There was violence, there was mayhem, there were ballot-box snatchers and there was loss of many lives during the first round of our 2019 general elections last weekend. But compared with other elections in our recent past, nothing came close to the worst that we expected, that we prayed not to happen. If you expect your child not to do well at all in school and he or she does little above average, you give thanks and hope that next time around, the results will be even better. That is exactly how many Nigerians feel about the elections – with the possible exception of the aggrieved and bitter PDP leadership. In this piece, I start with the admission that like most Nigerians, I am relieved that things did not go as horrifically bad as they could have gone, as, indeed, we all feared they would. But beyond this, beyond the provisional and restrained hallelujah of my feelings, I wish to point out and discuss certain things that the elections revealed that we ought to worry about. As we shall see, these are things about which both the victorious APC and the defeated PDP are in almost complete agreement. Collectively, I call these things the gaps between what is open and what is hidden, and what is and what isn’t.
Before delving into the subject of this piece, I deem it necessary to provide a short framework of explanations concerning my assumptions in the following discussion. Forgive me if it sounds too “professorial”. I will make it very short and then go directly to the topic of the essay. Thus, in the sub-field of logic in the academic discipline of philosophy, you can say that wherever you go, there you are; you cannot be anywhere else in the country, let alone the planet. This is a version of the well-known English adage that states that you cannot eat your cake and still have it. However, in philosophy, there are more fields in addition to logic. For instance, there are the sub-fields of ethics and metaphysics. In ethics, questions will be raised beyond your being where you go and nowhere else on the planet. Questions like what you might have done or not done while you were there to affect your life and the lives of others. And in metaphysics, issues might be raised as to the possibility that while you are logically and physically where you go, in spirit, psyche and imagination, you might be somewhere else as distant as possible on our planet, perhaps even in our entire solar system. If there is a lesson, a moral to this framework of assumptions, it is this: take seriously the logical limitations and consequences of where you are, of life and its realities; but know that beyond logic, there are hidden and perhaps even illogical dimensions to what we do and don’t do as human beings in general and members of a national community in particular. Having made this clarification, let us now go the issues.
Perhaps the most startling and consequential gap between what is open and what is hidden and what is and isn’t in the election last week is the gap between, on the one hand, what transpired during the announcement of the results of the presidential election at the National Collation Centre at Abuja and, on the other hand, the things that either barely happened or did not happen at all at the other collation centers in the country at the local government and state levels. Permit me to present this as carefully as possible. At the National Collation Centre, the INEC Chairman and the State Collation Officers, Presidential Election (SCOPE) were impressively meticulous, patient, diligent and thorough in their presentations. The intention, the calculation was to appear as unimpeachably professional, accountable and impartial as possible. To a large degree, it worked, so much so that one could be forgiven if one thought that what happened during the two days of the announcements of the results at Abuja could serve as a model of how to conduct official business against the background of the endlessly dysfunctional ways in which the country and the people are served by state bureaucracies and bureaucrats in Nigeria. Obviously, it was all a carefully choreographed and brilliantly executed SHOW. One could even say that it was all a RITUAL, the performance of which was to lend legitimacy and dignity to the process and, especially, to whoever was eventually declared the winner at the end of the ritual process – which happened, in this instance, to be Muhammadu Buhari.
INEC did nothing to show, to display or to theatricalize its collation operations at the local government and state collation centres as it did at Abuja. In most of the democratic nations of the world, the announcement and public legitimation of election results are at their most open, concentrated and publicized at the local and state levels. As a matter of fact, many nations do not have formal collation at the national level; the national winners are extrapolated from the results declared at the local and state levels. Against this general global trend, INEC went out of its way to browbeat all news outlets, all media organizations not to publish results that did not come from it. Understandably, this was to prevent fake and misleading “results” from taking the place of genuine results. But this should not have prevented INEC from publishing the results at all the collations centers at the local government and state levels, long before getting to collation of all results at Abuja; indeed, it should have served as an incentive for INEC to publish results where and when they were first collated. Thus, in my judgment, anything could have happened during and after the collations at the local and state levels before the final one at the National Collation Centre. Indeed, I go one step further, since I know my country and its politicians: I strongly suspect that both APC and PDP “worked” on the results at those lower collation levels before the national, depending on which areas of the country and their bureaucracies each party controls. I go even one step further and draw attention to the fact that Buhari refused to sign the new electoral law passed last year; if he had done so, among many other things, INEC would have had no choice but to clearly display election results at every level of collation in the country.
