Nigeria: battle for a cohesive national identity

THE February 2023 presidential poll has proven that although trends and history exist to provide insights into the past and how that relates to future occurrences, they do not fully determine how the future is designed. This message was lost on many analysts who posited that the election this time will go in the way of past elections where the country’s two heavyweight parties will punch heavily during the elections while other contestants scramble for the crumbs.

This was the case when Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari received about 90 per cent of the votes in 2011, leaving the remaining 10 per cent to the other 18 candidates; or as the duo picked up 99 per cent in 2015, leaving the other 12 contestants with one per cent; or even in 2019 when the two leading candidates garnered 96 per cent of the total, with the other contestants, numbering up to 60, contesting for just four per cent.

Therefore, widespread prediction by most Nigerian analysts was that it would be business as usual and either Bola Ahmed Tinubu or Atiku Abubakar would win the election; that while the bulk of the votes would be between the two, other candidates, including the favourite of young Nigerians, Peter Obi, will scramble for a small percentage of the total votes.

This prediction was often supported with justifications such as the peculiarity of the Nigerian electoral scene. This involves electoral malpractices, vote-buying, voter intimidation by the country’s major parties, and the use of wealth, whether state-funded or personally amassed, that cannot be traced to any clear legal means of acquisition.

During research with my team, we found out that presidential elections in Nigeria cost aspirants billions of naira — from the outrageous prices of forms to the several money-gulping “mobilisations” that needed to be undertaken. Nigeria is a corrupt country, and so is its electoral system, where all participants — from the electorate to the electoral officers, including party members and agents — expect to get some financial incentives to perform their duties.

Prior to the gubernatorial elections, a video went viral of women who were complaining bitterly that the All Progressives Congress in Lagos promised them money for having voted for the party during the presidential poll, but that since they had yet to receive payment, they would not support the party for the gubernatorial election. Similarly, there were videos of Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) ad-hoc staffers saying they would not commence electoral activities if they were not given some monetary incentives by parties, that is aside from the official wages for their job.

It is easy to blame this phenomenon on the gross absenteeism of elected leaders from the grassroots and grassroots-related issues, which, in turn, makes all participants in the electoral process consider election year as the time to earn some money before the next four years. However, the fact remains that it will only amount to a dog chasing its tails if Nigerians do not make intentional moves to stop this phenomenon.

Regardless of what justifications the electorate might have for selling their votes, a hopeless adventure. It is a better approach to refrain massively from vote selling, and to elect leaders based on personal choice, demand accountability from them, and then build a reward system — mostly reelection-based — that ensures that a leader who does not do well during their tenure never gets re-elected at any level.

One of the biggest phenomena during analyses, polls, and predictions leading up waiting on elected leaders to deliver on good governance before deciding to stop vote-selling is tantamount to embarking on to Nigeria’s 2023 election was the overromanticisation of concepts and factors. This was done by two categories of people

— those who predicted an abysmal run by the Labour Party’s Obi and those who predicted that his run would be groundbreaking and he would emerge as the winner.

For the first category of pre-election analysts, they failed to see that since the months leading up to the polls, when Obi’s candidacy began to gain popularity, the election started to position itself as being more similar to the 1979 election than to any that has been held in the Third Republic. I firmly stated this in my preelection analysis (Africa Briefing, JanuaryFebruary March 2023), and it was not surprising to see that the percentage share of the results by the two leading candidates was more in range with what happened in 1979.

The second category of people are those who failed to factor in the peculiarity of the Nigerian electoral scene. The candidates who had spent hundreds of millions of naira to secure their party’s form and billions of naira to get their party’s tickets would be willing to spend tens of billions to ensure their victory at the polls.

While the dispensing of their tens of billions might not have been through the known widespread vote-buying, which was curtailed to some extent by the cashless economy, the fact remains that there were strategic electoral malpractices, widespread electoral violence, clownish rigging, and voter intimidation and suppression. All the political parties are guilty of this.

