entire process.”
I’m quite certain that many people reading this would think that the comments were being made about the recently concluded 2023 elections. Nigerians are notoriously known for their short memory and I can wager that most Nigerians would describe the 1999 elections as among the most peaceful, credible and freest, without remembering that apart from the violence that erupted in several parts of the country, as many as 10 election-related deaths were recorded. As it was 24 years ago, so it is today. The more things seem to change, the more they remain the same. But we still have five more elections to evaluate before coming to 2023.
Next week: 2003 and 2007 elections.