NIGERIAN politicians must by now be shocked by the unpredictable politics their country promotes with fanfare. No, not in terms of the expensiveness of their elections, which has become the leitmotif of their competition for office, or the gargantuan remunerations elected officials receive, but in terms of their defiance of every known orthodoxy that has typified and ennobled global politics for decades. Nigerian politicians defy the odds, subvert rules, mock conventions, and now, seem to sneer at even common sense itself. The just concluded governorship elections in 29 states, the last being Adamawa — Rivers State is in a class of its own — all but indicate that while democracy is to be preferred over every other system of government, Nigerian politicians have themselves been very reluctant to let that system grow and be nourished.
In Rivers State where votes usually didn’t count but were customarily allocated, but are now been forced to count and be counted, the trauma of conducting true balloting has knocked political leaders in that endemically violent state sideways and exposed the state to some sort of politically-induced autoimmune affliction. The governorship election in the state was expected to be a straight contest between the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), with the ruling PDP perhaps capable of piping the main opposition party candidate at the post. Unfortunately, the imperious but evidently brittle and factionalised Rivers State APC was unable to agree among themselves who should be the party’s standard-bearers despite the straightforwardness of party guidelines and the Electoral Act.
Unwilling to be consigned to observer status, and after trying valiantly to get the courts to sanction its participation in the election, the APC quickly adopted a forlorn party which had entertained no hope of participating in that election with anything properly describable as a glimmer of chance, let alone winning. That forlorn party, the African Action Congress (AAC), enthusiastically lent its structure and soul to the grieving APC to do as it pleased. But weeks of aggravated violence and strong-arm tactics, not to talk of wholesale seduction by an anxious PDP afraid to lose the election, had created such tumult within the state that even the hitherto somnolent AAC has been left terribly flustered by the aftershocks. Days before the conclusion of the April 2, 2019 collation of the March 9 Rivers State elections, the multi-purpose AAC vehicle deployed by the APC to upend the ambition of Governor Nyesom Wike had also been convulsed by desertions and defections. Indeed, while still waiting for the final collation in an election he was supposed to have participated in, the AAC’s deputy governorship candidate, Akpo Bomba Yeeh, managed to defy conventional wisdom by defecting to the PDP, embracing Mr Wike with gusto, and denouncing his former party’s alleged gangster tactics.
But while defections were convulsing the AAC in Rivers and complicating the state’s political equation, and while tempers were still fraying over an election in which both leading sides were claiming victory, other kinds of curious scenarios were playing out in some other notable states like Sokoto, Kano, Zamfara and Bauchi, all states where arguably needless rerun elections took place. In Sokoto, Governor Aminu Tambuwal finally won the governorship poll by whiskers, in fact by a measly, threadbare 342 votes. For all his acclaim and experience as a politician, not to say his highly lauded stint as Speaker of the House of Representatives, it shocked many analysts that Mallam Tambuwal could not secure an emphatic win. Many observers were indeed left gasping for breath at the wafer thin margin of his victory. Mallam Tambuwal had four years to build on or burnish his legislative leadership reputation. If he could only eke out a win, some argued, it implied that he had allowed many things to go horribly wrong with his administration.
And while many were still befuddled by the closeness of the Sokoto poll, especially given their expectations of a much higher margin of victory for Mallam Tambuwal, something quaint and flabbergasting was playing out in Zamfara State. The election had been concluded in the beleaguered Zamfara, and a winner in fact emerged on the APC platform. Earlier, the factionalised APC had just managed to throw its hat in the ring in the nick of time before the deadline set by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for submission of candidates list expire. But the internal party process that produced the APC candidates was alleged to be fraught with violations of the constitution, thus requiring the repeated intervention of the courts. First, the APC candidates couldn’t participate in the governorship and legislative polls, said the courts; then they could; then they couldn’t; and finally they could. Was that the end of the yo-yo? Alas, it wasn’t. Now, after some sort of victory had been procured by the APC, it turns out, says the courts again, that they really should not have participated because the party’s candidates were not produced by a valid party primary. This, too, is on appeal; and no one seems to know how the tragedy would end, whether dramatically or melodramatically.
Then, also, there were the Kano and Bauchi polls, which were at first declared inconclusive. In Kano, the incumbent governor deployed every known trick in the book to retain office with less than nine thousand votes in an election that controversially saw the highest turnout in Nigeria in this election cycle. Both candidates received more than a million votes each, with the incumbent, Abdullahi Ganduje, besmirched by a financial inducement scandal. If the polls are to be believed, and notwithstanding the appalling violence that attended the rerun, Kano voters appeared to have been unfazed by the scandal actuated by the governor’s ethical challenges. If the courts deem the poll largely satisfactory, Dr Ganduje will rule Kano for another four years, though considerably hobbled by the allegations of graft against him. But if the courts should overturn the controversial victory, however, the PDP candidate, Abba Yusuf, must inevitably contend with a legislature dominated by the APC.
In Bauchi where the former FCT minister Bala Muhammed defeated the incumbent governor, Muhammad Abubakar, by some 14,488 votes, it was an election that neither the people of Bauchi nor INEC itself could be proud of. At first, it seemed like the APC had wanted to avoid defeat at all costs. Then, again, it seemed that ethnicity had beclouded the electoral behaviour of the voters in much the same depressing and aggressive way religion had been whipped up in Kaduna to tilt the March governorship poll. But, at least finally, a winner emerged in Bauchi, and the incumbent was unhorsed. Like the Kano votes, Bauchi adds the painful reminder that both the electorate and the electoral process are really not what they are cracked up to be. It will obviously take a much longer time to get the process right, and even much longer to reform the political behaviour of the electorate and their political leaders. Nigeria should have the ambition to be Africa’s, or West Africa’s, leader and visionary. But given the unsatisfying elections of 2019, not to say the widespread violence that accompanied the entire process in many states, that leadership now seems to be gravely imperilled.
By the time the returns of the elections in Rivers come in, especially with Adamawa eventually joining the opposition column, it should be possible to paint a more accurate picture than today’s terrifying silhouette. The picture at the moment — a picture that is unlikely to be altered significantly any time soon — is one of a high degree of chaos, some measure of incompetence by the electoral umpire, and a government unable and unwilling to administer the elixir capable of energising the system and making it function seamlessly and optimally. The voters themselves have been less than sterling in their behaviour, and most political leaders have shown a lack of patience and vision to let the poll run untrammelled by orchestrated distractions and governmental interferences. If nothing fundamental and significant is done to correct the anomalies noticed in the just concluded polls, if no attempt is made to study the 2019 polls and draw lessons, it will not automatically be better in the next election cycle. It will in fact get much worse.
As exemplified by the aforementioned states, this year’s elections have shown very clearly that something is still fundamentally wrong with Nigeria’s wobbly and stultifying structure. If nothing is done to right the wrongs of this unsustainable structure, Nigerians should not be surprised if they encounter far worse and more atrocious electoral behaviour next time.
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