This was an election that divided Nigeria across several ethno-religious lines, one where emotions were allowed to fester and grow into hate, tribalism, and bigotry, so much so that these translated into desperation-fuelled violence. It was a classic do-or-die case across the country for many people, including political godfathers, incumbent leaders, party agents and election contestants.

By emerging as the winner of the 2023 presidential election, Tinubu had the lowest percentage of results by any winner in Nigeria’s Third Republic — at 37.62 per cent of total votes cast. The combined percentage of votes received by him and Abubakar, the two top candidates from the two heavyweight parties, was just a little over average at 67.5 per cent.

When compared to other percentages from this republic, it is safe to say there has been a systemic shift in the Nigerian political landscape, and that there is now a truly nationalist third force, encompassing both old and young but mostly championed by young Nigerians.

The gross irregularities that happened during the 2023 elections are tied largely to the steady dysfunctionality of the Nigerian state. Those who want INEC to be a perfect system forget that nothing else works in the country. Nigeria has the tendency to sink lower and lower.

The New Electoral Act held some promise as voters believed they would be able to follow the results of the election in real-time and that it would help curb rigging and results manipulation. Alas, it is the business of those seeking power to prevent rigging, and the business of the regulators to discover cases and punish people accordingly.

This belief about an imaginary perfect performance of institutions formed a huge part of the interest that new voters had in the expected credibility of the elections. INEC relied on manually collated results in the end. It was business as usual for the manual collation process, where intimidation, rigging, and bribery occurred in some areas.

More interestingly was that presiding officers in some areas across the country attested to the possibility of uploading the results of the National Assembly election directly from the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System to the IReV portal in real-time while encountering issues with doing the same for the results of the presidential election.

There were also unforgivable logisticsrelated issues on the day of the election, and for a body that spent N305 billion on the elections, the widespread lateness of INEC staff at election venues, accreditation issues, and last-minute change of polling units for several voters do not speak well of the organisation that was in charge of the elections. The live broadcast of polling of lives across the country — from the coordinated attacks in some places to the incineration of the Nigerian National Democratic Party’s headquarters in Kano to the other pockets of violence reported nationwide. So it is that in 2023, Nigeria still battles vote buying, electoral violence, underage voting, and many other shortcomings, all of which can be tied around the neck of the behaviour of political parties. For the shortcomings of the election, INEC, political parties, and party agents have to share the blame.

As with other elections, the results of units with underage voters in the North was proof that Nigeria is still being haunted by its past. For a country whose independence had been gained for well over 60 years, electioneering processes have seen few positive changes.

Nigeria has to move forward, whether Mr. A is angry or Mr. B is happy. Should Tinubu's win be upheld by the Tribunal and should he be sworn in, added to a crippling economy, he would have to deal with increasing debts, rising inflation, and other conglomerated malaise.

He would also have to face the daunting task of piecing together a nation that has now, more than any other time in recent years, plunged deeper into the abyss of ethno-related grievances and a sense of “un-identity”, and possible separationist agitations fuelled by the over-reliance on ethnic divides and the tribalistic cards played by the leading political parties in the 2023 elections.

Worst of all was the widespread electoral violence that led to the loss this election are at the Election Tribunal — being contested by both Obi and Abubakar. Three contestants could not have emerged as the three winners. This leaves us with the question: who, then, was the rightful winner? Can the two aggrieved parties claim they consider themselves the rightful but robbed winner of the election?

These elections have heightened Nigerians’ sense of awareness about the lack of a cohesive national identity, and now, more than ever before, many Nigerians are beginning to question their Nigerianness. President-Elect Tinubu must consider ways to reconcile Nigerians and repair ruptured fibres of national consciousness, borrowing from the playbook of several other heads of state before him. Whether you wish Tinubu well or not is the least of my worries: the real worry is the survival of one of the most important countries in the world.