Monday
January 25, 2010 |
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In eleven days – February 6 – Anambra
voters will go to the polls to (attempt to) elect the state’s governor
for the next four years. They have a full field of candidates to choose
from, and they certainly have a hard task discerning the wheat from the
chaff.
The election, by every measure, is a profoundly significant contest.
There’s no question in my mind that Nigeria’s deeply entrenched
anti-democratic forces will seek, yet again, to thwart the popular will.
Will they succeed in their sick mission? Will Nigerians awake on
February 7 to realize that the hijackers of power had plied their trade
once again, and imposed a candidate the people did not elect? And if so,
what are the likely consequences?
My opening sentence speaks, advisedly, about the electorate “attempting”
to elect a new governor. Nigeria’s electoral history has been marked by
such honest attempts marred by massive rigging abetted by the police,
security agents and electoral officials. That practice has brought
Nigeria’s by-name-only democracy to the brink of utter collapse. Time
and time again, voters’ efforts to hold up their part of the bargain by
going – under rain or shine – to cast votes have been sabotaged by those
who prefer stealing power to licitly earning it.
Are there any grounds, speaking objectively, to expect that things would
be different in Anambra this time around?
The answer is yes and no.
Let’s dwell, first, on the yes. Umaru Yar’Adua’s apparent incapacitation
and likely absence from the country strike me as holding out hope for a
credible election in Anambra. Despite his posturing as an agent of
electoral reform, Mr. Yar’Adua has earned a reputation as a ruthless,
shameless apostle of hijacked elections.
His record as far as electoral probity is concerned is, to be sure, a
wretched one. Yes, he’s talked electoral reform, as he’s talked “rule of
law,” but he’s been a hypocrite on both issues. In fact, it’s impossible
to reconcile his words and his actions on the two fronts.
A comatose steward at Aso Rock, Mr. Yar’Adua has been content to slumber
at moments of national crises that called for stellar leadership. But
he’s woken up and risen to every partisan occasion when his party sought
to re-steal a governorship election – in such places as Kogi, Adamawa,
and Ekiti.
It is no secret that Mr. Yar’Adua and his wife, Turai, played key roles
in the still questionable decision to hand the PDP’s governorship ticket
to Charles Chukwuma Soludo, the immediate past governor of the Central
Bank of Nigeria. Were Yar’Adua in operation, there’s no question he’d
try to put pressure on the malleable leadership of the Independent
National Electoral Commission (INEC) to call the election for Mr. Soludo,
regardless of how the people of Anambra think about the matter.
The subtraction of the Yar’Adua factor and threat bodes well for the
Anambra election. Goodluck Jonathan, Yar’Adua’s deputy, is in a too
precarious position to mount decisive on the electoral body. And without
strong covert pressure being brought to bear on INEC, it’s unlikely that
the Nigerian police as well as other security agents and the military
would be marshaled to choreograph the election for the PDP candidate.
In effect, Mr. Soludo must strive to win on his own steam.
Another (admittedly miniscule) source of hope is that the governorship
election is holding at a time of sober stocktaking in Nigeria. With
Yar’Adua and his cohorts embedded in Saudi Arabia for more than two
months, nudging Nigeria to the edge of a serious political crisis,
Nigerians have come to reckon with the dire consequences of permitting a
cabal to hijack power. Yar’Adua – who has never been a leader even when
he was at his squash-playing best of shape – has finally brought home to
us what we suspected all along: that Nigerian leaders, as Chinua Achebe
suggested in The Trouble with Nigeria, really reside abroad, psychically
and (now) physically.
Nigerians are aware, as never before, of the cost of letting politicians
(and especially mediocre, unscrupulous ones) to usurp power. Since
Anambra will give us the best preview of the shape of elections to come
in 2011, one foresees less tolerance of rigged elections.
Incidentally, the fear is that – precisely because the stakes are so
high, not only for Anambra but also for Nigeria as a whole – the
merchants of stolen mandates will make heavy investments in Anambra. If
the Anambra election can be manipulated with little or no resistance,
then 2011 will similarly be a rigger’s bonanza.
One major danger for the Anambra polls is the man named Maurice Iwu, the
chairman of INEC. Iwu has combined the awfulness of his performance in
the 2007 “elections” with a shameless capacity for the worship of
impunity – especially his own.
Mr. Iwu is not the first person to preside over bungled elections in
Nigeria. But he easily distinguished himself by the scale of fraud in
the elections he supervised as well as the moral offensiveness of his
insistence that he oversaw a superb – if not the most flawless – set of
elections. Whether he believed his own fiction is beside the point.
A man capable of that lethal combination of monumental incompetence and
moral fecklessness should have been relieved a long time ago of his post
as an electoral umpire. Iwu’s part in hoisting Andy Uba as governor of
Anambra after a travesty that went in the name of elections in 2007
still inspires deep suspicion of his judgment. Uba, whose 2007 (s)election
was one of the lowest points in the farcical general elections, is now
back as the candidate of the Labor Party. In 2007, Iwu denied spots on
the ballot to incumbent Governor Peter Obi as well as former Governor
Chris Ngige in order to spare Mr. Uba any serious challenge.
With that history as background, only a fool would approach an Iwu-supervised
election with supreme confidence in its integrity and credibility.
Even so – since Iwu may not, after all, be as ethically sapped as he has
let on – the Anambra election offers a rare opportunity for a (small)
measure of rehabilitation. Nigerians and the international community
view the commission that he led as embodying electoral fraud. Once he
leaves his post, Iwu is bound to find most addresses in Nigeria hostile
to his person.
His only hope for some reprieve is to midwife an election in Anambra
that only manifestly sour losers would question. It remains to be seen
whether the man is capable of such transformation – even on a small
scale.
There are two other danger signs.
Several weeks ago, Inspector General of Police Ogbonna Onovo alleged
that some politicians in Anambra were amassing weapons with which to
disrupt the election. Mr. Onovo’s statement followed a tired, unhelpful
approach. The job of the police is not to sound unsubstantiated alarms –
it is to arrest those implicated in real, provable plots. The IG’s
failure to name, much less apprehend, the alleged gunrunners left me
wondering whether Onovo sought, preemptively, to rationalize his
officers’ inability to maintain law and order during the election.
Watchers of the election should be troubled too by reports that a few
individuals were caught with ballot papers. INEC quickly claimed to have
fired some of its staff involved in one of the cases. But that’s not
enough. The staff should be prosecuted. In the interest of a clean
election, the police and INEC should also unmask the parties or
candidates who sponsored the illegal handlers of ballot papers. Those
sponsors must be arrested as well, and barred from the election if they
happen to be candidates.
One reason electoral malpractice thrives in Nigeria is that those who
steal votes are never charged to court. All too often, they are allowed
to luxuriate in the offices they have devalued through electoral theft.
And – as the case of Yar’Adua proves – we all pay a steep price in the
end.
