Less than one year to the general elections, Senior Correspondent, Ishaya Ibrahim, x-rays the fate of three North East states ravaged by Boko Haram
There are growing fears that the onslaught by Boko Haram insurgents on the North East corner of Nigeria means that election would not hold in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states, or, if held, would eventually be marred by low voter turn-out.
Political analysts further remark that this is going to be bad news for the All Progressives Congress (APC) whose popularity in the states, especially Borno and Yobe, is high.
Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Attahiru Jega, had earlier hinted on the possibility of not having elections in the states.
“We are working very closely with security agencies, and our hope is that the security challenges in these areas will be long addressed before the 2015 elections. We hope that these challenges will be solved or dramatically reduced before 2015. What is clear is that we cannot conduct elections under a period of emergency. If there is generalised insecurity, how can we hold elections? It will be disrupted or people will not come out,” Prof.Jega had noted.
But since December 2013, when Jega made the remark, Boko Haram has widened the scope of its activities, extending its bizarre campaigns to random killing of villagers in their sleep. Now, the people of the affected states are scared and the last thing on their mind is coming out for election.
Even the best efforts by President Goodluck Jonathan to put more boots on the ground have failed to make the states safe for habitation, raising fears on the possibility of conducting governorship and presidential elections in 2015.
For instance, Pauline Godiya, a resident of Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, told TheNiche that the fear among residents over the security of their lives and property has reached an unusual height. According to her, one of the attacks that alerted them that no one was actually safe from Boko Haram attacks was the killing of 59 pupils of Federal Government College, a boarding school in Buni Yadi, Yobe State.
Despite President Jonathan’s security measures, including a full-scale state of emergency to tame the Boko Haram insurgency, the terrorists continued to torment and deny them peace.
The president had initially thought that going after Boko Haram with a sledgehammer was the most effective approach in ending the violent sect’s campaign of terror.
“We will hunt them down; we will fish them out,” the president had declared in May 2013, while sending troops to the troubled states.
Rather than tame the insurgency, the troops that the president sent appeared overwhelmed with the barrage of attacks on civilians and even military barracks. But the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Air Marshall Alex Badeh, said the military would quell the insurgency in the areas,for elections to hold.
Supposing the military fails to suppress the insurgency in the North East, which would mean that election would not hold in the three states? Professor of Law, Akin Oyebode, said that would be unthinkable.
His words: “The election you mentioned, I don’t think Jega meant that he won’t hold elections in the North East. He was just sounding an alarm bell that the Nigerian state should do the needful to contain that challenge in the North East.Otherwise how can you envisage holding election? But I have to remind Jega that even on the West Bank, under the threats of Israeli occupation, elections were held. Elections are held in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
So, if elections are not held in the three states owing to the insurgency, it would therefore mean that the governors of Yobe, Borno and Adamawa, all of whom belong to the APC, would have to handover the affairs of their states to the military after the 2015 elections.
“This would deal a deadly blow on the APC. The votes the APC should have been expecting from Borno and Yobe alone in the 2015 election cannot be less than 90 percent, while reaping at least 60 percent votes in Adamawa. So if these states are excluded from the 2015 elections, especially the presidential election, the APC will stand no chance at all in the contest, since the three states hold a staggering five million votes to offer in the election,” Ayuba Ibrahim, a Kaduna-based political analyst, said.
APC had also said the likelihood of INEC excluding the three states in the 2015 election is a grand ploy of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), to manipulate the outcome.
“The APC has earlier alerted the nation of the strategy of the Jonathan administration to depopulate areas where our party has strong followings and suppress voter turn-out in the Northern and South West states through deliberate exacerbation of insecurity. We suspect that wittingly or unwittingly, the recent declaration of INEC that elections are not likely to take place in states under state of emergency is in furtherance of this agenda,” Bisi Akande, interim national chairman of the APC said.
Even if INEC decides to hold election in Yobe, Borno and Adamawa, the voter turn-out will undoubtedly be low, many have argued.