NIGERIA’S PAST SHOULDN’T BE TODAY’S BURDEN

Fredrick Nwabufo canvasses the need to move beyond our past

The post-election conversations have been a putrid salad of prejudices, recriminations, and elevated provincialism. Our wits, resolve, temperance, capacitance, and stability threshold as a nation are being tested, and they will be tested further in the months and years ahead.

Our history is always ready ammunition to be dispatched in any ethnic combat in that ungoverned social media neighbourhood. Contending sides launch missiles from the war rooms with their own ‘’droppings’’ of history. I will not be a soundboard for those tiresome and unyielding conversations here. The duty of the citizen is to be a dispassionate arbiter, divining truth from untruth, and staying irrepressibly on the side of the nation’s interest. I believe instead of these contentions which re-emerge in our public discourse every now and then, we can learn from our past and forge a better country.

The truth is, history is subjective. Every group has their own version of history — as regards their social and political existence in Nigeria. But we cannot keep recycling the epics of woes that have bogged us down as a people. We must move forward and look forward.

Nigeria’s past is not a very glossy one, yes. It is replete with tales of pain, sorrow, and blood – depending on who is telling the story. Fatal mistakes were made, but must we keep reliving the errors of our past? Are we doomed to remain a rendition of our past? Can we not move forward – beyond our past?

Nothing changes because the old ways remain the same. We must think a new Nigeria, and a new Nigeria begins with new progressive thinking. We cannot take a leap into a glorious future while we are still stuck in the rut of the past. Our past has become today’s pain, and tomorrow’s burden.

But does this imply we must abandon our history? Absolutely not. We embrace it, but learn from it as well, and stop repeating the same mistakes. The current confusion shows we have learnt nothing from our chequered history.

Our past should teach us to be respectful of one another; it should teach us caution; it should teach us tolerance; it should teach us understanding; it should teach discipline, and it should teach us the very essence of unity.

Like Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto, said to Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe: ‘’Let us understand our differences. I am a Muslim and a Northerner. You are a Christian, an Easterner. By understanding our differences, we can build unity in our country.”

We must manage our diversity with ‘’care, mutual respect, understanding, caution and trembling’’. We cannot discount our points of divergence, but we must also recognise that we have solid arcs of convergence. What unites us should be stronger than what divides us.

It is unfortunate that to reinforce prejudices, some deploy self-archived ahistorical accounts. Our past as a country should not be a springboard for hate exchanges, but a source of learning to forge a better country. We hold on to “history”, whether manufactured or inverted, to accent our biases. Evolving means we are better than yesterday.

No one can hold their own version of history as truth everyone must chow down. There are villains and heroes in every story. It is depressing that our much-vaunted past has become stuff of propaganda passed down from one generation to another. Hate transitioning from one generation to another. We must break this circle of hostility.

Really, we cannot make progress as a country if we remain on this treadmill. We must sanitise our conversations, discard epithets, and evolve into a wholesome whole.

We must deconstruct revisionist fabrications and pretensions to make good of the future. Knowing that we started off on a shaky foundation should thrust us into consciously working out our destiny. We cannot hold on to an acrimonious past as a precedence for the present and the future. As I said previously, we take the lessons from the past and forge a new path.

We dissipate so much energy on ethnic bouts of supremacy but leave very little to interrogate fundamental issues of governance. We must make our existence as a nation about jutting issues that govern our lives as citizens – economy, security, education, and health.

In conclusion, it is insalubrious to ascribe the actions of deviants within a certain pool to any group. I have maintained this position since the wave of baleful propaganda against the Fulani. I will not deviate from the path of unity and peacebuilding no matter how perilous the road becomes.

The invidious and menacing enterprise of Peter Obi’s ‘’Obidients’’ has driven the dagger deep into the national umbilicus. Sore points quickened, passions inflamed, and bottled-up emotions unlatched.

First, we need to address the ‘’Obidient’’menace full-frontal, and we need to strengthen national and community concord. We need new ententes brokered for national cohesion or unity. We need to talk. We need to have those difficult conversations in civilised and decorous fora with a view to healing our nation. We need to talk with one another, not at each other.

