Emerging Election Reforms Exposed In Edo

AYODELE OKUNFOLAMI argues that

electoral reforms without developmental governance are meaningless

As the declared winner of the just concluded Edo State elections, Senator Monday Okpebholo, is going about town flaunting his certificate of return he received from the Independent National Electoral Commission, his PDP counterpart, Asue Ighodalo, is heading to the tribunal to challenge the results of the election. Ighodalo is not the only person probing the integrity and legitimacy of the elections, civil society organisations and election observers majorly condemned the overall conduct of the elections. Although, there were no apocalyptic reports of violence nor ballot box snatchings typical with Nigerian elections, the Edo governorship race experienced pockets of late arrival of election personnel and materials to polling stations that led to delays in accreditation and voting, dubious use of the BVAS machine, contradicting accreditation as against number of votes cast, and questionable result collation process.

Unfortunately, a quarter of a century into our journey of uninterrupted democracy, elections in Nigeria appear not to be improving. People are now calling again for another amendment to the electoral act as if the Petroleum Industry Act and Dangote has stopped the fuel queues or that local government autonomy changed voting patterns. As much as our elections are naggingly irritating with obvious infractions that oughtn’t be overlooked, I don’t think electoral reforms would make any difference.

Aside the appropriation act that is annually sent to the national assembly with accompanying supplementary budgets, the electoral act is the law we have tweaked the most in Nigeria. We have so frequently used the law to amend how we elect our leaders and representatives, so attempting to again give the rogues that continuously maneuver the system to amend it in my opinion will be futile. If our politicians are not reformed, we will just have another Eneke the bird who learnt to fly without perching because men had learnt to shoot without missing their mark.

As the world advances, humans adopt easier and faster ways of doing things, therefore we can’t separate technology from 21^st century elections. Disappointingly, former President Goodluck Jonathan remarked days after the Edo election at a programme organised by the Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution that technology can’t solve our electoral challenges. This concurs with a 2019 article in which I compared elections as done in the UK with what obtained in Nigeria. In that piece, I emphasized that UK elections are manual from start to finish proselytising that electronic voting is overrated and not a silver bullet to credible elections. I am in no way against technology, but if trust deficit persists in Nigerian institutions and overall development remains lagging, no amount of technology will make us satisfied with Nigerian elections. I always say, if you have any reason to doubt the traffic light, you will have reasons to doubt election results.

Some have even said we should return to the option A4 system as used in 1993 that produced Chief MKO Abiola. Although that election remains a benchmark, I won’t subscribe to voters crudely coming together and lining up behind their preferred candidate and counted in view of all to see for the following reasons. One, the 1993 elections were what they were because those in power had no stake in them so we had no incumbent saying it was a do-or-die or an opposition threatening to make the nation ungovernable if they lost. Two, Abiola was far better and more popular than Bashir Tofa for there to have been any contentions whom Nigerians preferred in the first place. Thirdly, as we later found out, the then military President, Ibrahim Babangida had no plans of handing over. He had dribbled us with his unending transition exercises and did us another leg over. Had General Adbulsalami Abubakar toed IBB’s path, 1999 elections would have been accorded the martyrological awe of June 12.

Fourthly, we should be in the business of the future not taking us 30 years backwards. Fifthly, we see how party primaries go in today’s Nigeria. Despite using option A4, they are still wrought with irregularities. In fact, people trust INEC’s open-secret ballot of the general elections than the charade of party primaries. Sixthly, we have more than one election in one day. Does it mean voters will queue and get counted as many times as the number of elections for the day? How would forensics for possible litigation be designated? Seven, electoral violence, ethnic profiling, voter intimidation and vote trading will make nonsense of anybody openly trying to vote his conscience. Finally, elections are determined more by what happens in collation centres where the votes are summed up, swelled up or stitched up than at the polling units where voters line up in the glare of cameras to vote. Moreover, electoral malpractices are technical and conspiratorial these days that even after INEC has flagged discrepancies through its control mechanisms the courts can’t prove otherwise.

I think the open-secret system of INEC is okay. It is a hybrid of the secret ballot and the open ballot where the voter’s choice is secret but his vote is open. Moreover, there is more to election than INEC. INEC depends on ad hoc personnel who are primarily youth corps members some of whom won’t show up on election day forcing urgent replacements that will need crash training. These ad hoc staff are at the mercy of transport unions to move them around on election day who in turn need to be accompanied by security personnel for their safety and that of election materials that would ferry along unmotorable roads or dangerous waterways. Truth in elections in Nigeria is herculean that involves a lot of stakeholders.

Increasing insecurity, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, infrastructural decrepitude and other

imprints of failed governance are the

triggers of electoral malpractice and if diagnosis is wrong treatment can’t be right. Electoral reforms without developmental governance are meaningless. The societies that vote remotely have working post offices. They don’t need a curfew on election days because movement is predictable and security of lives and properties is guaranteed. Not Nigeria.

Most carefully, we should not make our democracy only about quadrennial elections. Endless electoral reforms only make us voters not citizens. We should avoid being pawns used by the political elite to earn political capital for themselves. Politicians who campaigned on fractioned and weak party structures or failed godfathers will turn

 around to blame the system for their loss. Well, let them go to court. Really and truly, it is more about sore losers than about a defective system.

See how much money and resources we are spending on elections. If the hundreds of billions spent on elections were funneled into fixing our roads, election materials will arrive on schedule. Had we fixed electricity instead of always providing generators for INEC to power collation centres, unemployment won’t be as high as it is easy to recruit political thugs used to disrupt elections.

It is because we have made our democracy election centric that almost 50,000 security personnel would be sent to Edo for elections while less than 32 police officers are patrolling over 200 villages in Katsina. Do we realise that the only contact majority of Nigerians have with government is when that youth corps member comes with his team of election staff? The electoral reforms we need is one that primary schools and healthcare will find a way of getting to the citizen and not polling unit to the voter.

And this grownup discussion on electoral reforms is not about the middle class pushing for debates and manifestoes to be mandatory in a quest to get the best out of our leadership selections. Besides debates being more of show than substance and a cheap advertisement for the media house organizing the event as we are seeing in America, the Nigerian electorate is too impoverished and ignorant that ideas don’t move the needle. Okpebholo and Ighodalo knew this and dodged the debate organized for the candidates. They would rather use sentiments of zoning and share N10,000 to get votes which proves more successful. Electoral reform minus intellectual and economic upliftment equals stomach infrastructure. Those climbing themselves for 2k bread now, will by 2027 sell their votes cheaper than 5k.

 Okunfolami writes from

Festac, Lagos