Adamu Muhammad Hamid
When the whistle of INEC shrieked February ending and mid-March, the game was over. Winners emerged in the presidential and National Assembly elections and guber. and state assembly ones as well. To the ordinary mind, the electoral process was received with much hope and expectations. Optimists project that with the BVAS we’re already at the Promised Land, at least election-wise. Such ordinary minds would, later on, be disappointed to observe that happenstances among electoral officials, especially ad hoc staff and party agents compromise the process cooperating with the highest bidder money-wise. The publicity the BVAS received on the eve of the election did not square well with the expected integrity of the election. Sanity in voter accreditation was portrayed to be all we needed in our election. Outcomes from the 2023 elections pushed the nation to come to terms that voter accreditation was a minimum basis of what was required but other factoring variables which were deliberately ignored played a great part in botching the process.
Through accentuation and media hype on voter education, the abilities of BVAS were incredibly extolled as though it was the end, rather than a means; but what the machine controlled was only authenticating the number of actual persons who voted at a Polling Unit. The machine had nothing to show on how many votes each participating party scored; while this gap, in some places, was taken advantage of and manipulated. If for example, 100 voters were accredited at Polling Unit “P” and Party A scored 80, while Party B, 20; the scores could easily be interchanged and recorded on the Polling Unit’s results form, with the compromise of ad hoc electoral officials and party agents. Before the elections, INEC ad hoc staff were induced with money denominated in US dollars, some 200, others 300 by politicians. So why did they collect the money?
So the ability of BVAS to give transparently and control the number recorded of actual voters was projected in a category mistake fallacy to make citizens believe it means a quality democracy. This is far from the truth. In Bauchi for example, voter consent was indirectly bought using small quantities of sugar, spaghetti, detergent, etc. In many places, 10s of women were given N20 000 to share. Some of the politicians sprayed mint currency openly to groups of youth. Indirect vote buying was seen all over the place!
The quality of a democracy is determined by free and fair elections, conducted in an atmosphere that promoted rule of law and respected human rights. Another attendant criterion is the quality of voter decision based on credible information and education, and the voter decision-making being independent of inducement, coercion or any form of negative influence. Let me again mention here that democracy in itself is not an end, but rather a means. If the whole process cannot deliver competent quality leadership which is necessary for development, democracy would have been worthless, much less, elections.
The thesis of this column stresses that as far as the character of our elections is concerned, which, largely is responsible for our system failure as a nation, everything remains constant even with the deployment of technology, the Card Reader, and its upgrading to BVAS. Literally, nothing has changed.
The critical point of the electoral process is clumsily handled and bastardized at party levels. It is called a democracy but actually, the entire citizens of the nation were left at the mercy of the only highly narrowed options decided by a very few at the party level. And this narrow, highly disfigured, capriciously decided option is the one to finally play out at the finals of general elections. Voter choice is restricted to the only options made available by parties; and at those levels, ridiculous factors are the top considerations; money, blood, subservience to political masters, craftiness in deception and lying, etc.
The Electoral Act 2022 presents a substantial improvement in our system but there are many aspects to be further domesticated to serve the Nigerian setting well. The latitude political parties legally have to shape political processes at their levels is too wide. The option of consensus must still be revised: that Section of the law was used to emasculate Machina to give way to Ahmed Lawal the current senate president (to represent a Yobe Senatorial District) in the most undemocratic, clumsy manner. For our democracy to be the means that can take us to the desirable end of quality leadership, reform must go beyond upgrading technology to real issues in our political well-being.
As a system, democracy reveals only the popular but not necessarily the competent. Again, as a student of public political opinion, I was always baffled by the inherent paradox of democracy. Like many others, I always thought once a government came through democracy, everything will naturally fall into place and systems would be okay. I realized I was dead wrong! In Nigeria, our electoral system witnessed a tremendous improvement with each passing general election since 2011, but not the quality of governance. Corruption gets worse by the passing day. Human development indices and life expectancy fall every year. This outcome means, literally improvement in the election becomes inversely proportional to human development in Nigeria. Come to think of it, the unexplainable paradox is standard of life and of living in the ideal is expected to be better in democratic nations than in monarchies, which are the opposite of democracy. As witnessed by the world, this has never been the case. In terms of human development indices just compare monarchies like Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Kuwait with democracies like Nigeria. Their economic systems, health, education and wealth distribution are by far greater than what obtains in this democracy. And there is no basis for comparison between us and countries which are not true democracies like China. Again, I was always confused: under Gaddafi, Libya was one of the most dictatorial countries, yet at the time, the standard of living of the common man in the country was higher than that obtained in the most developed democracy, America. All that glitters is not gold.
If our democracy cannot take us to the desired destination of decent living and gradual development, then the practice is worthless. We must revise democracy to square well with our needs and development priorities otherwise drop it and sample monarchy.
