Truths about the elections
Jibrin Ibrahim
Five Truths About the Nigerian Presidential Election
Jibrin Ibrahim, Deepening Democracy Column, Daily Trust, 3rd March 2023
On Wednesday, Bola Tinubu was declared the winner of Nigeria’s presidential election by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu. Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) party garnered a total of 8,794,726 votes, or about 35%, defeating his two main rivals: Atiku Abubakar of the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), who secured 6,984,520 votes, or about 29%; and Peter Obi of the Labour Party, who received 6,101,533 votes, or about 25%. The three leading candidates won in one third of the states with twelve each, although the twelfth for Obi is the Federal Capital Territory. This election tells the essential truth about Nigerian elections – the history of Nigeria’s electoral geography is clear; no hegemonic party can emerge in a credible election. This was the situation in all of Nigeria’s foundation republican elections in 1959, 1979 and 1999. Following these elections, the ruling parties abused their powers of incumbency to make themselves hegemonic in subsequent elections through rigging. Those dismissing the current election and calling for its cancellation are doing great disservice to the efforts made by political parties and citizens to disrupt incumbency powers and re-establish the truth of Nigeria’s electoral geography as the victories by opposition parties in Lagos, Kano, Kaduna among others show.
The second truth about Nigerian elections is that there is always a variable level of fraud, which can upturn outcomes in a number of constituencies. Nigerians are politically perceptive, they see it and the story of rigging would normally be the defining narrative of every election even if there is insufficient evidence to show the overall outcome would have been different. The 2007 election is notorious for being one of the most heavily rigged election in Nigerian history but there is no evidence that Buhari would have defeated Obasanjo had the election been free and fair. 2007 is also the main example in which the national leadership of the Electoral Commission was implicated in the organisation of electoral fraud. The norm is that elections are actually organised at the operational level by the 774 electoral officers at the local government level, sometimes coordinated by Resident Electoral Officers at the State level but the blame is always on the INEC Chairman, who as the leader of the Commission takes all the blame. When we scholars orient ourselves towards studying what happens to elections at the local government level, more light would arise on what the results mean.
The third truth about the February 23 election is that the leadership of INEC is guilty as charged for eroding the credibility of the election by proposing an integrity test for the elections - INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) and failing to deliver on it. The main technology innovation, BVAS, would ensure that only those eligible to vote participate and additional “votes” cannot be added subsequently. Recalling the 2019 debates, there cannot be fabricated votes subtracted or added by any INEC server. At the end of voting in each polling unit, the results would be counted in the presence of voters and written into the poster EC 60E which will be posted on the wall. It is this result that was to be captured through a scan and sent through BVAS directly to the INEC viewing portal that all citizens and voters can see live. This transparency means everyone will be seeing the results as they come in and citizens, candidates and parties can cross check that the results on the portal reflect what was compiled at the polling unit. Citizens would have therefore all participated in confirming that the portal results replicate what was counted at the polling units. The IReV component of the integrity test failed and therefore the credibility of the election was lost using the definition of the integrity test crafted by INEC itself. This failure for me is really catastrophic because it created the basis for loss of confidence of citizens in INEC and its processes.
The fourth truth about the election is that voter suppression is the underlying reality. There are 93,469,008 registered voters in Nigeria but only 23,377,466 turned out to vote given a voter turnout of only about 27% which continues the downward trend of voter engagement as apathy deepens. This was however the election that had the vocation to turn the tide of voter apathy. In the lead up to the election, 9.46 million new voters had registered, 70% of them youth between the ages of 18 and 34. They showed a lot of enthusiasm about the elections, campaigned and were ready to vote. Many could not vote due to violence and ethnic profiling, late commencement of elections, malfunctioning of technology and lack of transport money to their polling units due to the Naira scarcity. In other words, voter suppression worked.
The final truth about the election is that even without Naira, vote buying occurred through bank transfers, offer of food parcels and yes, distribution of the scarce new currency. While citizens could not access cash from their banks and businesses, politicians could and did even if there was less of it than was the norm. EFCC reported someone in Lagos with 32.4 million Naira and another I, Rivers with USD 500,000 for vote buying. Denying citizens access to their own money with the hope that politicians cannot bribe voters needs a lot of naivety to think it would be effective.
For all these reasons, many candidates have good reason to feel these elections were rigged against them. Some of them have already indicated that they will go to court and they should. The Nigerian police needs to rise to the occasion and arrest actors who organised violence and electoral fraud because such behaviour continues to mar our elections due to lack of accountability. People who are involved in criminal activity almost never get arrested and prosecuted for their crimes so they continue. We must learn to stop them.
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Professor Jibrin Ibrahim,
May God bless Nigeria is a fervent prayer
Congratulations to President-Elect Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the Jagaban !
World Leaders Congratulate Nigerian President-Elect
Long live democracy!
Once again, many thanks for a succinct analysis, straight to the point, just like Bertrand Russell, and for that matter Noam Chomsky, Garvey, Malcolm, Hon Minister Louis Farrakhan, Nigeria’s President-Elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Cornel West, straight to the point, no camouflage big grammar, no flowers, no frills.
(When the empty buckets who make the most sound want to impress their grammatically less endowed fans they resort to camouflage big grammar, inane philosophizing, and subtle hints about their secret contacts who on the whole remain invisible because they are lying, and of course, there’s nothing invisible about the movers and shakers since they - be it Joe Biden or his Man Friday, address us directly, in full view of the cameras….)
The crux of the matter: “There are 93,469,008 registered voters in Nigeria but only 23,377,466 turned out to vote given a voter turnout of only about 27%...”
So, how do we explain and account for the low turnout of the so-called youths, who we are told make up more than 70% of the 93.4 Million registered voters, an army of disgruntled, mostly unemployed youths who both domestic and foreign political commentators had been variously assuring us had all been jazzed up by one man only, one 61-year old ”old youth” named Peter Obi?
Can we merely attribute the low turnout to “ voter apathy” as some kind of lack of energy/ motivation, or are the other factors such as the prospect of long hours of waiting in the serpentine lines queued up to vote, insecurity issues, lack of mobility/ transport or fuel money to the voting centre and back, etc, etc?
Of course, the disappointment is great, especially in the camp of the major losers, namely Atiku and in third place Obi, both of whom must have spent heavily on this election, with the dream of reaping great dividends from their investments, once they became the oga of ogas at Aso Rock, perhaps looking forward to, as Ernest Bai Koroma the Chief ECOWAS election observer on this 2023 Nigerian Elections said back in 2007, about running his country Sierra Leone, “like a profitable business concern”, as some presidents often do. Some of them run the country like a family business. You see the problem now? One Love. The national treasury and the sum total of the national assets devoted to running their beloved country as a business, a family business
PDP stalwart Ayo Fayose a great Obi enthusiast - so effusively in praise of his Obi in this short video excerpt ventures a partly plausible explanation of the low voter turnout: “The 2023 Presidential Election Was Not Rigged by Any Standard” according to Ayo Fayose
In essence, I understand him as saying that this time INEC was more vigilant than they have been at any time before, and this meant that ghost voters, double registrations, and women voters apparently pregnant with bundles of ballot papers and delivering their bundles of ballot papers into the gaping ballot boxes, etc, was not possible…
In the final analysis, what do you propose? That after any flawed election, a fresh election should be held until the outcome of a perfect election ( as in digitalized Sweden) is finally ratified?
Having scoured the Nigerian media so far, my impression is that if Obi had emerged as the PDP candidate and if the smallies had vacated the scene and it had been a two-horse race to the finish, even then Obi could not have been a real menace to Asiwaju