The 1999 Nigerian Constitution, as amended, frowns at all types of cheating during electioneering and even stipulates some sanctions against the act. The Constitutionally created Institution, regulating the conduct of elections in Nigeria, for now, is the Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC]. This Organisation forbids all types of electoral malpractices, which includes but not limited to “votes buying and votes selling”.
The incumbent Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Professor Mahmood Yakubu; who will be having his first baptism of fire on general election matters in a few days’ time [February 2019 specifically], has made his stand against the malpractices of selling and buying of votes known, assiduously and vehemently too. He has even threatened, with all seriousness, deploying whatever weapon in his constitutional armoury into the battle of election malpractices. And one of the main battles of election misdemeanours this Professor has identified is the selling and buying of votes.
Of course, Professor Mahmood Yakubu has a very legitimate backing for this war and this is to be found in the Electoral Laws, either as amended or about to be amended, or even being presidentially rejected for amendment.
We can now see that beginning from the Constitution, to the Electoral Body [INEC], to the Electoral Laws, even up to the person in charge of executing the electoral functionalities – the Chairman of INEC and his officials, there is great determination to deal with anyone and anything that is likely to truncate the process of free and fair election, come 2019.
It is therefore going to be test of Will of Prosecution and Implementation between the Wolves and the Lambs. The former are those fully determined to “do everything, including all things” to win the elections by all means [including deploying the mechanism of “selling and buying votes” while the latter remains, strictly in my own opinion, the Electoral Ombudsman – which is INEC and its operators [since nearly all politicians are compromising machinery in the operation of electioneering exercise].
Who wins in this crucial battle against vote selling and buying? Will it be the Ombudsman [INEC], which has spoken eloquently against the practice, through its Chairman? Or, is it going to be the hawks; the deadly class of politicians that would consider it “a do or die” matter that will emerge as winners? Ordinarily, the winner of a battle like this should not have been anything difficult to predict, without waiting for outcome of the battle’s engagement. And this is being so; given the weight of constitutional backing INEC has been equipped with for the battle.
However, while such prediction, as pointed out above, is not meant to be a difficult assignment elsewhere, it could be one herculean task in the Nigerian clime because of those conflicting dynamics of operation that are, unfortunately, peculiar to us alone because of our wicked peculiarity in doing everything and most thing abnormally upside down.
It is for this reason that we need to examine the possibility of INEC winning the battle of “vote selling and buying” against the Nigerian politicians. Did l hear myself talking of the Nigerian politicians in this matter? Yes, I am categorically announcing it, with all certainties and senses of conviction that most Nigerian politicians, across all political parties are into the prosecution of this unholy alliance.
We should not be deluded to believing that election’s malpractices in Nigeria are the exclusive malfeasance of one political party while others are saint. That would remain a terrible lie “from the pit of hell”, as some people are wont of saying. All the political parties have the potentials of election malpractices and in fact, all of them moved into election contests with one plan to rig or the other, except that the best rigger comes out “victoriously”.
Yes, in most times, the level of privileged machineries of government at the disposal of the Political Party in Power helps in maximization of spoils of victory to the detriment of political parties that are not in government. It is for this reason that l agree with my brother journalist; the author per excellence, who is also the Chairman of Thisday Newspaper Editorial Board, Segun Adeniyi, when he captioned one of his most recent books “Against the Run of play: How an Incumbent President was Defeated in Nigeria”.
Yes, it was really against the run of play indeed because the power of incumbency has always remained a lucrative instrument of winning everything, and at most times. Since the focus of this piece is not to review Segun’s book, which has been done more than adequately, it will be better to flip over to the next page of our narrative – can INEC win this war or not?
The first obstacle l can see is the formidability of the enemy, to wit: votes selling and vote buying. Then, the second thing l am looking at is the cumbersomeness in defining vote selling and vote buying. The definition looks so nebulously packaged, in my view anyway, that the possibility of smelling rat without the ability to catch the rat would remain one major and strategic obstacle. These two forces make it look like the instrument of winning the battle, though explicitly spelt out in the books [electoral laws] may not have been glued to the hands of INEC enough to be able to catch the thief and jailing same. Let us escalate this evaluation a little further.
The seller of the votes in contention is most likely a victim of one or more unfriendly circumstances while the buyer is a victim of one circumstance exclusively. Before looking at the circumstances or circumstance of each of the two personae dramatis, it is good to accept that in the market place of vote selling and vote buying, like any other market place of life endeavours, there are two participants – the one that brings wares to the market for sale and the one that come to the market to buy the wares. It is another fact of life that while one is a producer [of the wares at the market place] the other is a consumer of the wares in display at the market place. And both are doing business through one means of exchange, which in this case is the currency [money] of that created community.
