Spoiler Alert: Plotters say 2023 won’t make or mar Nigeria

Burying their heads in the clouds, pundits and tribal elders tick the 2023 elections as make-or-mar again. Sad these spotters will come back to earth after February

By Elijah Olusegun

Parties have elected flagbearers; losers are aching; INEC has lifted its ban on campaigns; supporters are going gung-ho, monies swishing about; the media is agog; excitement rages across Nigeria.

Just as it was in 2019—which was a reflection of 2015—also a carry-over of 2011—all much of a cycle all the way back to 1999.

But, as expected, some who think themselves more conscious of the political direction Nigeria heads in 2023 have begun their divination again. Others are gawking at crowds of supporters. These political wizards are using the sight to read the minds of voters on INEC register, and of the universe itself.

“2023 elections are the most decisive since 1999,” Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, the spokesman for the Northern Elders Forum, tweeted in July.

Every election year is a season of stargazing in Nigeria, no doubt. All the magi and sages must have their takes.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo likes to be taken seriously. More so when he, too, foresaw the necessity of making the ‘right’ choice in 2023.

“If we do not make the right choice in 2023, things would consume us…,” Obasanjo said while delivering a memorial lecture in Lagos in August.

Nigerians have heard worse than ‘things’ consuming them.

Former US Ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell, a Council of Foreign Relation fellow, predicted something more blood-chilling in 2015. Reading the political temperature at that time, he saw Nigeria melting down the middle in one of his books. The Africa expert later denied that after the APC upstaged the PDP’s 16-year government, and the nation snapped back.

Seven years after, many public affairs analysts and political pundits, like Baba-Ahmed, are again making an apocalypse of the 2023 elections, especially the presidential one, as preparations begin.

Looking into his crystal ball, Baba-Ahmed saw one of two things: the coming elections will show whether Nigerians have decided to reverse the journey to destruction, or sink irretrievably towards destruction.

If that was a riddle, his counsel was clearer.

“Will you be part of those who will decide, or will you watch others do it. Register and vote. 7 days left,” he added.

The northern elder has reasons to gush.

The younger brother Datti Baba Ahmed, owner of Baze University in Abuja, eventually clinched the V.P slot of the Labour Party. He became Peter Obi’s running mate without breaking a sweat.

Datti and Obi are drop-ins in the Labour Party.  Obi skipped out of the PDP, and Datti, as it were, just sauntered out of his office, and both snagged the ticket from the LP candidate, veteran contestant Pat Utomi who probably figured he was a no-account in the 2023 race. Shopping for tickets, however, has been a trend all along, and has never decided how elections go. Baba-Ahmed knows that.

Maybe the 67-year-old was just feeling like a spring chicken again, relishing the internet gale the young supporters of his son’s principal unleashed, and the hard sell they employed in motivating others to register and get voters’ cards. Again, Baba-Ahmed could tell if AAC’s Omoyele Sowore’s Revolution Now or ANPP’s Buhari’s disruption didn’t cause a stir, and the elections still went the way they did, and Nigeria was never worse or better for it.

The seven days he said eventually expired. About 14 millions failed to complete their registration, according to INEC. And all the cheers and backwind from Obi-Datti supporters and other presidential candidates, including the APC’s Bola Tinubu and the PDP’s Atiku Abubakar, yielded little.

For the 2023 general elections, INEC has said it’s preparing for approximately 95 million voters.

“We have 84 million voters now; we have registered 12 million newly,” INEC Chairman Yakubu Mahmoud said in Lagos last month. “None of the fresh registrants has been added to the register. We are cleaning up the register.”

The 12-million bounce in the registration figure is nothing earth-shattering. Registered voters’ numbers have always risen. About 58 million Nigerians registered to vote in 1999.The figure increased to 61 million in 2003, and about 62 million in 2007. Nigeria’s population then stood at about 120 million.

INEC recorded the biggest registration uptick so far for the 2011 cycle: about 12 million. The last two cycles in 2015 and 2019 recorded 67 million and 82 million respectively.

But, because nothing or little changes, the figures of accredited voters during elections over these years have been going south. Even with all the commentaries painting every election as make-or-mar.

Over the last six cycles, about 53 percent of registered voters, on average, voted during the elections. The highest percentage of participation was in 2003. About 69 percent of the 61 million registered voters re-elected Obasanjo.  But the 2019 general elections recorded the lowest. About 35 percent of the 82 million registered voters then decided who ruled Nigeria—then, incumbent APC President Muhammadu Buhari. He sought reelection at the height of insurgency and banditry in Nigeria, another valley of decision. And the outcome still favored him.

Election observers and analysts readily identify voters’ apathy as the reason—same over the years. Apathy has always taken the zing out of every election many trumpet as decisive. And if that bogeyman so scared many in 2019 that only 29 million voted, it will do the same—or worse— in 2023. The sweat and tears of those collect-your-PVC evangelists won’t mean much.

The scale of violence in the northwest, the southeast, and the northeast is already sending a vibe to repel voters. Former INEC chairman Attahiru Jega first raised the concern as early as last December. Yakubu dismissed it, insisting nothing threatens the general elections. But governors across the nation in an August policy brief warned Buhari the elections may not hold in some parts of the north. No fewer than 40 LGAs in Kaduna, Sokoto, Niger, and Kebbi have been buffeted enough by terrorists, scaring election management workers and voters equally. The separatist group in the southeast is also making good its threat to ensure elections never hold in Imo, Anambra, and others in the region.  Of the 41 INECs offices torched and vandalized in 14 states between 2019 and 2021, Imo ranks the highest, and ‘unknown gunmen’ or IPOB featured in the list of attackers, according to INEC’s incident report.

The violence still continues.

It will take rose-coloured spectacles for the optimists to believe the gap between registered voters and accredited ones won’t widen in 2023. And the doomsayers will need bigger doses of despair to convince Nigerians, after enduring six cycles of elections, their country goes bang next year.