TNG Election special: How vote buying may alter Saturday polls

Barely 72hours to the 2019 presidential and National Assembly elections and the fear of ‘vote-buying’ altering the elecoral process has not rescinded in Nigeria.

Recently, anti-corruption agencies said they had unearthed vote buying by some local politicians and foreign countries ahead of elections Saturday.

Vote buying is now a troubling trend in Nigeria’s electoral process – the ugly incident took the forefront in last year’s Osun and Ekiti gubernatorial elections.

At the aforesaid polls, political parties lurred electorate with cash and in some cases voters where mandated to take oaths after voting before they could be remunerated.

At Osun gubernatorial election both the PDP and APC had a field day inducing voters to vote according to the dictates of the amount shared to voters.

The most disturbing aspect of this bizzare development was the issue of oath taking after such voters cast their votes.

The APC had then alleged that the PDP started it all and had to double their efforts during the re-run election that fetched the ruling party victory in Osun.

In Ekiti it was alleged that the APC using both the instrumentality of federal might and cash for votes overturned the results in favour of the ruling party.

Both major parties in Osun and Ekiti alleged that aside rigging, vote buying was a factor that influenced the final election that crowned Kayode Fayemi and Gboyega Oyetola of Osun.

The governorship candidate of the Restoration Party of Nigeria, Mrs Mercy Ayodele, also alleged that although the election was peaceful, it was characterised by vote buying by politicians who were desperate to buy their ways into power.

She alleged that those who paid voters forced them to oaths to ensure they voted as agreed.

Speaking in the same vein, the Director General of the Oyetola Campaign Organization, Hon Ajibola Famurewa too narrated his harrowing experience before and after both the re-run and the proper election.

He said ‘ I learned a lesson that all these campaigns and all these things don’t work again. What an average Nigerian wants is money. If you have your money on the day of election, you can…because of the level of poverty.

And they introduced something that was very funny and scary as well, forcing people to take oaths. Like in my polling unit – people that I can say they are my people – that I can say any time, any day I can knock their doors and say come and vote for our party and they will vote because of the relationship. I went there on the day of election and they were moving back, saying, “I have collected money and I have taken oath , I don’t want to die.” That was my personal experience.

Oath taking became something very rampant and popular. People were taking oath freely for money – for N5,000 or N3,000 in some places.

So, that was what played out. It had nothing to do with the popularity of the government .

The Saturday election may not escape cash for votes as the trade money being dangled by the ruling APC government has been tagged another form of vote buying.

Traders are given N10000 as trade money which the opposition had tagged another cash for vote.

The alleged distribution of $322m Gen Sani Abacha loot released by the Swiss government to the poorest of the poor too was considered another cash inducement for vote.

From all indications, there’s no way cash for vote will not play a major role in Saturday’s election.

It is even alleged that both major parties have a war chest to distribute money for votes on election day.

Some claimed that both APC and PDP refused to spend money on publicity because cash distribution gives faster results on election day.

This is clearly an indication that this hard earned democracy may soon kiss the dust.