Now, what are the circumstances or circumstance of creating the Seller and the Buyer in this market place of Vote Selling and Vote Buying?
The seller of votes in the Nigerian market place of vote selling may actually not be taking his/her wares [vote] to the market place for display because strictly speaking, there is no geographical market place for this operation. Yet, there is a market place, created by the Buyer more than the Seller and since the Buyer [of votes] is the creator of this market place, the rules and regulation of operation in this market place are dictated by the creator – the buyer, in this case. Expectedly, the buyer who created the market, rules and regulations of operation, also creates and decides the value price for the commodity.
To the buyer, it is more the operation of monopsony than monopoly sort of a systems. And there are conditions that made this practice, where the Buyer, in all ramifications, has upper hand of dictating everything to the Seller. We need to know those conditions first as such might smoothen our journey of discovery.
The Seller of Votes participates from weaker bargaining platform by the necessity of existing forces, which themselves predate the arrival of the market [for selling and buying of votes]. Few of these forces can be identified, and maybe we just pick only two for the purpose of brevity, as following:
Poverty: this is primary in most underdeveloped countries of the world, mostly in the Continent of Africa. The political Class; the essential politicians – people that their profession and occupation is politics, the driver of the political vehicle from the very first date they made incursion into politics until the day they die, has made it an unholy cardinal point to keep the masses of their countries in perpetual bondage of poverty.
It is for the reason of fertilizing the ground for securing loyalty through the instrumentality of playing the godfather role in “rescue operation for my people” [have you not heard this before?] that the poor are becoming poorer while the privileged rich politicians would always remain the money bags. Having first of all created generations of poor people, they [politicians] return back to them, telling them [the poor] the good plans of rescue they have for them “if only you can vote for me again”.
Illiteracy: the uneducated is the quickest tool of wealth creation in the hands of the enlightened wicked politician [permit me to remark here that this politician might not be necessarily too educated but there is a sort of political enlightenment he has over others]. There is a level of poverty that sometimes reduces the mental capability of an otherwise educated man into an unbelievable imbecile. And the wicked politician of our society [not all but majority are in this gene] have enough capacity to create this generation of imbecile at larger number.
How does these definitions relate to the issue under discuss, which is vote selling and vote buying viz-a-viz INEC’ s power to put a stop to the practice in a few days’ time? We should not forget, in looking for an answer to the question, to admit that INEC under Professor Mahmood Yakubu was overwhelmed by what he saw of vote selling and vote buying in Ekiti and Osun States elections that held recently. It was these eye-openers that convinced him to take the battle up quickly so that the woes of vote selling and vote buying of those two elections would not bring him face-to-face with electoral Armageddon in 2019.
Permit me to use the Osun State governorship election as a more practical template of evaluating the likely success or failure of INEC in the battle against vote selling and vote buying. Let us go.
There was not an outright winner between the candidates of the All Progressives Congress and that of the People Democratic Party, so declared INEC and it is for this reason that INEC asked for a re-run of the elections in some place. That re-run had come and gone, winners have been announced by INEC and litigation is ongoing about the exercise in the Judiciary. The latter forbids comment on the exercise as the law of prejudice is superior to any comment.
But it is suffice to say that the few days between the announcement of inconclusiveness of the votes and the rerun date fixed, there was a pilgrimage voyage to Ile-Ife, to seek the face of the Ife political Oracle; Senator Iyiola Omisore, for votes [in then declared rerun] by both leading political parties in the election – the APC and PDP. Eventually, the Ile-Ife political Oracle spoke and directed his people to cast their votes for a particular political party and when his people did in obedience to him, a winner emerged.
The big question is this: What did the two parties [APC and PDP] that met with Senator Omisore bargain for? Can we say that they went to bargain for the peoples’ votes by passing through Omisore? Did Senator Omisore deliver the PEOPLES’ VOTES to one Party or not? If the answer agrees with intellectual expectation, can that be regarded as Vote Selling and Vote Buying? Finally, how would INEC arrest and deal; with the extant electoral laws of course, with the case just enumerated?
Can the Independent National Electoral Commission stop vote selling and vote buying in 2019? The late Chief Bola Ige said that “we should sit down and look”.
Godwin Etakibuebu; a veteran Journalist, wrote from Lagos.
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