No Nigerian with modicum of shame, should celebrate the circus that Tinubu, Yakubu and APC staged in Edo. It was not even a show in the right sense but a sham, in fact, shame of a nation.
There is no how the scam of Saturday, September 21, 2024 that passed for Edo governorship election, can be appropriately situated without measured references to a 2018 publication on comparative politics by Harvard University political scientists, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, titled; How Democracies Die.
It is a robust publication that offers insights on how leaders can subvert the democratic process to increase their power. The book recommends mutual tolerance and respect for the opposition, including accepting the results of a free and fair election. It also stresses the importance of respecting the opinions of those of different orientations.
The authors advise against denial of legitimacy of the opponents, by which parties in power, cast their rivals as criminals, subversive, unpatriotic or a threat to national security. In their words; “Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders – presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power”.
Soccer game is used by Levitsky and Ziblatt to illustrate how autocrats subtly undermine national institutions to achieve their desire. In it, power mongers compromise the referee, sideline at least some of the star players of the opponents and rewrite the rules of the game to lock in their advantage. In democracy, the institutions that are readily targeted, include the judiciary, law enforcement agencies and other regulatory bodies, that are ordinarily supposed to be neutral arbiters. “Capturing the referees provides the government with more than a shield”, the authors note.
The sham that was called Edo election exhibited all the features highlighted in the book. It was one election that gave Professor Mahmood Yakubu, national chairman of the Independent national Electoral Commission (INEC) and members of his team, ample opportunity to redeem whatever shred of integrity, if any, that remained in them on poll management. The thinking was that after the electoral heist which INEC under Yakubu inflicted on Nigerians in 2023, the commission would seize the window of the off-cycle elections in Imo, Bayelsa, Kogi, Edo and Ondo, to remedy its sullied image. Observed errors of the November 11, 2023 governorship polls in Imo, Kogi and Bayelsa were expected be corrected in Edo. But Yakubu and his gang fluffed the chance, choosing rather to sink deeper in infamy.
Make no mistake about it; not many Nigerians expected much from INEC under its current leadership. Truth be told, it would have been a massive surprise if something different had happened this time. As in 2023, all the antics of the agency that preceded the elections manifested in the Edo contest. Assurances of the commission’s neutrality and readiness for the exercise, were freely given by Yakubu without asking. But all turned out mere dummies as the chairman simply dumped the electorate and acted the scripts of the presidency.
Four days to the election, Yakubu was in Edo and promised that his commission was going to deliver a free and fair election. “My assurance to everyone in Edo State is: On the part of the Commission, we keep saying this: INEC is not a political party; therefore, we don’t have a candidate in this election. The responsibility of choosing the next governor of Edo State is entirely in the hands of Edo voters”, he said.
But that turned out a lie. If anything, INEC and the security agencies purportedly deployed to the state to ensure hitch-free poll, worked from the answer and served as conveyor belts in actualising the agenda of the Bola Tinubu presidency in returning the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Senator Monday Okpebholo, the winner.
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Virtually all the observers and monitors of the election were united in one verdict; what happened in Edo, was not an election but sheer mockery of democracy. Democracy as defined by Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, is the government of the people, for the people and by the people. Of course, democracy does not guarantee emergence of good leaders. But it assures of the people-content by which the people have a say on how their leaders emerge, of course, through their votes. This is why informed minds say election is celebration of democracy.
What happened in Edo was not election but a rape on the people, crass exhibition of impunity and total disregard to the ethics of democracy by INEC and other supervising authorities.
Reports by civil society groups, particularly, Yiaga Africa, on how the Edo election was won and lost, should make every right-thinking Nigerian be ashamed of what the country has turned to. Simply put, the organisation reported that the contest failed basic integrity test.
In a statement signed by its chair of the 2024 Edo Election Mission, Dr. Aisha Abdullahi, and Executive Director, Samson Itodo, Yiaga Africa, noted; “While key processes such as accreditation, voting, counting, and recording of results at the polling unit substantially complied with procedures, the results collation process was compromised by the actions of some biased INEC officials in connivance with other actors. This manipulation severely undermines the overall integrity of the election”.
The group recorded disruptions during ward and local government collation in Ikpoba/Okha, Etsako West, Egor and Oredo LGAs, including intimidation of INEC officials, observers and party agents. Other reports accused INEC of awarding marks to the APC flag bearer.
Despite these obvious infractions, President Tinubu, his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, APC National Chairman, Abdullahi Ganduje and other chieftains of the party, have been on victory laps over the outcome of Edo poll. Ganduje has even taken the clownery to the point of boasting that same template adopted in Edo would be replicated in Ondo, Anambra and subsequent elections in the country. There can be no shorter way of singing a requiem for the rule of law in Nigeria.
Now, nobody is begrudging the APC or any party for that matter, the right to celebration after a resounding outing in a free and fair exercise. After all, success, they say, has many parents, while failure is an orphan. But when such purported success is procured via under-the-table deals, the beauty is lost. That is the only way to explain the oddities of the Edo governorship poll.
No Nigerian with modicum of shame, should celebrate the circus that Tinubu, Yakubu and APC staged in Edo. It was not even a show in the right sense but a sham, in fact, shame of a nation. Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate in 2023, Peter Obi, is right in dismissing the election as state capture.
By the mindless indiscretion exhibited in Edo, the President and INEC Chair, have perhaps, unknown to themselves, initiated the process for eclipse of democracy in the country. It is doubtful if any candidate of the opposition would dare to run in future elections, knowing that the outcome would have been decided beforehand.