Nigeria elections

Some of you might be interested in a friend of mine's account of the elections in Nigeria, especially those following Mushtaq's course or with any kind of interest in the process of democracy.

He asked me to remain anon.



It feels like… it feels like someone stole from you, like having your house burgled. You stand there looking at your smashed kitchen window, knowing you can call the police, knowing even that the insurance will pay out, but still your stuff has been taken, and there’s basically nothing you can do about it.



All the media reports you might have seen have been centred on the feud between outgoing President Obasanjo and his deputy-turned-opposition-leader Atiku over the Presidential elections. Atiku was fighting in court to be allowed to run after the electoral commission refused to register him citing corruption allegations. But inside Nigeria , that wasn’t the concern. Everyone was aware that Obasanjo’s handpicked successor Yar’Adua would get the presidency, and despite the rhetoric most people couldn’t care less about Atiku anyway. Instead the elections for the 36 state governors were closer to home and much more important. They took place on 14 April.



What you need to know by way of context is that while President Obasanjo has done great work abroad, leading African peacekeepers into Darfur and so forth, at home – especially since the aborted attempt to extend his term in office – most people are heartily sick of his PDP government, which has really showed its grubby underbelly during all the pre-election bickering. And this time there was a new generation – a small new generation, but serious – of dedicated progressive people who actually had a chance of making a difference. Real people likeAdams Oshiomhole, head of Nigeria ’s equivalent of the TUC, were trying to yank the established politicians’ heads out of the trough in a few places across the country. In Ekiti, in the hills of Yorubaland, Kayode Fayemi my former boss from CDD was already being addressed as ‘Excellency’. I saw the crowds myself, this was not just hype. People were so ready for change, they were even feting those recycled chancers who’d turned up on opposition tickets just because they’d fallen out with their former cronies, as if they were going to be the new saviours of Nigeria .



Election day was fun, a buzz. Tola and Yinka were here, helping us on our CDD observation programme in lagos . We bowled around country roads in Ikorodu suburb, us, Voke, Pastor Prince driving, Mr David piloting us in front on okada. We checked on volunteers, questioned officials, resolved arguments, straightened queues. On the way in at the beginning of the day a soldier stopped us with a ‘Good evening’ and tried to stop us continuing. Voke bawled him out for being drunk on duty. Polling stations were not opening on time; we found the INEC (electoral body) commissioner in his office, grilled him, he squirmed, answered his mobile, forgot to give his name. Respectable ladies and gentlemen of the older generation queued under parasols; younger voters pushed to the front while lairy area boys jeered at us and asked us why we bothered. We fumed as some unimportant royal father delayed us with protocol as we tried to catch votes being counted, forgot to eat with all the excitement. Towards evening I called Tunde in Ekiti. I could hear noise in the background. ‘How’s it going?’ I bawled down the phone. ‘We are rounding up the riggers! he shouted back. ‘Rounding up how?’ I yelled, worried. ‘Through MASS ACTION!’ he replied, and I wished I was there, thinking - this is how it felt in Ukraine , Serbia , everywhere regimes fall. ‘Are you safe?’ I shouted, and he paused and then shouted back ‘WELL, I’M NOT VERY SAFE, BUT I’M A BIT SAFE’, which in the circumstances, I thought, would have to do. I called again later, just before going to bed. This time, Tunde told me the results as they came in showed they were ahead in 12 of the 16 local governments (districts) in the state. I went to bed exhausted and on a cloud…



…and when I woke up on Sunday Tolu asked me if I’d heard the news. I grinned from ear to ear and said what? Fayemi lost in Ekiti, she told me. They announced PDP win. My smile fell off.



And this, it turns out, is what happened everywhere. In Edo , where Oshiomhole was contesting, they simply cancelled the results of his home area and then changed the others to show a PDP win. In Imo, the PDP was split internally, so INEC just declared elections delayed in order to give them time to get organised. In Adamawa, the government was so keen to give Atiku a bloody nose in his own home that INEC disqualified the AC candidate the night before elections. In Ondo, the election commission announced the government win from Abuja before counting had even finished in the state. In Anambra, the election commission couldn’t wait to show a massive vote for the president’s close aide Andy Uba, and rushed so much they got the maths wrong and announced he’d polled several thousand more votes than there were voters registered. I could go on, but why bother. I think you can see what I’m trying to say.



