Tag: gangsters

No question about it: what transpired during the Bayelsa State governorship election penultimate weekend was a show of shame and failure of leadership. The poll witnessed a brazen display of the reprehensible mentality in Nigerian politics that electoral outcomes shouldn’t simply be left to informed and intelligent voters to freely decide, but should rather be modulated by political actors who test one another’s will in superior use of force as well as intimidation of opposing voters and, indeed, the election management body. And that is not counting the generous dose of all other imaginable manners of subterfuge thrown in the mix. For a state that is relatively less expansive in administrative scale, considering that it has just eight local government areas (Kano has 44) – although many of the communities are riverine and estuarine, hence very difficult to access, it was shameful that the governorship election ended up inconclusive largely because of the impunity of the political leaders and their supporters alike.

Militancy is not alien to the south-south zone where Bayelsa State is located, and so, no reasonable person foreclosed the likelihood that there would be some measure violence in the course of the election. But what played out penultimate weekend overshot all reasonable projections. Sheer violence and other electoral malpractices, including ballot box snatching, intimidation of voters and polling officials, characterised the December 5 election in many of the local government areas, especially the riverine terrains. At the Southern Ijaw council area, election officials were barricaded in by militants at the council office and prevented from deploying for the election, compelling the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to reschedule the poll in that area to Sunday, December 6. But when the election eventually held, the brigandage was fiercer; it was so bad that militant supporters were reported to have held polling officials hostage. The electoral commission subsequently cancelled the poll in the entire local government area, thereby making the governorship election inconclusive.

Violence and poll cancellation: those were the hallmarks of the Bayelsa election – just like it has been in many other areas across this country. The two leading political parties – the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) – were the major culprits in Bayelsa, as they maximally exerted their capacity for mutual intimidation during the poll. If one may play the devil’s advocate, the high level of desperation by these parties was, perhaps, not too far fetched: Bayelsa is the home state of former President Goodluck Jonathan, who lost power in the 2015 general election as PDP’s candidate, and it would seem a matter of existential pride for the party to hold on to the state and avert the ultimate humiliation by the APC. For the APC, on the other hand, winning Bayelsa State would rank next to taking over power at the presidency in conclusively proving the party’s supremacy over the PDP.

Contestation for political supremacy is fine if it is done within the universal bounds of civility and the voter’s indivisible right to exercise free choice – which is the essence of democracy. And that free choice ought to be informed and guided by the voter’s keen awareness of the policies and programmes being put on offer by the political parties and their candidates. In Bayelsa however, as has been typical of the Nigerian political space, the parties and their candidates did anything but engage in a decent contest of ideas and programmes to convince the voters. The comportment of the political actors was more of seeking to compel an outcome through the use of force and other malpractices. The two major parties, in particular, exerted themselves in a mutual test of capacity for intimidation and taking umbrage. Even though the governorship candidates signed a peace accord before the election, there was little evidence that they took the accord seriously, and they evidently did very little to rein in those militants – their supporters – who disrupted the balloting in some areas.

The PDP candidate, Seriake Dickson, who is seeking re-election as Governor, stood out as using his official position to mobilise mob sentiment at different stages of the balloting process. It was ironic seeing the chief security officer of a state carry on with the gung-ho of a lynch mob leader. The tendency, however, is not peculiar to Dickson: there have been other state governors who, in the thick of past elections, resorted to verbal lynching of the electoral commission, their political opponents and other stakeholders in election administration such as the security agencies, just to gain whatever advantage they thought was possible in the process. In Bayelsa State, there were mutual calls by the political parties for the candidate of the other party to be disqualified by the electoral commission. But such advocates need to know that the provisions of the law – for instance, Section 31 (1) of the Electoral Act 2010 as amended – do not give the commission the muscle to act as canvassed. By the way, it was for the same reason that INEC could do nothing about the unwilling candidature of James Faleke when the APC nominated him as Deputy to Mohammed Bello for the recent Kogi State supplementary election.

I have always wondered why political emotions are so raw and unbridled in our own electoral jurisdiction. Electoral contests in many other climes do not entail the level of desperation and bile that we see in this country. I know this because I have had the privilege to observe elections in a good number of other countries that space would not allow me to elaborate upon here.  It’s not as if all the ills of the Bayelsa election were from the political class alone. Many observers reported that polling units opened late in many areas, and INEC has the blame for the disfunctionality of its deployment system. But I also happen to know that there is a sense in which even this challenge is connected with the uncivil temperament of the political actors. For, instance, the electoral commission typically cascades its deployment of personnel and materials from the state headquarters to the polling units for any election, with security agents providing protection all the way. Where security agents were not promptly available to provide that protection, deployment would have to stall because risks could not be taken in view of the impunity that characterised the electoral environment. Bayelsa is also peculiar because of the predominantly riverine terrain, much of which is not easily accessible. But let’s be clear: none of these frees INEC from blame for the disfunctionality of its logistics.

Observers also reported deviations from regulations for accreditation in a few polling units, such that some polling officials allowed voters whose Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) were not authenticated by the Smart Card Readers to proceed with the balloting process contrary to the commission’s process design. And there were reports that security agents looked the other way in some places where militant supporters disrupted the voting process. For a singular operation executed by tens of thousands of hands, it is a tough call to expect the electoral commission to guarantee full compliance with the regulations by every single staff. In ideal situations, political parties would assist the electoral commission with field oversight of the voting process if they weren’t so given to impunity.