Anambra: Its 2015!

“Politics is so corrupt, even the dishonest get screwed.” George Carlin

By the time you read this, INEC would have returned the APGA candidate as winner in the Anambra Gubernatorial elections held on Saturday, 16^th November. The APC, PDP and Labour Party candidates would have rejected the results outrightly. The tens of thousands of policemen and soldiers and INEC officials would be leaving. Many citizens of Anambra would be wondering whether they will live under a genuinely – elected governor or a fraud. They may spend the next four years never knowing the truth. Some would say that is how it has always been. Others will curse, grumble and more ominously, wait for the next elections, with bitterness and the wrong lessons learnt. 

There is still a long way to go before the final word is heard on the election. Going by tradition, the battle will now move to the courts. Lawyers and judges will now make fortunes, but a governor will be sworn in to exercise a questionable mandate. Part of the resources of the state will be used to pay for legal expenses, of course, although the books will not reflect this. The courts will rely heavily on INEC to provide evidence against allegations that the elections it conducted were not free and fair. INEC will defend itself with everything at its disposal, which is considerably more than all the defeated candidates can muster. It will be a miracle if Ngige or Nwoye will become governors of Anambra State before 2017.

Now Anambra may be just another mark in an institutionalized parody of a democratic system that prevents Nigerians from ever knowing if they have elected leaders, or people who govern because every rule in the book was broken to install them into elective offices. As is to be expected, INEC is in the eye of the storm. After the embarrassingly low-quality of elections for the Delta Central Senatorial seat last month (even by INEC’s standards of conducting elections in that region), many people expected that INEC will raise its standards dramatically. After all, this is Anambra State, where everything is both possible and beyond the ordinary. People thought the charade which passed for the bye election of a seat in Oguta, Imo State House of Assembly a few months back was the forgivable type of election, and challengers can should go and spend new fortunes in the courts, in vain.

You know that Anambra is a major benchmark when the candidates of the PDP and APC find themselves in the same boat. Ngige thought the mere presence of soldiers would guarantee a free and fair election. What the soldiers and policemen did was to provide the appearance of a peaceful atmosphere, in the event that anyone wanted to snatch ballot boxes or break a few heads or chase away voters or opponents’ agents. You can have the most rigged election being conducted under the safest and most secure environment. Politicians in fact now understand that militarizing the electoral process is a vital requirement for rigging elections. Such is the sophistication of the rigging process now that the crude old methods of snatching ballots and scaring away voters are limited only to areas where you are worried that opponents’ strongholds may embarrass you.

Anambra last week exposed a vision for the future. The elections are won beforehand because INEC chooses to exploit all the weaknesses of the system. Voters’ registers are tampered with on a large scale, but specifically in a manner which guarantees that registered voters in particular areas have their names missing. This takes considerable local level knowledge which a display of voters register could mitigate. So you skip this stage for any number of reasons, but principally on the grounds that voters do not bother to check their names, or time does not allow you to do this.

Then you mix up registers and lose considerable amount of time sorting them out. By the time you put together registers, ballot papers, result sheets and all electoral materials, it is 4pm or 5pm. Elections then go into the nights, when people are afraid, or are not sure what is being done at voting or collation centers.

While people wait, agents are threatened, bought over or chased away. Security agents look the other way, or concentrate on the security of polling officials, not the sanctity of the voting process. Agents cannot complain over abuse of excess ballots, voting by unaccredited voters who turn up with cards, or being prevented from observing. But foreign observers are allowed a carefully-choreographed access to a few selected polling and collation centers. Their opinions are important, particularly since they have been made to believe that any election conducted in Nigeria without massive violence is virtually free and fair. Local observers are treated with scorn and contempt because INEC and politicians all know that most of them have long been bought and paid for.

Naturally, the major parties which thought they had a fighting chance will reject the results. Even the PDP candidate who was in the unusual position of rejecting the result while his party went to town praising President Jonathan for facilitating a peaceful environment had to share a common platform with Dr Ubah and Dr Ngige to reject the results. Even without the formal declaration of the results, APGA’s candidate Victor Umeh claimed victory which he said was well-deserved. The quarrels will continue all the way to the highest courts, and even then, Anambra will be governed by people who may largely be seen as stealing mandates.

APGA had to fight fair and dirty to retain Anambra. It did, and got it. The new opposition APC thought it had a good candidate and a good chance to make a loud statement that it is the future. It fought hard, and will now have to learn a bitter lesson: every party will protect his turf with every weapon at its disposal, including INEC. If APC does not have much turf to protect in 2015, it will fight many fruitless battles. The PDP will lick its wounds, and regret that others are fast waking up to its old tricks. Its candidate may have to come to terms with the bitter truth that he will be sacrificed to the imperatives of limiting the spread of the APC, and striking unstable alliances between factions of the APGA and Jonathan’s PDP.

Everyone will study Anambra very closely and improve strategies from lessons learnt from it. INEC may come to the painful conclusion that it cannot conduct free and fair elections in most parts of the country, no matter how sincere and well-meaning Jega is. But it wont tell anyone of this. It will sit on its weaknesses and inadequacies, promising to improve. Very few people will believe it, although most Nigerians will hope it can. Depending on how the damaging fights within the PDP play out, the 2015 elections could represent the tipping point for the nation. If the split in the PDP boosts the opposition APC, Jonathan’s presidential ambitions may have to be realized or damaged on the back of massive security challenges and a near-total loss of credibility by INEC. If the PDP heals itself, it will face massive opposition in most parts of the North and South West, and bitter competition will deprive elections of any semblance of credibility.

Still, only INEC will conduct all these elections. The political context of the elections will of course substantially determine their credibility. The more bitter the campaigns and the higher the stakes in terms of political ambitions, the more INEC will be compromised. There is no better time to pray that INEC will find the will and the capacity to conduct credible elections in 2015. While the nation prays, INEC needs to undertake a very painful soul search: the entire survival of a democratic Nigeria depends on it.