President Muhammadu Buhari (left) and Chairman Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Prof. Yakubu Mahmood would go down Nigeria’s history as two men that manipulated the will of the people of Nigeria on February 25, 2023 presidential election
By Olu Fasan
President Muhammadu Buhari said, ad infinitum, that he would leave a legacy of credible elections. Last year, at the 77th session of United Nations General Assembly, UNGA, Buhari told world leaders: “I would leave an enduring legacy of free, fair, transparent and credible elections.” Yet, last week, he delivered the worst and most corrupt presidential poll since Nigeria returned to civil rule in 1999.
Buhari gave Nigerians false hopes and pulled the wool over the people’s eyes. Last year, he signed into law an electoral bill that introduced two key technologies expected to make elections credible. The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, used for digital voter accreditation and electronic transmission of results, was seen as an antidote to election rigging. The INEC Results Viewing, IReV, portal would enable the public to view uploaded results from polling units, ensuring transparency.
With the Electoral Act mandating the use of BVAS and IReV technologies, some believed President Buhari genuinely wanted to leave a legacy of free, fair, transparent, and credible elections. But for me, the taste of the pudding was in the eating. Behind the operation of any technology are humans, and if those individuals can be compromised so can the process. Furthermore, you can have the best electoral law, but if it’s not properly enforced, and can be violated with impunity, it’s utterly worthless.
Ironically, President Buhari was the first to violate the electoral act openly. After voting in the presidential election, he displayed his marked ballot paper for the cameras to show he voted for Bola Tinubu, his party’s candidate. First, that was a violation of section 50 of the Electoral Act 2022, which says that “voting shall be by open-secret ballot”. It’s “open” because you drop your marked ballot paper publicly in the box; it’s “secret” because you should mark your ballot paper in secret and keep your choice to yourself, at least within the voting area. Yet, Buhari ignored that basic law.
But the wider implication of Buhari’s action is that he was campaigning for Tinubu on election day, contrary to section 94 of the Electoral Act, which says that “the period of campaigning in public shall end 24 hours prior to polling day”.
By openly displaying his marked ballot paper to show he voted for Tinubu, President Buhari was signalling to his supporters, to security agents and to election officials that he desperately wanted Tinubu to win. Well, to use a popular lingo, they “got the memo”, judging by the collusion of security agents and election officials with the ruling party. President Buhari abused his incumbency power and distorted the playing field to favour his party’s candidate. He failed to demonstrate the neutrality he repeatedly promised.
Last November, Buhari defended the CBN’s currency redesign policy, saying: “Nobody will be allowed to mobilise resources and thugs to intimidate people in any constituency.” But did the naira redesign stop the mobilisation of resources and thugs in Saturday’s presidential election? Certainly not. True, the naira shortage limited the ability of some politicians to bribe voters directly, but it didn’t stop them from bribing election officials, and mobilising political thugs.
It’s utterly disingenuous of President Buhari to say he wanted free, fair, transparent and credible elections when he was willing to appoint card-carrying members of his party as electoral commissioners, as he attempted to do with the nomination of the arch-Buharist Lauretta Onochie. Or when he is willing to turn a blind eye to the partisanship of the security agents for electoral advantage.
Yet, a universal test of credible elections is the absolute impartiality of electoral bodies and security agents. It was such impartiality that caused US electoral officials and security agents to reject Donald Trump’s attempt to manipulate the presidential election in 2019. Sadly, Nigerian electoral body and security agents lack the independence and impartiality critical for credible polls.
For instance, last week’s presidential election was marred by widespread violence, perpetrated by political thugs under apparent protection from security agents. In Lagos, we saw in viral videos how thugs invaded polling units and snatched or burnt ballot boxes, while security agents looked on, and how voters were brutally suppressed. In one polling unit, a notorious political thug audaciously said: “Anyone who is not voting APC should leave now,” adding: “This is an APC zone.”
In their book, Political Systems of the World, Denis and Ian Derbyshire stressed that the absence of voter intimidation or suppression is a critical test of credible elections; all adults, they said, should have the right to vote. But in Nigeria, eligible voters are frequently intimidated and disenfranchised, as happened last Saturday (February 25, 2023), which stripped the presidential poll of any pretence of credibility.
But the voting is one thing, the counting is another. The British playwright Tom Stoppard famously said: “It’s not the voting that makes democracy, it’s the counting.” Sadly, neither works in Nigeria; the voting is marred by significant irregularities, the counting is subject to systemic manipulations.
Think about it. INEC refused to transmit the presidential election results electronically and upload them on the IReV portal, as required under the Electoral Act. This was a major abuse of process and understandably heightened post-election tension. Both the EU election observer mission and the US joint election observation mission of the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute said INEC’s lack of transparency severely eroded the poll’s credibility.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo went further. He said most of the results announced outside BIVAS and IReV “are not true reflection of the will of Nigerians”, adding that reverting to manual transmission of results led to “manipulation and distortion of results”. Consequently, he called for the cancellation and rerun of “all elections that do not pass the credibility and transparency test”.
Of course, Buhari and the APC have incumbency advantage and have exploited it, riding roughshod over every opposition, and controlling every state institution, including INEC, which has declared Tinubu “winner” of the presidential election. But by declaring Tinubu “winner” of a deeply flawed election, based on deeply controversial results, INEC creates a legitimacy problem and has plunged Nigeria into the abyss of political instability. That would be Buhari’s enduring legacy, not a legacy of free, fair, transparent, and credible elections!
