The 2023 Presidential election: Departure Points 

By Akin Osuntokun

1) Game of numbers

Playing fast and loose with numbers, elections in Nigeria are a derivative of fraudulent population figures and the abuse of the majoritarian principle of democracy. The fraud of the Nigerian population yields the fraud of Nigerian elections and many other sanctified scams. It is a syndrome in which the utility of population figures in Nigeria boils down to accessing consumption but seldom rationally engaged as a facility for planning, growth and development. It is employed to enable and rationalise power politics and who gets the bigger pie of the so called national cake. It has been used to freeze power politics relations in Nigeria at the level it was handed down by the manipulation of the British colonialists.

 It is the basis for the creation and sustenance of the following consumption sub revenue allocation heads: Wards, local governments, federal constituencies and states. It necessarily yields the mentality of fraud pervading a most consequential agency like INEC. What is the use of fictitious population figures if not its utility to work towards predetermined answers. What is misinterpreted as voter apathy was a mere reflection of the true numbers of registered voters as against the register produced by INEC. At the national level, the authentic numbers of voters are nowhere near the cooked up 89 million registered ghost voters. It is counterintuitive to believe that Nigeria will uniformly record massive gaps between registered voters and accredited voters across the nation- with no single outlier.

2) Federalism

Nigeria, ponders the pundit, is structurally rigged against rationality. This irrationality, first and foremost, is rooted in the ‘mistake of 1914’. The mistake comprises the contraindications of fundamental internal contradictions that did not recommend the amalgamation. Regardless, the fate of a failed Nigeria is not thereby sealed, but only if the inheritors, did not stray from the foundational policy prescription of federalism as the organising principle.

With federalism as enshrined in the 1960 constitution and as practised up to 1966, there would be no need to engage in a Russian roulette game to win the presidential election at all costs. It is the sustained subversion of federalism into the monstrous centralisation of power at Abuja that is responsible for the life and death desperation to win the presidential election. With a federalism compliant

decentralisation and devolution of powers, there would really be no need to be force fed with the broth of North/South power rotation, especially in its Muhammadu Buhari heralded perversion as institutionalised turn by turn plundering of Nigerian resources. 

3) BVAS and IReV 

Ironically, the newly introduced Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, was both the hero and (the INEC proxy) villain of the elections. It foiled the time tested avenue of rigging elections through the inflation of figures beyond the numbers of duly accredited voters.The rigging that took place occurred within the constraint of the captured accurate numbers of accredited voters-such as deducting a certain number of votes from one candidate and crediting the same to another. Without BVAS, the All Progressives Congress, APC, presidential candidate would simply have been credited with outlandish figures that would correspond to the fictitious number of registered voters. In this ancient regime, the near one million votes scored by the labour party presidential candidate would just be superseded by the attribution of over two million votes to the APC

3) INEC

The contrived competitiveness of the presidential election has been tendered as the evidence-in-chief of the credibility of the INEC announced results. But, what, if in reality, the election was not competitive?. Did polls after polls by detached third parties like CNN and Bloomberg not indicate Obi was going to win the election? And isn’t there something naive and credulous, in the first place, to accept the testimony of a heavily compromised witness like INEC? How probable is it that the three leading contestants will win exactly 12 states apiece in the election.

For that matter, this is not the first time INEC will be called out in its habit of the attribution of farcical competitiveness. In an assessment of a previous electoral cycle, the London Guardian newspaper noted “analysis of the data for each of the country’s 36 states and its capital shows that INEC has increased the number of new registered voters by almost exactly the same percentage across all states. The correlation is a statistical impossibility”

Three characteristics are adjunct to election rigging in Nigeria, namely, opportunity, capacity and inclination. The three are written all over the 2023 elections. You will recall the evidence propounded in the theory of how elections are won in Nigeria by no less the then candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu at his Chatham house outing in London. He called it “grab it, snatch it and run with it”. 

On top of it all, the sum total of the argument of INEC before the election petition tribunal, is that the Nigerian public should discountenance the relevance of BVAS and IReV in the determination of the credibility of the results. It does not get better clarified than the expert statement of the versatile lead counsel of Tinubu, Chief Wole Olanipekun “It was wrong for the petitioners to hinge their grouse on the electronic transmission of votes when INEC’s electoral laws also contemplated manual transfer of votes as an option”. Yet, a crucial peg on which the agency predicated the need to evade electronic transmission of votes had been contradicted by the host of the INEC server, Amazon Web Services, AWS, that there was no glitch in its services on the 25th of February 2023. 

