Antics of desperate Nigerian politicians

 

I have been fortunate to work in the field of Democracy and Good Governance, popularly called D&G, for over 25 years. I have been an accredited observer of elections in Nigeria since 1999. I have worked for both domestic and international organisations on elections and electoral reforms. I have built capacities of different actors and stakeholders in the electoral process, from election management bodies, namely the Independent National Electoral Commission and State Independent Electoral Commissions, political parties and contestants, civil society organisations, national and state legislative assemblies, media, and security agencies. I am a development consultant, author of three books on governance and a renowned public affairs analyst.

I say without any fear of contradiction that Nigeria’s major challenge is our vicious, self-centred and desperate politicians who will stop at nothing to win elections. Nigeria has been having electoral reforms since 2001, yet the quality of our elections has never yielded sterling results. Thus far, we have six electoral acts (2001, 2002, 2006, 2010, 2022 and 2026) and have had five alterations to the country’s 1999 Constitution. Despite these efforts, all our elections elicit palpable fear; it remains a civil war!

Nigeria’s frantic politicians are not only in the ruling party. There are plenty in the opposition party, too. They employ game theory in political science. It is like the game of chess. You anticipate the move of your opponent and block it. Incidentally, Nigeria runs a winner-takes-all political reward system whereby, by virtue of as small as one vote, a contestant wins all and a loser loses all. The few who have compensation after losing elections are those who belong to the ruling party. Take a look at the current All Progressives Congress national chairman; he lost the gubernatorial election in Plateau State in 2023 but was later made Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and later the APC national chairman, all in a spate of three years. Same for the Minister of State for Defence, who lost his reelection bid in Zamfara State but is now a minister of the Federal Republic.

 

Our ever-calculative, desperate politicians always try to undermine every credible process. When there are electoral reforms, they ensure that the laws passed in the National or State Assemblies favour them. That is the crux of the hullabaloo on electronic transmission of results, which has dominated the airwaves over the 2026 Electoral Act. Why is that necessary? Because if results are not posted to the INEC Result Viewing Portal, this crop of cavalier politicians can cause the results to be altered, mutilated or vanish.  How many of us remember the case of the pre-filled election results sheet in the Ogori/Magongo LGA during the November 2023 Kogi State off-cycle gubernatorial election?

It is said that in Nigeria, it is cheaper to eliminate your opponent than to contest against him. We have seen that play out several times in the past. People like Engineer Funso Williams, a governorship aspirant in Lagos State, was strangled to death in his Dolphin Estate home in Ikoyi on July 27, 2006. Otunba Dipo Dina (DD Direct), a governorship aspirant in Ogun State, murdered on January 25, 2010, Dr Ayodeji Daramola, was a World Bank consultant and a Peoples Democratic Party governorship aspirant in Ekiti State before he was murdered in cold blood on August 14, 2006. In February 2023, just days before the national elections, Labour Party senatorial candidate for Enugu East District, Oyibo Chukwu, was killed alongside five supporters who were inside his vehicle. On September 18, 2021, Labour Party governorship candidate in Anambra State, Obiora Agbasimalo, was abducted at Lilu, a community in Ihiala Local Government Area of Anambra State, while on a campaign tour and has never been found since then.

Do you know that desperate politicians do declare a living person dead and will even obtain a death certificate for the person. This occurred in late 2023, causing a massive uproar within a political party.  Musa Ali, the Action Democratic Party House of Representatives candidate for Nasarawa Federal Constituency in Kano State during the 2023 elections, was declared dead by his own party. Ali accused the ADP leadership of forging his death certificate, which was then submitted to INEC to replace him as a candidate. The forged certificate claimed he died on October 28, 2022, while another document claimed a different date, leading Ali to petition the Inspector-General of Police and the Department of State Services for fraud. Ali resurfaced to demand a public apology and retraction from his party leaders, stating he was “traumatised” by the attempt to declare him dead.

In 2015, when INEC first introduced the smart card reader, the commission, knowing well that some persons may be disenfranchised if their fingerprint cannot be captured by the device, decided to introduce incident forms. However, even though those who have issues of non-recognition of their fingers by the SCR were negligible, desperate politicians induced many presiding officers to bypass the card reader and massively use the incident forms to inflate voter figures.

In our electoral law, any polling unit where there is violence will have its results cancelled, and if such cancellations are widespread to such a level that it could determine the outcome of the election, then INEC will have to conduct supplementary elections in the affected PUs. In Nigeria, another shenanigan of the political class is to foment trouble in the stronghold of their opponents to have the elections there invalidated, while they guard their own stronghold. This was what was partly responsible for the inconclusiveness of the November 2015 off-cycle gubernatorial election in Kogi State.

The number of registered voters in the cancelled polling units was more than the margin of victory between the leading candidate and the runner-up. After the election results from the 21 local government areas were collated, the APC candidate, Abubakar Audu, was leading while the then incumbent governor, Captain Idris Wada of the PDP, trailed by a margin less than the number of cancelled votes. The APC candidate had 240,867 votes, while the PDP got 199,514 votes. The commission said 49,953 votes were cancelled, which was higher than the margin between the leading candidate and the runner-up.

Another noticeable act of the desperate political class is the reduction of the time for INEC to get its election fund from 360 days in the 2022 Electoral Act to six months in the 2026 Act. As an election expert, this will put INEC in dire straits financially, and the commission may not be able to meet its procurement obligations given the short time available to it. I do not see any good sense in the National Assembly reducing the time for fund release to INEC from one year to six months. As I write this, the 2026 budget has not been passed by NASS, and anyone following the budget defence sessions would note that non-release of capital vote to ministries, departments and agencies has been a recurring decimal. INEC will need about a trillion naira to conduct the January 2027 polls. Will it have the full complement of the resources needed and in good time?

As we prepare for another election season, I plead with Nigeria’s political class not to adopt the well-known Machiavellian principle of “the end justifies the means”. Maximum cooperation should be given to INEC to do a good job. As has been well said, no matter the number of law reforms we do, the most important and pivotal reform is attitudinal and behavioural reforms. All actors and stakeholders must see the forthcoming election as a national project and should give their maximum support to make it succeed.

I.G: @jideojong