The control of electoral behaviour is as important as the planning and implementation thereof. What people do to win elections goes to show what they will do when they have won. It’s difficult to win elections through criminal acts, then come clean in governance. By the time after-elections punishment denies offenders their booty, it would become clear that it after all does not pay to engage in such. But then, will this be done and where is the will?
When we talk about electoral offences, we should consider chiefly the criminal aspects of it and, worse still, getting away with them. Things like adding two zeros to 820 to get 82,000; using thugs to kill/maim people or carry coffins loaded with knives and guns to scare them from voting, then turning around to lodge 81,180 thumb-printed votes in a place election did not take place; running to INEC to coerce it with inducements to accept and announce. First, it suspects, cancels, meets the offenders, reverses itself, goes silent, then finally announces it as a winning outcome.
In Abia, there is a new dimension. Someone won the House of Assembly election in Umuahia South, was announced and in the day of issuing the Certificate of Return, the name of his PDP opponent appeared on the certificate. You may think it’s a mistake, the opponent was waiting at the corner with his team of celebrants. Even after the elections, it’s not sure the voting materials are safe with INEC in the state, especially as the march to the tribunal gets obvious by the day. News of tampering with card-readers to cover up areas where figures were laundered is rife. Question is, would INEC allow all these to be associated with it?
Future elections have to consider increasing the scope of international observers to observe even the INEC. The role of the security agents needs a careful study. Principally, they’re there to maintain peace. But because they can disrupt the activities of the fraudsters, one can’t rule out what the offenders can do with them in a corrupt environment. Remarkable is, it’s a systemic collaboration.
Since at the theatre of fraud, INEC is overwhelmed, its best chance is to wait for the offenders when they’re about to take office just like you wait for a robber at the bank when he’s about to cash his loot. By the time people are moved from the Senate/House, governorship positions to jail, the lesson of ‘in the end, it doesn’t pay’ will have been learnt. But can INEC do it? Can Buhari do it?
It’s because this control measure was compromised in the past that the impunity in the PDP became audacious. If the compromise continues, the APC will do same. Why? If they can beat the PDP in the game to get power, they know what the PDP knows and even better. The impunity in the PDP was intolerable; if the APC knows their game better, then, run. The fight to track them as they celebrate onwards to the jail begins now. If we are to save democracy in Nigeria, somebody has to act like someone who’s annoyed. We who saw some of these things happening get perplexed when the election is described as free and fair and Nigeria being congratulated. Maybe the congratulation was relative. Nigeria was heading to war and break-up; it didn’t, therefore, congratulations; it’s not really about the ‘good’ conduct of the election. Yet, what Nigeria has enjoyed is merely an escape; people who fled have started returning. But four years isn’t distant. If something deterrent is not decisively carried through now, there may be no escape again.
We are saying that, inadvertently, corruption in Nigeria is killing its democracy. The fight against it should focus not just on how much was stolen, but more on its non-physical impact on the democratic institution without which the nation’s identity will be skewed. The proposed fight against corruption should start with stopping the agents and forces whose activities stifle democracy and make its practice become a rock of offence against decent living and facilitator of instability. They should receive their meals from behind the bars. That’s what will tell future practitioners that ‘in the end, it does not pay’.
Jega’s work is not finished. Buhari’s work is about to start. That work is to shop for the will to effectively control the behaviour inherent in our electoral process and for Buhari and crew: to make public example people who used crime to enter into the democratic space as its drivers. The scope of infamy in the electoral process ridicules voters and makes them look so foolish. But they are not. They’re only restraining themselves for the sake of land and no one knows for how long.
Onyebuchi ONYEGBULE
