Election 2023 Part Three - Epilogue 1 - INEC and Hope Deferred - Part 4 of 4
Political culture and the game of politics in Nigeria
In his last press conference before the Presidential elections started on the 25th Feb, 2023, the INEC Chairman Prof Mahmoud Yakubu was so ebullient in his presentation of how the electronic gadgets INEC had acquired and deployed for the election would work. I was so taken in by his assurances that I could swear that at last Nigeria can make our democracy work for all. Twenty four hours after polling started, the uploading of results was not happening, later about 27,000 were uploaded but only for the National Assembly polls. What happened to the Presidential ballots? No answer from anybody near INEC. Something was happening but what? In the meantime the social media was spewing out all kinds of theories as to what was happening; Soothsayers and prophets started announcing what the gods and their oracles were saying. Still INEC’s Mahmoud kept mum.
I went to bed on the night of 27th February 2023, hoping to hear the good news first thing the following morning, that finally the BVAs and the iREv had started communicating with each other and that uploading of the results of the Presidential polls finally started working, meaning that we would soon know who the next President would be. As I was coming downstairs next morning , I had this foreboding of deja vu, I turned on the TV, it was same story as the previous night. I said to myself “Here we go again”!
Then the “credible” news media – Daily newspapers, TV stations, and the ubiquitous social media started showing that it was politics as usual – some groups have sabotaged the multi million Naira INEC equipment. Can INEC tell the world what was happening? No one except reports of violence, ballot box snatching , burning of ballot papers; even the BVAs machines were snatched at gun-point or daggers point; arson, mutilation of INEC forms, Some say the INEC’s computers were hacked to produce faulty results etc.
What failed us? People or Technology?? We have our own million Naira catch 22 question! Is it that the razor is not sharp or the barber does not know his work? To answer this question, we have to go back to the beginning to reexamine our politics, the way we play politics in Nigeria and whether it is not time we adopted a new system suitable to our culture and temperament. Then came the Governorship and State Assembly election, and the mayhem continued in several states all over the country. The worst was Lagos State, where the ruling party added ethnic profiling and intimidation to ensure a particular ethnic group did not exercise their franchise because they feared the opposition candidate might pull more votes from that particular ethnic group. A fallacy. For the March election they employed ethnic profiling and violent intimidation, door to door search and kill, barricading access roads etc. to ensure the Igbos did not come out to vote. All these took place in the Lagos metropolis. The next morning, some of the affected areas looked like war zone, or neighborhoods hit by a hurricane. That the incumbent governor was re-elected with only about 762139 votes, (LP scored 312329. PDP. 62449 votes) This shows the level of voter suppression in Lagos, a state with over 6.7million registered voters. Out of which for the gubernatorial election, only 1182620 were accredited to vote in all the polling units.