By February 23, when the first set of presidential and National Assembly polls took place in another of Nigeria’s quadrennial electoral cycles, President Muhammadu Buhari and his All Progressives Congress (APC) ruling “politburo” had not only met but had broken every record of misrule of the preceding sixteen years of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), prior to the 2015 elections, when it conducted, perhaps, the worst election in the history of the country’s Fourth Republic. Having failed in his promise to bring economic prosperity, alongside security, in a system devoid of corruption, to Nigerians in his first four years, Buhari and his powerful cabal of entrenched self-interest groups, conceptualised and executed a most brazen electoral fraud scheme to rig its largely discredited administration back to power.
Beginning with some key but nepotism tainted appointments into Nigeria’s electoral management body, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to the refusal of the president to sign far-reaching amendments to the electoral law, which were aimed at consolidating the gains achieved in Nigeria’s electoral process in 2015, the road to an election, which was primed to be anything but free and fair, was paved. With lines between national and partisan loyalty substantially blurred, security agencies working in concert with INEC at the behest of the ruling party chieftains, ensured a thorough rape of Nigeria’s electoral process to stupor.
Backed by a powerful clique of the ruling elite, which feeds fat on the proceeds of entrenched corrupt practices in his administration, President Buhari and his APC deployed the most ingeniously evil tactics to undermine the popular will of the Nigerian people, who were poised to take advantage of the ballot box to peacefully change an administration that is high on failure and very low on successful achievements. By weaponising state-induced mass poverty, bullion vans and overloaded air crafts stuffed with currency notes were rolled out for massive vote buying. Where financial inducements were resisted, voter suppression through intimidation and killing of defenceless citizens by security agencies, who also aided the disruption of voting by thugs, were the order of the day. These agencies were complicit in the electoral brigandage by turning a blind eye to allow for the hijacking of electoral materials and subsequent falsification of election figures at militarised collation centres, with the full cooperation of some compromised electoral management officers, to achieve a pyrrhic victory for a ruling but thoroughly failed administration. In some other cases, underage voting and multiple thumb printing without recourse to biometric verification became the sad reality of the elections.
Just as many Nigerians were still mourning the death of liberal democracy in the morning after a thoroughly manipulated electoral process, the fascist propaganda machinery of the ruling APC was rolled out in praise of President Buhari’s skilfully managed but now punctured image of integrity and celebration of the triumph of “honesty” over “corruption” to legitimise a glaringly flawed process. By engaging the services of intellectually dishonest individuals who deployed charming wit and poetic sophistry to cover up such electoral travesty, and by throwing up a clever spin, amounts to a celebration of President Buhari’s dishonest integrity, as he is the major enabler and chief beneficiary of this grand electoral heist in an attempt to give a different meaning to the concept of honesty.
The effort to project President Buhari as an outsider to the elite political establishment and his pyrrhic victory as a testimony of the will of the masses is as far from the truth as the moon is from the sun. Going by the massive support he enjoyed from powerful political titans, state governors, legislators, ministers, frontline traditional rulers and their collaborators in corporate Nigeria, all of who have been part of the ruling class since 1999, President Buhari’s choice came across as Nigeria’s elite consensus candidate going into the presidential polls. President Buhari’s stronghold of Northern Nigeria was not only cultivated but continually made safe for him by a powerful clique of Northern political elite who work in concert with the traditional religious establishment to project Buhari as the defender of a Northern agenda and the ultimate nemesis of the enemies of the North. This clique of powerful elite corps were able to manipulate the uneducated rural poor to believe their oppressors to be their liberators, as reflected in the president’s impressive performance among this democratic demography. That President Buhari performed poorly among the urban/cosmopolitan poor and working class democratic demography is a clear indication of how they realise his failure of integrity has impacted negatively on their socio-economic well-being. Therefore, if the elite establishment is corrupt as he often alludes to, then President Buhari is most likely furthering their corrupt dealings to the detriment of the masses, hence their [elite] strong support for him.
Going forward, the implication of the heightened level of political brigandage, such as that unleashed in the earlier phase of the current electoral cycle, is its potency to render the concept of democracy ineffectual in achieving good governance and socio-economic fulfilment for citizens. The overt deployment of state power to the maximum advantage of the ruling party in any given electoral contest derails from fulfilling the promise of socio-economic advancement of citizens, as the advantage of electoral reward or punishment for bad/good records of elected political leaders no longer resides within the voting public but in the hands of a few powerful clique of elite power brokers. Most importantly, there appears to be a growing trend of the emasculation of all structures of democracy (the National assembly and judiciary) to blur the lines of separation of powers and putting in check their respective constitutional roles of checking and balancing the actions of the executive, which will ultimately lead to the emergence of a civilian dictatorship. To further strengthen this monstrosity, the ruling party which has secured an overwhelming majority of National Assembly seats through a contrived electoral process is poised to repeat the same feat in the follow up state elections. If February 23 is repeated on March 9 by deploying state power to overrun the majority of states for the ruling APC, then Nigeria will have transmuted into a near one party civilian dictatorship where the National Assembly will be a dummy parliament and the judiciary will interpret laws, not in accordance with the constitution but in line with the whims of the all-powerful executive, which no longer needs to account to the people but to itself alone.
If the current practice of electoral impunity is sustained, the hope that a deepening of the democratic culture, as reflected in a credible electoral process wherein power truly resides with the people, will not only be dashed but will raise the inevitable question of the viability or otherwise of democracy as the best form of government. Democracy is not a cliché but a form of people-centred government. Democracy dies when an electoral process, which is its core ingredient, are manipulated to undermine the popular wishes of the people. For democratic structures to live up to their goals of socio-economic development for all, there is an urgency to entrench a deep democratic culture devoid of electoral malfeasance in whatever form. For now, Nigerians will have to grapple in the dark as the light of liberal democracy is momentarily extinguished.
Credit: Majeed Dahiru, PT