As we approach the presidential, federal, state and local elections early next year, one thing troubles my mind. This is the fact that once again, the majority of working and jobless poor people throughout the country will, as usual, not be voting in their own economic interests simply because they will not vote at all. Moreover, the small percentage of them that will vote will be doing so for the benefit and interests of the wealthy and/or corrupt minority of Nigerians that rule the country through their control of the ruling parties. This phenomenon is not unique to Nigeria; it is a fact of electoral behaviour in many nations and regions of the world, rich and poor, “developed” and “developing”.
Yes, the phenomenon is more pervasive in some countries than others, but it is common enough in our world to be regarded as a near universal phenomenon. Since it was not always the case that poor people had the right to vote, since in fact it took a long time in many parts of the world to achieve universal adult suffrage, it is bewildering to reckon with the fact that having at last won the right to vote, many of the world’s poor choose not to exercise that right. This is the topic of this week’s column, this deeply ironic fact of all the democracies of the world, liberal and illiberal, that the poor hardly participate in the electoral system for and in their own economic interests, whether they vote or do not vote. Before coming directly to the topic, permit me to explore a few relevant issues that may throw some light on our main topic.
Poor people vote but they cannot be voted for. Since there is no law in Nigeria or any country in the world that supports or enforces this proposition, it means that I am expressing it as a law, as even a constitutional doctrine, with an ironic intent. This is because it is rare, to the point of an impossibility or a joke. for any poor woman or man to present herself or himself as a candidate seeking the votes of fellow citizens. I mean, have you ever heard of such a phenomenon? Well, I have! And it was in this country under the regime of Ibrahim Babangida, when a bunch of penniless jokers formed the “YCIC Party” and presented themselves as candidates in the proposed but eventually cancelled elections of 1992. What does YCIC stand for? “You Chop; I Chop”! One still wonders whether that party would have recorded any significant electoral victories if the elections hadn’t been cancelled because of its bold claim: “all politicians, all political parties are in the game for money; we are being completely honest about this; if you vote us to power, we will chop and you, the electorate, will chop too”. But this was unlikely because everybody, including the generality of poor Nigerians, did not take the YCIC Party seriously. And that left our unwritten but ironclad “law” intact: poor people vote but they cannot be voted for.
As we explore the ramifications of our topic in this piece, it is necessary that we separate what happens when the poor vote from what happens when they don’t vote, even if the same result is produced by the two scenarios – the interests of the wealthy, of the corrupt, of the nation-wreckers prevail. [If this sounds too bitter, I admit it: I am very bitter on this point] It so happens that there is a name, a term for when the poor in their tens of millions don’t vote and it is “voter apathy”. Now, voter apathy is relatively very high in our country. Moreover, it takes some very cynical and self-defeating forms that are not common in other parts of the world. Now, one of the worst forms of this phenomenon of voter apathy in Nigeria is the act known in the Yoruba-speaking parts of the country as “dibo ko se’be”. Roughly translated, it means “make sure that if your vote cannot get you any other thing, it will at least get you enough to fill your soup pot for a day or two”. I am absolutely sure that there are equivalents of this phrase, “dibo ko se’be”, in most of the other languages of the country since open and flagrant vote buying and selling operates throughout the length and the breadth of the country.
For readers who might think that this practice of open and extensive vote-buying in Nigeria has not much to do with the wider phenomenon of voter apathy, I offer this following pithy explanation: vote buying is to voter apathy what the buying of the blood of the poor is for sustaining the nation’s blood banks. Why so? Well, in each case, the value of the “commodity” – the vote or blood – is dictated by forces and agents that have little respect for the intrinsic, life-sustaining values of the commodity. For readers who might regard this analogy between the selling of blood and the selling of votes by the poor as too strained, let me explain that I am drawing here on traditions of political thought that regard the vote as the bloodstream of the nation as a political community. In other words, I am thinking here of slogans designed to act as powerful counterforces to voter apathy like this slogan: “Make your vote count as if your life depends on it because it does!”