4) INEC And The Professors 

On the face of it, the recruitment of university professors to serve as state elections returning officers was a commendable policy. But, as is the case with anything this INEC touches, the policy soon turned to ashes. It has become habitual of the agency to self sabotage all interventions with any potential to steer democracy into safe harbour. As it is the case with BVAS, so has it become with the INEC professors. Below is the testimony of the vice-chancellor of the Ahmadu Bello University, ABU, Professor Kabiru Bala. “It makes me shiver when I hear some of our colleagues say, ‘We are the people who rig elections.’ I participated in the process and I know what I did.” 

The exception to the rule was the force of character demonstrated by the vice-chancellor of the Federal University of technology, Oweri, Professor Nnannaya-Oti in her resistance to the pressure mounted on her by the INEC hierarchy. “I shall stand squarely and unapologetically on these principles. The people’s votes and mandate shall stand…The pastor and the mother in me will not permit me to do anything that will adversely affect the future of our children,”. This was in contrast to the instructive behaviour of the INEC witness (the redeemed church pastor Bayode) who objected to affirm the truthfulness of his testimony with the holy bible and took exception to being recognised as a pastor at the court hearings. 

The Intervention of the Obidients 

Regardless of their imperfections, both structurally and exuberant protagonism, this Nigerian population demographic are the heroes of the election. At the core of the movement, inspirationally and organisationally, were the concatenation of the Nigerian youths who prosecuted the End Sars protest in October 2020. It started as a collective revolt against police brutality but expanded to incorporate reformist angst at the degenerate propensities of the Nigerian status-quo. I had urged them on with the charge borrowed from Frantz Fanon “out of relative obscurity, each generation must discover its destiny, to fulfil or betray it”. As the 2023 presidential election goes, they fulfilled their part of the bargain but their dream has been abbreviated by the depravity of the political status quo. 

At the approach of the elections, I tried to substantiate what polls after polls were telling Nigerians about the potential capacity of Peter Obi to upset the political apple cart. I made it a point of duty to verify the appearance of a bifurcation of opinion between the older generation and their younger counterparts, especially between parents and their children/domestic workers. What I discovered, almost in its entirety, was a ratio of one to four, five or six within families and households in favour of obi. 

5) Igbo/Yoruba Schism

My belief is that if the God of the Yoruba wanted them to play the son of soil politics, he would have ensured the former vice-president, Yemi Osinbajo won the APC primaries. Peer rivalry between the Igbo and Yoruba had played a crucial role in their ascension on the ladder of modernisation. But their coerced membership of a country founded on consumption culture rather than the ethic of productivity has degraded their capacity to rise to their promise and potential. Were they to stand alone as individual countries and on the projection of feats they recorded as autonomous regions, they were on course to rival the likes of India and Brazil in socioeconomic development. 

The toxic environment of Nigeria has made each sub-national component (including the pan Islamic North) a victim of the mistake of 1914. The Nigerian dysfunction has rendered the duo unable to cooperate with one another to make the best of the bad Nigerian situation-to the advantage of the adversarial third component of the WAZOBIA tripod. The 2023 elections proved to be a classic theatre for the resurgence and display of the role, wished and designed for them by their common political foe. 

The lapse into their default position of mutual antagonism culminated in raw tribalism especially and shockingly of the Yoruba intelligentsia. The pathos was tragically captured in the demonisation of the Labour Party governorship candidate in Lagos state, Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour. At the height of absurdity, otherwise reasonable and intelligent people began fulminating that Rhodes-Vivour was Igbo candidate on account of his mother being of Igbo origin. 

6) Conclusion 

Soon enough, we will know whether going to court to prove the obvious is another colossal waste of Nigerian resources and time. A precedence of sorts has been set by INEC. Given the widespread condemnation of the electoral agency as totally devoid of credibility, it is a contradiction in terms to accept the results declared by such a body as worthy of the paper on which it is written. As things stand today, Nigeria is caught in a vicious cycle of self-destruction. The trillion naira question is where and when will this cycle be breached and by who?