As a continuation of last week’s article, this would buttress the military juntas, its era and election processes. The period from March 1999 to date has turned out to be the longest we have had a civil administration uninterrupted with a coup d’etat. Within the periods of civil administration, we have experimented with 3 different constitutions. At the first return to democratic governance through universal suffrage, we abandoned the Parliamentary System of administration that we inherited from the colonialists in favor of the American (USA) presidential system. That civil experiment was terminated and followed with military rule from 1983 to August 1993.
That decade of military rule featured two military juntas, the first from 1983 to 1985, and the second from 1985 to 1993. By the time it ended the Shonekan Administration, birthed as a transitional government that would conduct acceptable elections to usher in a new elected government of the people. We can all recall that on June 23, 1993, the then military administration of General Ibrahim Babangida nullified what was considered the most free and fair election conducted by Nigeria to date for no credible reason. The Earnest Shonekan care- taker administration in itself was pushed aside barely 3 months in office for another 5-year period of military rule. The then ruler, General Sani Abacha died in office on June 8, 1998.
We must recall too that Abiola Chief Moshood Abiola, whose popular election was nullified in 1993 and imprisoned by Sani Abacha when he insisted on assuming power under his popular mandate died in mysterious circumstances in jail on July 7, 1998, a month after his incarcerator died. The seventh military junta to rule Nigeria assumed office June 8,1998 following General Sani Abacha’s death. He was General Sani Abacha’s Chief of Defense Staff, who became the last military ruler to hand overpower to a democratically elected administration of Rtd. General Olusegun Obasanjo in his second iteration as the Nigerian First Citizen.
In each of these transitions from military to civil rule, a new constitution would be printed only to be terminated when another military junta seized power. In the same vein, each return to civil rule was preceded by a period with a set of 4 to 5 elections for local government councils, state governors and state legislators, federal house of assembly members, senators, and lastly the President and Vice-President.
I bet you must have become dizzy at the end of the preceding paragraph. That is the idea, because the Country too was in a dizzying stupor during those uncertain periods of 34 years plus. Free speech was trampled upon. Equity and fairness were thrown away over the mountain sides. Members of pro-democracy opposition were hunted, jailed, killed, or driven into exile. I will make bold to say that we as a nation have been in suspended animation since 1914, a country unable to find its bearing in any sense of the word.
The years long resistance that followed the June 12 election annulment, the ‘stepping aside’ of the military president who annulled the will of the people, the punch that threw out the care-taker government of Earnest Shonekan, the imprisonment of General Olusegun Obasanjo over trumped up allegations of leading a failed coup against the military government of Sani Abacha, the death of Sani Abacha in 1998, followed by the inexplicable death of MKO Abiola a month later left the country reeling uncontrollably and in utter confusion over its next path. General Obasanjo was let out of prison and the military leaders then convinced and selected him as a consensus presidential candidate to run for election in a 4th iteration of return to civil governance. The leaders within and outside of government saw him as a healer who would unite the Yoruba nation, whose son had been denied the presidency and left to die in jail, with the rest of the country. Obasanjo practically had an easy ride to his first term as a civilian President of Nigeria.
We can all recall that since 1959, every election result had been contested in parliament, in the streets, and in the courts. Who can forget the famous 12 2/3 (twelve two-third) case of 1979. By 1999 we had a full-blown judicial arm in the governance trifecta known as Election Tribunals. These tribunals were set up to adjudicate all electoral complaints in accordance with the electoral acts of the day and the Constitution. Lawyers and law firms began to specialize in election malpractice cases. It was a thriving business, and it still is to this day. But Obasanjo’s first term election was one that generated little rancor.
Fast forwards to 2003, Nigerian politicians were back at their nefarious bests. Vote suppression, voter intimidation, ballot box stuffing or snatching, multiple thumb printing, arson, murder, general brigandage became electoral acts that were taken to brazen new heights. In places, elections were producing results in excess of registered voters. The people have been witnesses to these acts. Yet miraculously the tribunals always found mysterious ways to uphold the elections at the centre as free and fair. And whatever governing that was in power at the centre controlled the outcome of these tribunal judgements to also guarantee positive outcomes for the party in the states. The politicians gleefully called this the ‘Bandwagon Effect’.
The task of running elections in the country is the responsibility of the body of government employees called the Independent National Electoral Commission. The functions of the Commission include;
- Registration of voters
- Production of voters’ register, update and revision of same
- Production of election materials such as ballot papers
- Production of Electoral Acts
- Registration and validation of candidates
- Conduction of elections in accordance with the laws
- Declaration of results
The Commission is run by a Chairman who is appointed by the President to a term of 5 years in the first instance. From the above listed responsibilities, it is clear that the Electoral Commission owes it as a duty always to conduct credible elections. Such conducts must be seen to be credible, that is transparently credible. The June 12, 1993, election that MKO Abiola won was adjudged as the most free and fair election ever held in this Country. This was because Prof. Nwosu’s Option A4 that was the method used called for the queuing up of voters in front of the polling booths of their candidates. The votes cast must correspond to the number of people in the queue. Then results were entered in the relevant documents, signed and sealed for dispatch to collation centres. There was no falsification of documents, nor ballot snatching or stuffing of ballot boxes. Security agents were alert to their duties.
There have not been any elections since 1993 that went unchallenged at all levels. Remember that INEC has the overarching responsibility to produce credible elections. Regrettably, INEC has failed repeatedly in this task at every election.
In 1993 when the June 12 election was nullified, the population of Nigeria was estimated at around 100 million. Fast forwards to the present day with an estimated population of almost 233 million. In 2023, the total number of registered voters was around 96.3 million, about the total population in 1990. With this fact at their disposal, the knowledge and the enumeration of available infrastructure with their challenges, the digital age that rule the 21st Century, the history of ballots snatching, and ballot box stuffing, how can anyone be designing elections with open plastic ballot boxes? How can anyone demand that voters first queue to get accredited then queue again to cast their votes? Knowing what we know about falsification of results, how can anyone design a system that encourages the use of manual collation that encourages nefarious acts like mutilation of results or validation of unauthenticated results? How can anyone design mobile voting machines that can fit into a school bag in Nigeria where snatching of ballot boxes is as easy as snatching a rugby ball?