We need new alliances cementing the north with the south, and the east with the west in holy matrimony. But to achieve this, we need to talk.

 Nwabufo is a media executive 

Letter
BETWEEN THE US AND NIGERIA’S ELECTIONS 

The primus inter pares (first among equals) status of the United States of America among the comity of nations which pride themselves as the proponents and bastions of modern constitutional democracy was not achieved on a silver platter. The US indeed underwent some turbulent flows in their democratic transformations. It is a forward-looking thought to continually juxtapose Nigeria’s democratic practices with the USA. 

In assessing, the US long and epic journey from crude democratic practices to the current cherished and developed democratic system must be considered. As the modern-day democracy was fundamentally embedded in periodic elections, the trajectory of the electioneering process in the US at the early stage of her political independence was marred with electoral irregularities, ballot snatching, voters’ suppression, widespread mayhem and vote buying. 

The most controversial electoral fraud in the US political history was the 1876 presidential election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden. The election was pervaded with the campaign of calumny, disenfranchisement of political opponents through intimidation at both candidates’ strongholds and the alteration of electoral results. The election almost tore the nation apart as both presidential candidates lay claim to victory. Besides the prevalence of electoral fraud, there was no clear-cut legal and institutional framework to determine the winner.

Despite the political conundrum, the US overcame the internal menace without any foreign intervention. The Electoral Commission Act, 1877, was specifically enacted to resolve the 1876 electoral crisis. The Act provided a 15-member Electoral Commission to arbitrate the disputed result. The pronouncement of the Electoral Commission alongside some political negotiations eventually ended the electoral impasse as Birchard Hayes was declared the actual winner of the US 1876 presidential election.

The US has continued to reform her electoral system ranging from the Electoral Count Act (ECA) of 1887, recently amended as the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, 2022, the Voting Rights Act (VRA), 1965, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), 2002, amongst other electoral legislative reforms. The United Kingdom (UK) which introduced democracy into Nigeria was not left out in this electoral fraud. The attempt to curb the menace prompted the enactment of the 1872 Ballot Act and the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act,1883.

In the present day, the electoral fraud in the US has been reduced to the barest minimum. It took the nation many decades of electoral reforms before they achieved the current illustrious electoral status. Though, Nigeria still lags behind in comparison to the US electoral standard, the pace of electoral development in Nigeria is more rapid. More than a hundred years after the US had gained her political independence, the likes of Isaiah Rynders, John Kelly, amongst other notorious rogues violently engaged in ballot snatching, voters’ intimidation and disruption of opposition political meetings. Many elections also recorded cases where the registered voters’ names were found on tombstones.

Having shed light to the electoral antecedents of the US, it is pertinent for Nigeria to emulate the US by resolving her electoral obstacles internally and democratically. Every nation which emotional outbursts of her people had prompted to embrace a direct foreign intervention into their polity has lived to regret their actions. Uninterrupted democratic system has just lasted for 24 years in Nigeria since the country attained political independence in 1960. Between 1999 and 2023, Nigeria has undergone numerous impactful electoral reforms. The continuous overhaul of Nigeria’s electoral institution and laws could only guarantee her the typical US electoral standard.

The radical departure from the era of manual electoral processes to the digital system coupled with the enactment of the Electoral Act, 2022, have set Nigeria’s path to achieving electoral accuracy, transparency and credibility. The digital processes which range from the Electronic Voter Register (EVC), the Smart Card Reader (SCR), the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), and now the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the IReV portal, are all giant strides to achieve and sustain electoral integrity.

Nigeria’s electoral system has evolved though it is not free of infractions. Gone are the days when it was almost impossible to unseat a sitting president, states’ governors, national and states’ lawmakers and their adopted candidates. The political reality and electoral signal from the just concluded elections have shown otherwise. It would be unfair to describe the entire 2023 general elections as sham. Any candidate who has sufficient evidence to disprove the electoral results should seek redress in court rather than resorting to extra-judicial measures. The judiciary remains a democratic institution to right the wrongs.

 Binzak Azeez, Newworth LLP (Legal Practitioners), Onikan, Lagos