Tag: witness

The first election I witnessed as a small boy in  this country was in 1956. I was in form one in Christ School in Ado-Ekiti . Ordinarily I should not have been interested but for the fact that Chief Joseph Oduola Osuntokun, my brother was running for the House of Assembly in Ibadan . He had been a member of the House since  1951 and in 1955 he was appointed Minister of Works in the old Western Region which stretched from Lagos to present Delta and parts of Bayelsa states. To be a minister of such a huge region that was almost autonomous of the centre in those days was not a  small job. I also had special interest in the election because after the death of our father, Chief Osuntokun as Dawodu stepped into the shoes of our father and that included paying my school fees. I was not quite conscious of the Election in 1951 which sent him to the Western House in the first instance. What he later told me as an enquiring academic was that it was not based on universal adult suffrage but  on divisional electoral colleges throughout the region. The political parties were organizationally inchoate. What our people did was to choose three or four graduates or professional people all over the regions. This is why the first crop of politicians were top class educated people in full employment while politics was  seen as vocations.  A reading of the Hansard of the period either in the regions or at the centre will confirm the quality of their minds. My brother became Minister of Finance in 1956 at the age of 32. Subsequent elections in 1959 to the federal parliament and in 1960 to the Western House were fought on highly debated and well articulated manifestos. The elections were well fought and well run and conducted. We usually sat by the radio throughout the night as election results trickled in. Western regional elections were usually keenly fought between the Action Group, the ruling party and the NCNC, the party in opposition. Even the much more keenly fought 1959 federal election provided a lot of drama with Chief Obafemi Awolowo taking on the forces of the NPC (jamiyar mutanen arewa) or Northern People’s Congress and those of its coalition partner the NCNC.  These two parties were led respectively by the aristocratic Sir Ahmadu Bello, scion of the Usman dan Fodiye dynasty in Sokoto and Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe,  a cosmopolitan Igbo republican.

Elections to a reasonable extent were conducted with finesse and solid planning. Awolowo’s party represented the best face of serious planning and perhaps because of this and the rather more prosperous condition of his region, the other two leaders treated him with suspicion. In spite of official British partisanship, elections even on the eve of independence still continued to be a civilized operation.

It was not until the Action Group crisis of 1961-1962 that things changed for the worst simply because the coalition government at the centre used the opportunity to fish in troubled waters. Instead of responding to minority demands all over the country for creation of states, the Western Region was singled out for the purpose of weakening it when the Mid-West region was created out of it in 1963. The much louder demands in the North for a Middle-Belt state and Calabar/Ogoja/Rivers state were ignored. Through meddling in the affairs of the West, the Action Group party was manoeuvred out of power. This was the prelude to the Western election of 1965 which was flagrantly rigged by the Akintola’s government. The federal elections of a year earlier had suffered the same fate. The Western election of 1965 was therefore seen as a do or die affair by the two rival alliances of UPGA (United People’s Grand Alliance) and the NNA (Nigerian National Alliance) formed respectively around the NCNC and the NPC with the old two factions of the now destroyed Action Group lining behind their major partners. Attempt to resolve the national question centring on the division of spoils of office by the election failed. Following campaigns of incendiary nature in Tiv-land in the North and farmers revolt in the West, young army officers who had been watching the events and whose members were being increasingly used to put down rebellion decided to intervene and change the government. The coup d’état of 1966 did not quite succeed but it decapitated the leadership of the NNA leaving the leadership of the other party unscathed. The much internationally respected Prime Minister Sir Abubakar was brutally killed. Worst still, the top hierarchy of the officer corps from the West and the North was eliminated. Reaction swiftly followed six months later. These events eventually led to a fratricidal civil war the aftermath of which is still with us till today.

After years of military rule we transited to democratic rule and surprisingly enough, it was like we did not learn any lesson from our history. The parties of the First Republic came back with different names with their leadership intact and unchanged except for the northern leadership which had had to make an adjustment following the loss of Sir Ahmadu Bello and Sir Abubakar

This Second Republic collapsed under the weight of corruption of the ruling party the NPN. The military rode back on the wave of public disenchantment and brought draconian decrees to teach the ruling class one or two things about the need for discipline. Muhammadu Buhari was the popular face of the new junta which was supported by the vast majority of Nigeria’s suffering masses. The regime promptly said it was a continuation of the Obasanjo/Muhammad popular regime of the 1970s. If there had been a referendum the regime would have won by landslide. This writer dislikes non-democratic forms of government but my observation is a record of history. The government made things difficult for all politicians without discrimination. It even made Nigerians proud when it tried to bring home in a crate from London, the boastful and garrulous Umaru Dikko who publicly challenged the government.  The regime deliberately stepped on many toes without looking inwards for fifth columnists among its hierarchy. When the free sealing and free dealing Badamasi Babangida  struck in 1985, it was good bye to discipline and Nigerians went back to their pastime  of cutting corners and general and generalized irresponsibility  which the new regime allowed to fester in order to remain in power for as long as possible. The regime began a costly transition regime that was programmed to fail. It however tried to create two political parties, one a little to the right and another a little to the left! But when these two parties took on character and life of their own and produced a winner in Moshood Abiola in the best election in independent Nigeria, Babangida moved to truncate the process. We finally ended with the thieving regime of Sani Abacha who confused outright looting of the national treasury with governance. The damage this man did to Nigeria remains to be assessed.

Since 1999 we as a country have soldiered on as best as we can holding elections that were adjudged fraudulent and lacking in integrity  not only by the international community but by Umaru Yar’Adua one of the beneficiaries.

We are now on the eve of an election that may decide the future of Nigeria. In spite of the negative campaigns, I believe we can hold a reasonably credible election if we can trust INEC and allow it to conduct a free and fair election. If the election is openly fair and transparent, everyone will abide by the result. I am not pessimistic at all about what will happen after the results are in on February 15. There is so much to lose that I believe politicians who are leading us to the edge of a precipice will make a round about turn at the last moment