In my mind, the great SHOW, the RITUAL process at the National Collation Centre at Abuja will long remain the outstanding image of the 2019 elections. I have said that to me, it was a show intended to lend credibility, impartiality and legitimacy to the elections. More generally, I now add that the SHOW was also intended to legitimate the overwhelming electoral and political dominance of the APC and the PDP, both of which, on nearly all grounds, are mirror images of each other. This conclusion is not based on strict logic, since INEC can in no way be validly accused of being institutionally committed to the dominance of the APC and the PDP. For this reason, our critique of INEC must be based on the law(s) that set up the body, together with its overemphasis on ritual over substance and theatrics over real democratic accountability. To do this, we must move beyond the place where INEC is to places where it isn’t and won’t go if it is not nudged to do so. This in effect means that we must go to the other great gaps between what is and what isn’t in our present political order.
I have some very sobering facts and observations to make on this issue, compatriots. For instance, to most commentators and pundits, the greatest gap of all is the one between registered voters and actual voters – in every state and every regional zone in the country. This year, in most cases, it is said to be well below 50%. I beg to differ from this consensus. More precisely, I wish to state that for us to get an accurate sense of potential voters that are routinely excluded from electoral participation in our country, we must first get the gap between the actual percentage of citizens of voting age and of registered voters before fixating on the gap between registered voters and actual voters. The cases of Lagos and Kano, the two most populous states in the federation are very revealing on this issue.
Let us take Lagos first. With a population of about 21 million, it has only about 6.6 million registered voters. Since the voting age is now 18 and the national median age is also 18, this means that there are close to 11 million people of voting age in the state. This gives us two great gaps. The first is between people of voting age (around 11 million) and registered voters (about 6.6 million), giving us a difference of 5.4 million. The second gap is the well-known one between registered voters (6.6 million) and actual voters (slightly under 2 million) which is around 4 million This in effect means that those excluded from participation in electoral democracy in Lagos State are close to 11 million people, much larger than the current fixation on around 4 million as the number of the excluded.
The pattern in Kano State is similar to that of Lagos State, though not as dramatic. The state has a population of about 16 million of which we can say about 8 million are of voting age. The number of registered voters is about 5.4 million. This leaves us the figure of about 2.6 million of people of voting age that are unregistered. If we add that figure to the gap between registered voters and actual voters (3.4 million), we get a grand total around 6 million. Thus, although Kano has consistently had the largest number of actual voters among the 36 states of the federation, it too presents us with a great, seemingly unbridgeable gap between those who could be active participants in our democracy and those that actually do participate in it. In effect, this goes well beyond the phenomenon of voter apathy which, normatively, is the gap between registered voters and actual voters. In other words, what we have here is apathy plus exclusion plus social invisibility; and it pertains to very large segments of our population.
Compatriots, here are some summative figures to ponder as we take stock of the aftermath, in years and decades, of the elections. We have a population of about 180 million. In January this year, the INEC Chairman announced the figure of 84 million as the total number of registered voters. This is not just a huge gap; it is a crushingly huge gap. Is it illiteracy that is responsible for so high a number of unregistered adults of voting age in our country? Is it poverty? Is it despair and imposed nihilism? Or is it, as I believe, a combination of all the above? Whatever any of us can say in response to these questions, of one thing we can be sure: neither the APC nor the PDP cares a jot about the significance of these gaps between what is and what isn’t and what is open and what is hidden in the culture of politics dominant in our country under the diarchy of the APC and the PDP. This leads me to the concluding paragraph of this piece that I wish to devote to the open and hidden aspects of the announced results of the presidential elections.
Here are the open aspects. With a few exceptions, the South voted massively against Buhari, especially in the South-east and the South-south. And in the South-west that had voted hugely for Buhari in 2015, the PDP and Atiku gave APC and the President a run for their money, scoring victories in unexpected places and coming close to the APC in places where they lost. The reverse is true, in general, in the North where Buhari won big in many of the places he expected to win and lost narrowly in places where he was expected to lose heavily. APGA, which used to hold sway in the South-east, has been wiped out – at least for now. Thus, the coalition that brought Buhari to power in 2015 is gone – or has been largely reconstituted. These are the open aspects. What of the hidden aspects? Remember, compatriots, that only a small percentage of our citizenry actually participate in our elections, in our “democracy”. If I am asked to put a number to this, I would say about 25%. Which kind of INEC, which kind of electoral practices can bring these hidden aspects to our consciousness and a truly progressive intervention throughout the country?
- Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
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