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The presidential election and its tragic aftermath
-By
Mohammed Haruna
Newsdiaryonline Tue April 19,2011
The announcement of
President Goodluck Jonathan
as the winner of last Saturday’s presidential election should
have been a cause for universal celebration that the country
has, at long last, ended its long history of jinxed elections.
Instead, the announcement has provoked widespread unrest right
across the North by supporters of General
Muhammadu Buhari,
the leading contender, sparked by their apparent belief that,
all the looks to the contrary, the elections were in the end
neither free nor fair.
As far as looks go the elections couldn’t have been freer and
fairer. The sack of the unlamented Professor Maurice Iwu and his
replacement by the widely acclaimed Professor Attahiru Jega as
chair of the
Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC),
was seen as a strong signal that the authorities were indeed
committed to a free and fair 2011 election after the 2007
electoral debacle. This signal was reinforced by the timely
approval and release of every kobo Jega requested for to conduct
the election.
On his part Jega proceeded to put in place all the things needed
for a free, fair and credible election. Among other things, he
produced a plausible voters’ register, in sharp contrast to his
predecessor who set a near-universal record of conducting an
election in the country without a voters’ register of any
description. Jega also adopted the so-called open-secret
voting system
whereby all voters at a polling unit got accredited first then
lined up to vote in secret before finally dropping their ballot
papers in a transparent
ballot box
placed in open space at the polling unit.
Also in spite of intense pressure from the authorities, Jega
stood his ground that voters were free to remain at their
polling units, with their mobile phones and all, until the
results have been declared, provided, of course, they behaved
themselves.
In a normal country where politicians do not engage in do-or-die
politics, all this would have guaranteed a free, fair and
credible election. The truth is that the transparency of the
National Assembly election, and even more so that of the
presidential election, was more apparent than real.
Unlike with previous elections people, generally speaking, lined
up peacefully at their polling units alright, voted freely and
the results were declared with few incidences of ballot box
snatching, intimidation by thugs and security forces, etc.
Certainly the elections of the last two weekends were, in their
transparency, a universe away from those of 2007 and even of
those before.
The problem was that the results of the
presidential
elections that were finally declared by Jega were
a gratuitous provocation of the opposition by a
ruling party
that was determined not merely to win the elections but to do so
by a landslide. Gratuitous provocation, because the combination
of the disarray, weak organisation and little funding within
Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), the absence of
internal democracy within virtually all the
opposition
parties and the historic opportunity that Buhari
inexplicably blew of forming an alliance with Chief
Bola Tinubu,
PDP’s nemesis in the South-West, that could successfully
challenge the PDP monster – in itself a subject matter for
another day - were almost guaranteed to hand over victory to the
PDP, in spite of the massive and near-cultish youthful following
of General Buhari in the North and the belief among almost all
Nigerians that his reputation of being as clean as a whistle was
what the country needed to stop its rot.
Predictably, a PDP afraid that its terrible
record of the last 12 years – no security, no electricity, no
jobs, but so much mind-boggling venality, etc, - might catch up
with it, did not want to take any chance with a truly free and
fair election.
This time, however, instead of using mostly
sticks to intimidate voters, especially those in opposition
strongholds, they used a combination of more carrots, lots and
lots of carrots, and fewer sticks, to buy off and/or intimidate
their leaders – traditional, religious, business, political and
professional. The most glaring manifestation of this change in
strategy was the way traditional rulers, especially in the
North, fell over themselves to welcome President Jonathan to
their palaces on his campaign trail and even to give him titles
but conveniently fell ill or otherwise became indisposed
whenever General Buhari requested a similar visit.
In the history of this country’s elections I
don’t think the national treasury has, as a result, bled so much
from the distribution of patronages as seems to have been the
case in this year’s.
In spite of all this - and more - the PDP
still stood in fear of its own shadow. Apparently its chieftains
then decided that in addition to buying off the leadership in
opposition areas it should also buy the cooperation of the minor
but crucial staff of INEC and even of opposition agents in the
tallying of votes.
This can only be the explanation for the pattern of the results
that Jega, with his hands tied since the figures he was given
seemed to have technically satisfied the requirements of law,
read out on Monday and relied upon to declare President Jonathan
the winner of the weekend elections.
This pattern reflected the country’s historically
low voter
turnout only in opposition strongholds. In sharp
contrast it suggested incredibly high turnout in the ruling
party strongholds all over the country but especially in the
South-South and the South-East. Yet on the spot media reports of
the election all over the country showed voters did not turn out
anywhere near the huge percentages that were returned in those
areas.
For example, whereas, my little arithmetic
showed that Kano, where Buhari had his greatest margin of
victory over the president, had a reasonable 52.3% voter
turnout, Bayelsa, the president’s home state had a voter turnout
of an incredible 85.5%. Except for Anambra (57.3%), Ebonyi
(47.3%) and Edo (37.2%), none of the states in the South-South
and South-East had a voter turnout below 60%. Imo came a close
second to Bayelsa with 83.3%, while Akwa-Ibom and Rivers tied
for the third place with 76.3%.
The history of elections in
Nigeria - and in much
of the world - given the widespread disaffection of people with
politics and politicians, suggests that these figures were
simply untenable.
Indeed a league table of the average voter turnout in 140
countries throughout the world between 1945 and 1998 by the
Stockholm, Sweden, based Institute for Democracy and Electoral
Assistance (IDEA), placed Nigeria at number 118 with a 47.6%
voter turnout, below the United States at number 114 with a
48.3% voter turnout.
It was not surprising then that Dr. Jibrin Ibrahim an election
expert, who, by the way, is a Hausa Christian with a record of
being anti-Northern Establishment that goes all the way back to
his student days in
Ahmadu Bello University,
Zaria, in the seventies, dismissed the figures as not credible
in an NTA discussion programme on Sunday which analysed the
results of the elections as they rolled out.
It is instructive that when the programme resumed on Monday it
was stopped barely five minutes from its start, apparently on
“orders from above.” Since then Ibrahim has been accused,
obviously implausibly, as an instigator of the violent protests
that have followed the declaration of the results.
The in-your-face scale of PDP’s victory, however, cannot justify
the mindless attack on Churches and Christians by Buhari’s
supporters. Neither can it justify the near wholesale attack on
the property and persons of PDP officials in many Northern
states. The fact is that most of them probably had nothing to do
with the way the results were manipulated.
Happily Buhari has since condemned and distanced himself from
the violence. Unfortunately this may have come a little too
late; as at the time of writing this piece there are reports
already of massive retaliatory killings and the burning of
mosques in Southern
Kaduna and in mainly
Christian neighbourhoods in Kaduna town itself, in spite of the
24-hour curfew that has been imposed on the state.
How President Jonathan and the relevant governors of the states
involved handle these tit-for-tat killings would, in large
measure, determine the way his government is perceived by those
who have lost the election. If his handling of the situation
confirms their fears that the principal agenda of a Jonathan
presidency is “to teach those Northern Muslims who think they
have the right to rule this country in perpetuity a lesson,”
then we can all kiss the very existence of this country goodbye
– with, of course, dire consequences for all, including those
who think they have nothing to lose if the country breaks up.
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