Postscript On The Elections

BY SEGUN AYOBOLU

(Published in The Nation newspaper of Saturday, April 8, 2023)

Even seemingly far more fierce than the battle among candidates and political parties to emerge triumphant particularly in the presidential election of February 25 is the ongoing contestation to demonstrate or disprove the legitimacy, credibility and integrity of the exercise. One would have thought that Nigerians should be proud of the outcome of an election which was successful to a substantial degree producing a President-elect in the person of the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, while also giving other dissenting and aggrieved contestants in the election the right to challenge the results following due constitutional process in accordance with the best tenets and traditions of democracy.

Despite Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Mr Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) who came second and third, respectively, in the hotly contested polls already filing their cases before the Election Petition Tribunal within the stipulated time frame, there continue to be suggestions in some quarters for the resort to extra-constitutional means to resolve post-electoral grievances. We referred last week to three of these which are plans for nationwide protests to grind the nation to a halt, calls for the institution of an interim national government which is unknown to the constitution and the bizarre and dangerously emotive demonstration by a group of protesters at the Ministry of Defense in Abuja pleading with the military to intervene in the political process.

It is obvious that the misguided elements involved in the recklessly childish posturing at the Defense Headquarters trying to lure soldiers back onto the political stage have little or no practical experience of what horrendous damage soldiers turned political rulers wrecked on the country’s political evolution as well as socio-economic development. It is sad that, perhaps even more than some aggrieved politicians, certain sections of the media have striven strenuously to delegitimize the election and discredit the country’s democratic process. Some radio and TV programme anchors as well as newspaper columnists have astoundingly claimed that the February 25 election has been the worst in this dispensation since 1999.

This is incredible. Were these people in the country during the 2003 and particularly the atrocious 2007 election, which even the late President Umaru Yar’Adua who emerged victorious in the exercise, described as severely flawed? Even though the far reaching recommendations of the Justice Mohammed Uwais panel on electoral reforms set up by President Yar’Adua did not see the light of day, there have been subsequent modifications to the electoral structures and processes that have helped ensure that successive elections become systematically more transparent, credible and reflective of the will of the electorate.

The most momentous of these electoral changes particularly the introduction of technology to enhance the efficiency, security and transparency of the electoral process were facilitated by the new Electoral Act signed into law by the President Muhammadu Buhari administration. To a significant extent, the introduction of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) as well as the INEC Results Viewing Portal (IRev) helped to enhance the integrity of the voters register, the authenticity of voters accredited to vote and the relative openness and transparency of results emanating from the polling units. Elections in 2015, 2019 and this year have been a far cry from what we had before then particularly in 2003 and 2007 when an INEC that was no better than a parastatal under the presidency announced results of elections in state constituencies from its headquarters in Abuja which had negligible bearing with the actual realities in various localities.

True, the INEC has admitted some glitches that hindered the immediate instant upload of results of the presidential election from polling units to its IRev portal as promised before the election. But it has stated that these results are intact on its BVAS machines and have been made available to the various parties who have demanded for them to prosecute their respective cases before the Election Petition Tribunal. It will be up to the parties to prove in court that the results declared at the polling units, signed by party agents as well as INEC and security officials differ substantially from those uploaded on the IRev portal. Since the aggrieved parties have the opportunity to prove their cases in open court, it is difficult to understand why some people prefer nationwide protests or the institution of interim government all of which are extra-constitutional measures.

Dr Olisa Agbakoba (SAN) has opined that there is a resort to such arbitrary suggested remedies because of the fear that the President-elect will be sworn in on May 29 even before the petitions against the outcome of the election have been conclusively adjudicated upon. He thus recommends that the courts take proactive action and pronounce definitively on the various cases against the outcome of the election before the inauguration of the new president on May 29.
But the distinguished former President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) seems to underestimate the enormity and character of the problem we have on our hands on this issue. Is there any indication that those who disagree with the outcome of the election will concur graciously with the outcome of authoritative judicial pronouncements on them?

We have the example, for instance, of the Vice-Presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Mr Datti Baba-Ahmed, who publicly insinuated on Channels television that a judicial pronouncement on aspects of petitions against Tinubu’s election would have to be in consonance with his personal view or be unacceptable. Or what do we make of the recent attempt by unscrupulous persons to denigrate the person and office of the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Olukayode Ariwoola, who was fraudulently portrayed as traveling to London for a private meeting with Tinubu; an allegation that has proven to be patently false? This was clearly a bid to impugn the integrity and reputation of the jurist and the institution he represents and destroy the credibility of judicial decisions on the election petitions even before judgements are delivered.

When I recently wrote that the February 25 presidential election is perhaps the most competitive and credible in our recent history, a reader responded that the polls were competitive but hardly credible. But the competitiveness of elections is a critical element in determining their credibility. Those media houses that continue to try to undermine the integrity and credibility of the election have been able to do no more than pronounce that the election was rigged and flawed without logically and empirically demonstrating their claims. For instance, the winner of the election, Bola Tinubu of the APC scored 8,794,726 votes, Atiku Abubakar of the PDP scored 6,984,520 votes to come second, Peter Obi of the LP scored 6,101,533 to come third while Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigerian Peoples Party (NNPP) scored 1,496,687 votes to come fourth. But these results are not arbitrary concoctions.

Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso broke away from the PDP and in doing so denied Atiku votes in the five South Eastern states that constitute Obi’s ethno-regional base and Kano that is Kwankwaso’s fortress. If Atiku, Obi and Kwankwaso had not split the PDP into three parts in the run up to the February 25 election, they would jointly have recorded a total of 14,582,740 votes making the APC’s victory highly unlikely all things being equal. Again, even the mainstream PDP went into the presidential election with five of the party’s governors, the G5, refusing to support Atiku because of the former National Chairman, Dr Iyorchia Ayu’s failure to step down in favour of the emergence of a national Chairman from the South as demanded by the governors. Atiku did not win in any of the states of the dissenting governors – Rivers, Benue, Oyo, Enugu and Abia.

It is curious and interesting that Mr Obi who came third in the February 25 presidential election has been even more vociferous than Alhaji Atiku Abubakar who came second in claiming that he was the outright winner of the contest. Mr Obi’s clearly exaggerated impression of the likelihood of his victory at the polls is obviously a function of the boisterousness, arrogance and intolerance of the ‘Obi-dient’ movement, the high expectations raised by opinion polls mostly of dubious value before the election and the prophesies of his many Christian spiritual ‘Daddies’ who portrayed him before their congregations as the anointed of the Lord. The bubble has burst with the announcement of the results and it is turning out that many ‘men of God’ who claimed to have spoken in the name of the Lord spoke out of their fleshly human minds after all.

Ironically, the narrow ethnic, regional and religious factors that propelled Obi to victory in the presidential election in the South-East and South-South with 87.78% and 42.37% respectively in the two zones also contributed to his dismal performance in the North that proved fatal to his presidential aspiration. While he scored 31.01% of the votes in the North-Central with its substantial Christian population winning in Plateau and Nasarawa states, Obi lost Kogi, Benue, Niger and Kwara in the geopolitical zone to Tinubu who secured 38.58% of the votes to win the zone.

Apparently the hugely Muslim populations of the North-East and North-West took due notice of the seeming church pilgrimages that characterized Obi’s campaign and his clarion call on the church at least on one occasion to ‘take back your country’. For, Obi scored a miserly 9.17% of the votes in the North-East, a zone won by Atiku with 50.58% of the votes and 5.23% of the votes in the North-West, a zone won by Tinubu with 39.64% of the votes. With Tinubu winning three of the six geopolitical zones, South-West, North-West and North-Central; Atiku winning only in the North-East and Obi winning in the South-East and South-South, it is clear that only the President-elect had a clear cut path to victory in Nigeria’s expansive and complex polity where the constitutional requirement for victory has been crafted in such a way that a winning candidate must not just secure the highest number of votes nationwide but must win victories in at least three of the six geopolitical zones. Atiku won in one zone in the North and none of the three zones in the South. Obi won in two zones in the South and none of the three zones in the North. Neither could have realistically won the presidency.

However, as Mr Festus Keyamo aptly noted, Obi’s real contribution in this election, perhaps unintended, was to remove the electoral rug from Atiku’s feet in the PDP’s strongholds in the South-East, South-South, Lagos in the South-West and parts of the North-Central thus paving the way for a Tinubu victory. There is no way his narrow ethno-regional and religious support base could have led to an Obi victory in the presidential election even though it is left to be seen if his lawyers can miraculously bring water out of the rock in the courts.

From the 12 states including the FCT that Obi won in the presidential election, the LP secured a victory only in Abia State in the March 18 governorship election. This shows that the LP lacked the structures to build on the successes that Obi’s personal charisma and the ethnic and religious factors brought to play in the February 25 elections in the governorship and House of Assembly elections. Even in Anambra, where it was expected that governor Chukwuma Soludo’s party would suffer an electoral backlash for the governor’s bold opposition to the vociferous’Obi-dient’ movement before the election, APGA won a comfortable majority in the House of Assembly. And neither could the LP build on its presidential election success story to post gubernatorial victories in Lagos, Plateau or Nasarawa states.

The victories posted by Atiku in key Northern states such as Kaduna, Katsina, Kebbi, Bauchi, Sokoto, Taraba, Adamawa, Gombe, Yobe, Zamfara among others in the North where he comes from shows the continuing strength of the ethnic factor in Nigerian politics even though his margin of victory over Tinubu in these states was narrow. That Tinubu’s victory and the power shift to the South could not have been possible without the President-elect’s victories in Niger, Kwara, Kogi, Borno and Jigawa, his substantial haul of over 500,000 votes in Kano where he came second and his securing over 25% of votes cast in most of the Northern states again underscores the critical import of networking and bridge building in achieving success in a presidential election. The import is that when the right candidate emerges with the requisite national outlook and pan-Nigerian network, there will surely be no stopping an Igbo presidency.