By Oguwike Nwachuku
Many issues characterized the supplementary election held in Kano recently. They are undoubtedly the same issues that question the development and progress we claim to have made in our journey to civilian rule these past 20 years of return to democratic governance in 1999.
From the March 23 Kano supplementary election outing, we have made ourselves slaves to the popular refrain “our democracy is still growing” or “our democracy is in progress.”
Career politicians and their supporters tell whoever cares to listen that ours is a “nascent” democracy. To them, we need to make all the mistakes there is to be made to justify how nascent our democracy is and to ensure we behave in ways that make it look young forever.
What they fail to satisfactorily explain, however, is how we should, in the name of “nascent” democracy, be victims of acts that either question or make nonsense of our learning capacity. In other words, learning from our mistakes should be out of it.
Of course, that also explains why we make avoidable political mistakes year in and out, and more noticeably, every four years when a general election is conducted in Nigeria, without caring a fig about our penchant not to unlearn the things that stunt our growth, or put differently, our inability to learn from our past mistakes.
The scenes that played out during the recently conducted supplementary election in Kano on March 23 tell it all.
In the name of democracy and attempt to win election will-nilly, thugs who wielded clubs, machetes and other dangerous weapons, were called out in their numbers by politicians in Kano to re-enact in more ferocious manner, some of the shameful acts that characterized the presidential, national assembly, governorship and state assembly elections held across the length and breadth of Nigeria in February and March this year.
In Kano,the thugs brazenly snatched ballot boxes, burnt ballot papers, and threatened those who tried to stand in their way. While all that went on, their paymasters savoured the unbecoming demeanour in the comfort of their homes in the name of democratic rule.
Unfortunately, what the political parties and their members who engaged the thugs in such despicable act forget is that the Kano scene of club and machete-bearing young men chanting war songs reminds discerning minds globally, is that Nigeria’s democracy shows little sign of progress and application of framework for the growth of democracy, 20 years after.
It reminds of how much we have pretended about our democratic growth two decades down the road without signs things will change in future. What a shame!
To many, the Kano scenario simply evokes memory of medieval lifestyle. It reminds one of the evolution trend known to social anthropologists and archeologists.
The Kano scene is nothing other than one that portrays Nigeria, its politicians and people as very much in the era when characters referred to as orangutan or what anthropologists/archeologists call homo habilis and more recently, homo erectus (Pithecanthropus erectus), were in charge of our environment.
It was a scene that shows that while democracy moves forward in other climes and promotes development, ours heads backward and points to the ancient and medieval era, and in such speed that appears dangerous and frightening.
The Kano scene paints a gloomy and dark picture of our democracy resisting forward movement. It shows how unprepared and un-proactive our electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), can be on issues around the conduct of polls.
The violence that attended the 2019 general election calls to question the competence of the chairman of INEC, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu and his commissioners.
A colleague of mine, in what appears a pejorative characterization of Yakubu, said his looks are innocent but criminal. I cannot agree less.
If you read Dele Momodu on THISDAY on Saturday, March 30, you will understand the depth of disappointment Nigerians express in Yakubu. Many, prior to the general election, thought he was caught out to be a champion.
Senator Shehu Sani put his ill-feeling for Yakubu more succinctly when he said no sensible person will say the 2019 election was credible.
In fact, many are of the view Yakubu should be sacked now for the shame his regime as INEC boss has brought on the country in the name of election conduct that are fraught with both irregularities and loss of precious lives.
Yes, many take pleasure in tagging our own democracy nascent in order to give vent to situations like ballot snatching, thuggery, vote buying (now called vote trading), and other forms of electoral irregularities. But are these electoral abnormalities not part of what the so-called INEC under Yakubu’s watch is expected to deal with or check?
Unfortunately, ours is a system where the umpire rewards brigandage and merchants of electoral violence and misconduct, all in an attempt to protect their jobs and the interest of their employers, instead of working towards the development of our democracy and riding the society of the ills that undermine progress.
In Nigeria, INEC is not ready yet for proactive election conduct. The umpire is filled with national commissioners and other personnel who are fixated on what the body language of their appointees says and not on result-oriented and competitive over-sighting that has helped shape democracies in other parts of the world.