But on Monday we woke to the news that the Supreme Court had ruled that Atiku could run after all. The final decision had been expected the previous Friday but the government had creatively declared a national holiday to prevent the courts from sitting. The electoral commission, which in its enthusiasm to please the presidency had jumped to print the ballot papers without Atiku’s name despite the pending decision, announced it would comply and put him back on the paper, and suddenly everyone was hopeful again. There’ll be a big backlash against this OBJ, we told ourselves. People suddenly cared about Atiku. We may not want him as president, they said, but let him give this old man a bloody nose. At least he has shown baba that it doesn’t all go his way all the time. And so on, so that by the time it reached the next Saturday, we almost really cared again.



In the end the way the government did it was very simple. Embarrassed by their almost total failure to open anywhere on time the previous week, INEC had announced that polls would open at 10 this time to allow officials and materials to get there in time. Once bitten twice shy, we started this time with a pre-emptive visit to the INEC commissioner. Looking a lot more relaxed than last time, he told us there was no problem, only that the presidential ballot papers had just arrived that morning due to the last-minute reprint. So we went to a suitably-situated polling station, greeted the venerable old men holding parasols who were first there, and waited while the crowd formed. My phone rang. It was Tristan, who’d gone north for the second round. ‘Have you seen the ballot papers yet?’, he asked ‘Best have a look at them’.



The pink ballot papers for Senate and House of Representatives polls came in tear-out books like raffle tickets. Each paper and its counterfoil had a number, so that each vote was anonymous but traceable, thus making it possible to trace results and settle disputes afterwards if any party claimed rigging. But the blue papers for the presidential election – which noone had seen until that morning – were in loose bundles, with no numbers at all. With no numbers, there is no way of telling how many were cast at each station, or how many were given to each station, or for that matter how many were in the country or were even printed in the morning. We made a few phone calls, and found that this is how it was all over the country. Then we started finding out that most polling stations – and bear in mind Lagos is an opposition stronghold – didn’t have enough. One station had six hundred registered voters, but was only given two hundred presidential ballots. Then you start to wonder what happened to the rest of the papers you are meant to have. Were they printed? If so, exactly where are all of those (unnumbered) extra papers right now, and where will they be by midnight?



In Nigeria , where the sewage rises in society like turds in a blocked toilet, the last few years have seen a new trend where state governors, ministers and others announce that they have graded their own administration and found it has performed wonderfully well. Usually they then use that glowing endorsement as the basis to gratefully receive the bonuses the local assembly will award them as a vote of thanks from the people. This has become so fashionable of late that we have been expecting reform of the school system to a new format where students will stand up in class and tell everyone that their project was so good they have awarded themselves an A*. So it was – disappointing, but not surprising - when I woke on Monday and sleep-groggy saw footage of the INEC head behind a bank of microphones with the rolling headline ‘Iwu Grades INEC 80% on Conduct of Elections’. Backslaps all round and let’s see what we made out of that lot. The wife’s been on at me for ages about a shopping trip to London , this should keep her off my back for a bit. There was another resultm, something about Yar Adua winning with 24 million votes, but that you can find in the news pages.



Speaking of which, I hope you saw some of this in the media. People have been sending me bits of coverage but I’m not sure how much actually got reported overall. Much as I was disappointed with Chris McGreal’s wet piece in the Guardian, I know there was somne good stuff written. Top marks to the sub who either thought of or let Tristan use the headline Nigeria’s Sham Polls Kill 400 in the Sunday Times. That was the bottom line.



I could try to salvage something from this: I could tell you about the few positives, about the army officer who took on Lam Adedibu, the aged Godfather of Ibadan, and blockaded him in his house with all the ballot boxes he’d stuffed until the election was safely over. I could dwell on how at least the foreign observers put diplomatic mealy-mouthing aside and told the Nigerian government loud and clear what a pile of shit they’d just witnessed. I could relate the words of the army guy who turned up in Enugu to find elections not started by 3pm, and was quoted verbatim in the paper as saying ‘there is suppose to be election and you people are saying one thing and another thing and still elections are not holding. Get on with it!’ But that’s all clutching at straws. Best you block it out, otherwise you might think things aren’t all bad, and then you would have got the wrong impression.



The reality is that these people have well and truly shafted us, and we have lost a huge historical opportunity to make a difference to the future of this country. By ‘we’, I don’t just mean Nigerians, but also anyone in the world who even slightly gives a shit how the rest of the world is run, and whether we’re just going to nosedive into an accelerating downward spiral. As for those who did it, it takes a special kind of cynicism to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of public money on holding an election, while at the same time also spending hundreds of millions of dollars of public money on deliberately subverting it. I can’t understand that kind of mindset, and I’m glad I can’t. It makes me feel sick even thinking about it.