A staff of the Independent National
Electoral Commission (INEC) sits on electoral materials at a local
office in Port Harcourt, Southern Nigeria on February 16, 2019
after Nigeria’s electoral watchdog postponed presidential and
parliamentary elections for one week, just hours before polls were
due to open. The two main political parties swiftly condemned the
move and accused each other of orchestrating the delay as a way of
manipulating the vote. Yasuyoshi CHIBA / AFP
Justice Ephraim Akpata did not postpone the 1999 elections. Abel
Guobadia did not postpone the 2003 elections. The notorious Maurice
Iwu did not postpone the equally notorious 2007 elections. But
since 2011, every election has been postponed for one reason or the
other.A conversation with an Egbon caused me to pause and reflect
when he asked the question – is this incompetence new? It will be
very difficult for anyone to argue that Professor Jega, who
postponed two elections in a row (in fact the 2011 election had
already started when INEC decided to postpone), is more deficient
in character than Professor Maurice Iwu. There is something more
interesting going on.
One does not have to go too far back in history to draw examples
of how ‘elections’ in Nigeria were conducted in a way that meant
they never needed to be postponed. One of my favourite examples
remains how the remote creeks in Rivers state used to be the first
to announce their results with 100% of the people there voting
‘correctly’. In many places people never even saw election
materials or officials on election day and yet by evening, it was
announced that, not only had all the people in such places voted,
they had all voted ‘correctly’. Votes were simply weighed and
allocated to whoever by the kilogram. And let’s not even get into
the violence where thugs would hijack ballot boxes and thumbprint
the ballot papers to their heart’s content.
The apotheosis of this type of election came in 2007 when even
President Yar’Adua – the beneficiary of one of the worst elections
ever conducted in Nigeria – was embarrassed by the gift of 24.6
million votes bequeathed to him by the notorious Maurice Iwu. He
genuinely tried to clean up Nigeria’s electoral process by setting
up the Justice Uwais panel on electoral reform among other
things.
And then the postponements started. The fact that the witch
cried yesterday and the child died today does not necessarily mean
the both events are related but at the same time we cannot rule out
a connection. Here’s a working theory – Nigerian politicians have
not changed. They are still full of trickery and shenanigans. But
the space within which they can play their old games has shrunk
significantly. The old technology of simply writing the ‘correct’
result is now obsolete mainly because everyone now knows about it
and both sides can cancel each other out (there is PDP in APC
and APC in PDP). This is partly what has forced politicians to come
out with new technologies like naked vote buying (also known as
‘disbursement’) and ‘parallel primaries’. Sadly, these new
technologies are more democratic than the old ones because the main
thing you need to buy votes is cash. 
Writing results was easier. INEC did not need to master the
logistics of getting materials to remote parts of the country on
time since results used to be announced even while voting and
collation were still going on. Once those technologies became
obsolete, the glaring incompetence and lack of nous quickly
revealed itself. It is also now forcing us to question the idea of
academics as heads of the electoral bodies and whether we need more
people with proper logistics experience in INEC. Should INEC
consider hiring people from companies like DHL, FedEx, UPS and God
Is Good Motors? These people have plenty of experience in getting
things around a very difficult terrain like Nigeria’s. At any rate,
it is now painfully clear to see where INEC lacks expertise.
What if the postponement is all part of a game? After all, the
2015 postponement wasn’t really about logistics but about the
ruling PDP running scared of defeat. The point still holds – the
party that pioneered the various technologies discussed above could
no longer use them partly because many experienced technologists
had defected from its ranks to the other side, balancing out the
equation. In the event, the incumbent PDP lost the elections. The
PDP of 2003 and 2007 would surely not have lost in 2015.
Here we are in 2019 and we have to deal with another
postponement. What we know is that the APC definitely wants to win
the election. We also know that the PDP definitely wants to be back
in power. But the tools available to them to achieve their
objectives have been severely restricted. Sadly, political parties
now have to do things the hard way by campaigning around the
country, sharing money in markets, buying votes on Election Day and
the most stressful of all, actually coming up with policies that
persuade people to vote for them.
There is no new incompetence. What was always there has simply
floated to the surface. The politicians are still the same
tricksters that they always were. It is the rules of the game that
have changed in favour of Nigerians actually voting and their votes
being counted. Let us close with this prayer – elections being
postponed is a sign that things are getting better in Nigeria’s
democracy. Somebody shout hallelujah.