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KOGI AND THE ENEMIES OF DEMOCRACY
In Nigeria, those who rig elections no longer stop at visiting violence on the ballot boxes, they now follow up at gunpoint. They now also snatch the complaints of those who would go to court.
On November 11, 2023, while a beleaguered INEC sent its staff under the midday heat, a scandal simmered. In Magongo, even before voters could dust up their accreditation and cast their votes, result sheets showing an overwhelming victory for the ruling APC surfaced.
In the run-up to the election, the state had become punctuated by gunshots ostensibly fired by agents of the state.
In what quickly became a game of imaginative intimidation, while the state government maintained that it had nothing to do with the surging violence, and that it was doing everything it could to curb insecurity in the state, there were multiple security breaches recorded.
Even when concerned political parties within the state took their protests to the relevant security agencies, they were quickly dismissed, and lazily described as disgruntled stakeholders headed for defeat.
As the attack on the Resident Electoral Commissioner, and the secretary to the tribunal have shown, danger looms. Not just to the good people of Kogi State, but to democracy as a whole.
With the amount of calculated and coordinated chaos witnessed in Kogi, but also in Imo State on the same day, Nigeria runs an enormous risk. If the actions of those who have operated without let or hindrance in Kogi State are allowed to serve as a blueprint, then Nigeria runs the risk of ceding control to the agents of chaos.
Elections do not happen in a vacuum. There are laws. Even in Nigeria’s suffocating legislative space, those laws have somehow managed to stay strong and even evolve.
The struggle to administer those laws, to enforce them, has been a mammoth.
The Independent National Electoral Commission, Nigeria’s chief electoral umpire, has been at the heart of this struggle. Struggling to get even the basics of free and fair elections right, INEC has struggled to implement its laws and guidelines. Its response to concerns raised about its operation has often left much to be desired.
However, the greatest fear many Nigerians have nursed for INEC has not been over its incompetence. Rather, it has been over its character as a commission. It has been over the integrity of those who staff it.
There is a consensus that no matter the sophistication of any venture that depends on men to power it, once those men are compromised, everything else goes out the window.
The presidential election of February was greeted by allegations of bias against INEC. As always, the commission’s response was weak and diversionary. A couple of elections since then have further exposed a commission that is seemingly unrepentant and incorrigible.
But the pattern confirmed in Kogi introduces a frightening dimension to the activities of election riggers. It appears that the level of violence they are prepared to unleash is unprecedented.
It happened in Rivers State when some lawyers were abducted and held for days because they were representing a certain candidate and political party in an election petition.
In Kogi State the Resident Electoral Commissioner came under heavy attack before the secretary to the tribunal was attacked. What should worry Nigerians most is the chilling audacity of those bent on truncating the democratic process. They weaponize fear before the elections by attacking and killing their opponents. They manipulate those charged with the conduct of the election. Then, they take desperate measures to frustrate judicial inquiries into the process.
What is most bizarre is that Nigerians know who these people are, or at least reasonably suspect them.
But in a country where impunity is the insignia of many public officers, there’s no one to hold anyone to account.
Nigeria is besieged by the enemies of her democracy. Every day, the country’s beleaguered institutions face new and old existential threats. These threats, which are often carefully orchestrated and maximized to achieve maximum chaos often disrupt democracy and yield deadly consequences.
If Nigeria’s democracy is to make sustained progress, then the enemies of that
Democracy who abound in Kogi as well as in many other states and the Federal Capital Territory must at once be leashed.
For as long as they thrive unchecked and unhindered, consolidating democracy in Nigeria would remain a Sisyphean assignment.
Ike Willie-Nwobu,