The preceding point leads directly to the heart of the matter in this essay: how and why the poor, when they vote, often vote against their own economic and social interests. Permit me to allude to how this issue played out in the presidential and federal elections of 2015 in contrast with what the pattern was in all the elections held between 1999 and 2015. What does this mean? Well, in 2015, largely because he seemed very credible in his anti-corruption electioneering promises and partly because all Nigerians – and especially poor Nigerians – knew that drastically reducing or altogether ending corruption was in their economic and social interest, Nigerians overwhelmingly voted for Buhari and the newly formed APC.
But, remember, compatriots: three times before the elections of 2015, Buhari had contested the presidential elections, losing very badly on each occasion. On each of those three previous occasions, Buhari had threatened fire and brimstone if he did not win; he had threatened Armageddon; and yet on each occasion, he had lost hopelessly. Well, not completely because he did win in his “home” regional zone of the Northwest and parts of the Northeast. At any rate, here’s the essential point that I am making here: In all the elections before 2015, Buhari lost because the votes he could manage to garner were mostly from his “own people” and had little to do with the economic and social interests of either his own people or of other Nigerian peoples; in the 2015, elections, his own people and other Nigerian peoples, mainly poor, saw their economic and social interests in Buhari’s electoral victory. What am I making of this argument?
This much I know: Buhari and the APC may prevail over Atiku Abubakar and the PDP in 2019. It is by no means a dead certainty, but it is highly probable. But what cannot be contested, what only the diehard, fanatical supporters of Buhari and the APC will argue is the proposition that if Buhari and the APC win in 2019, they would have done so on the same basis as their victory in 2015. This is because the people’s interests, the interests of the masses of the poor and the exploited and the looted and the interest of Buhari and the APC have diverged and gone completely different ways between 2015 and 2019. Let me be very concrete and frank on this point: in 2015, Buhari’s victory was a combination of the votes of his “own people” and the votes of the generality of poor Nigerian who saw in him an embodiment of their own interests, hopes and aspirations; in 2019, a Buhari victory will be comprise of the votes of his “own people” and the votes of the “own people” of his allies in other parts of the country, principally the Southwest and parts of the Northeast and the South-south. And broadly speaking, none of these blocs of voters or electoral constituencies will be based on the economic and social interests of the poor and the excluded majority of the national electorate.
This leads us back to the starting point of this discussion: when poor and underclass voters of the world shake off voter apathy and exercise their right to vote – ignoring for the moment their right to be voted for – they nearly always vote against their own economic interests. The typical factors are race and racism; tribe and tribalism; religion and religious bigotry; locals and indigenes versus settlers and immigrants; or a combination, any combination, of all of the above. The United States of America, one of the supposedly leading nations of liberal democracy in the world and in modern history, has for a long time down to the present period been based on deliberately counterposing the interests of white and black working and non-working poor against each other. A few concrete details: for a long time and again down to the present period, the suppression of the votes of the black working class was achieved by the active support of the white working and non-working poor, especially in the South. Another item: white and black evangelicals are normatively divided and opposed on either side of the big racial divide though, of course, both communities belong to the Christian faith at its most conservative, orthodox and literal-minded in their theology.
In moving to the conclusion of these reflections, let me make an observation based on hope, stubborn hope. What is this observation? Well, very simply, I say that we must not give up on hope, we must believe and work for those moments as we had in 2015 when the interests of the poor and the excluded converged with the interest of the diverse and multiple communities of the nation. Many voted for Buhari and the APC because they felt that they were voting for their “own people”; but an even larger number voted for Buhari because they saw in him the possibility of the realization of their interests, hopes and aspirations. This means that it is not always and forever the case that the poor vote against their own interests. But since this is not a frequent or regular occurrence, this means that true and progressive compatriots must recognize that elections do have their limits. In our country, elections take place very four years. What happens or does not happen in between this cycle of four years per every electoral season – that must become the object of our intense study and activist interventions.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
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