Of late, a new lexicon was added to our democracy calendar which is called “inconclusive election.” The essence is nothing but a rogue strategy to make irregularities in the conduct of election in particular places go the way the umpire and its collaborators want.
The National Chairman of the PDP, Uche Secondus actually thinks that the introduction of inconclusive and suspension of polling in the country’s electoral process was ostensibly to help the party in power to victory through supplementary balloting.
As far as Secondus is concerned, the brigandage that were deployed in the supplementary election in Kano “assisted by security agencies” sign-posted the height of impunity that neither INEC nor the government in power was ready to check.
Today, to say that INEC under Yakubu has taken inconclusive election to another level (Next level) is to say the least. The way the Commission is going, time will come when no election in the country will be conclusive at once no matter how hard we try regardless of whether Yakubu is in charge or some other person (s).
Because Yakubu and his team are not keen on well-thought out strategy on how to conduct polls that are rancour-free, they have short-circuited everyone with all sorts of ad-hoc tendencies that create room for election manipulation.
The result is what we saw in Kano where supplementary election was reduced to a medieval war. Similar experiences also took place in other parts of the country like Rivers State where electoral contest was nothing but electoral war, with the soldiers leading in the assault.
What an electoral umpire will allow politicians run the electoral show, and in a situation where the tax payers’ money was doled out to the Commission in billions of naira to be in charge of the stage?
How many perpetrators of election violence can INEC claim it has sent to jail to serve as a deterrent to others?
To what extent does INEC engage dormant National Orientation Agency (NOA), another government outfit that adds or subtracts nothing from the behavior of Nigerians, to advance the course of democracy?
Has anybody heard that INEC took a politician to court for prosecution over electoral infraction? What an umpire shies away from bringing to justice politicians who, through their criminal acts impact its jobs negatively if it is not collaborating with them to achieve selfish goals?
There is everything wrong with the Yakubu-led INEC. It matters little that those who were favoured by the sloppiness of the Commission in the recent elections are celebrating their victory, but no doubt, time will tell when we will come to our senses. One just hopes by that time it would not be too late for us to make the necessary amends.
For instance, are we not already witnessing the sham called elections that Yakubu conducted in Nigeria going by the way many of the so-called winners the exercise produced are behaving?
If you take a proper look at the newly elected National Assembly members and the returning members to the Senate and House of Representatives as the struggle for the NASS principal offices gathers momentum you will understand the damage the INEC under Yakubu has caused the country.
What manner of lawmakers would want to be shepherded like sheep, nay zombies, over who leads them either in the Senate or the House of Representatives the way the newly elected ones are?
Where they have not been brainwashed by the national chairman of the All Progressive Congress (APC), Adams Oshiomhole to compulsorily vote for the candidates of their party in the quest to secure the headship of the office of the Senate or Speaker of the House, they are being threatened with expulsion from their party by the national leader of the party, Bola Tinubu except they comply fully.
Oshiomhole, Tinubu and Yakubu lay claim to a successful 2019 general election, and the lawmakers they tele-guide are products of the so-called successful election.
Nigeria cannot grow democratically if we continue to glamourize impunity in our electoral contest. In fact, the situation will get worse except we work hard to make politics as unattractive as we can going forward.
Needless to say that because politics has become the only industry that is working in Nigeria, not because better ideas are injected into the system by the politicians, but because of the opportunity the system affords them to get rich quick without much questions being raised, everybody wants to play politics.
A political system that works should be one that makes entrance into politics a choice amid many choices. The lives we lose needlessly every four years of election through a systematic thugs recruitment process by politicians, with the attendant wielding of dangerous weapons by the youth so recruited to fight for their masters’ causes can be done away with if the electoral umpire, in conjunction with sincere government, put their minds to it.
And as Secondus reasons, “Nigerians and indeed all lovers of democracy expect to get from INEC and security agencies, particularly the Nigerian Army and their commanders, an unreserved apologies for their ‘shameful, unprofessional and ignoble roles in the just concluded election.’ ”
To many other Nigerians, the negative tendencies that the Yakubu-led INEC threw up in the 2019 election are simply too numerous. They point to politics of selfishness, greed, brigandage and lack of character that cannot guarantee the growth of our own political system. They point to everything wrong about Nigeria’s electoral system that will never give room for democratic development and progress. Not soon.
