10 Things to Note About Nigeria’s 2015 Presidential Election
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Jide Akintunde
1. President Jonathan’s statesmanship and Nigeria’s propensity to surprise the world: It is the nature of politics and governance: one major event often defines the outcome of an election or public perception of a regime. Therefore, the most remarkable outcome of Nigeria’s 2015 presidential election is that President Goodluck Jonathan conceded defeat to General Muhammadu Buhari in a very timely fashion. This good sportsmanship of President Jonathan immediately conferred statesmanship on him. His presidency will be remembered for nothing better or worse because what he delivered is what was mostly important to Nigeria, Nigerians and the world: peaceful outcome of the election.
That the one who fostered electoral best practice became its major victim is an irony; but it is not a cruel irony. It is what has earned President Jonathan greatness. If he had been the beneficiary of his efforts which made the elections that held during his presidency far more credible than all the previous elections in the history of independent Nigeria, the positive shift he has now given Nigerian elections would not have been very obvious, significant and pace-setting. Indeed, we could not have missed the sacrifice of President Jonathan in this election. On national television stations, we saw the President wait on his feet for a fruitless over 30 minutes for INEC’s card readers to accredit him, his wife and mother. He endured the harrowing and provocative experience with equanimity. Whatever frustration he felt, he completely controlled it, urging Nigerians to keep faith with INEC and with the election. In subsequent statements, he refused to speculate on the result or pre-empt whatever decision INEC would take or not take. Thus, Nigerians who wanted a peaceful election saw the worthy example of the President.
President Jonathan has enacted, once again, the enigmatic capacity of Nigerians to spring positive surprises on the world. Indeed, we don’t see where else the world is going to get a better pleasant surprise this year than this which came out of Nigeria and saved over 170 million people the agony of post-election crisis.
2. The resilience of the President-elect, Nigeria’s political arrangement and that of the economy: One of the significances of the 2015 presidential election is the resilience of General Muhammadu Buhari, the President-elect. He is now fourth time lucky, having contested and lost the previous three presidential elections. His presidential ambition and candidacy were thought to be dead and buried. We also see the manifestation of the often-overlooked resilience of the Nigerian political arrangement in the action of President Jonathan to defuse the tension of this election by conceding defeat in a timely manner.
Buhari won the election by cleaning up the Northern votes and by clinching majority votes in the South-west for the first time – when he ran not as a lone ranger and not merely as the champion of the political North. However, his lack of electoral support in the South-east and South-south means his immediate challenge is to close ranks with the politicians and people of these two geopolitical zones. His next challenge is how to deliver very quickly on the more realistic promises he made during his campaign. But using current threshold of oil prices as an indicator, Nigerians will have to be patient with Buhari. He will at best be slow to reverse the sliding fiscal trend; but he will surely have his period of opportunity to improve fiscal conditions as oil prices will definitely experience a significant period of rally over the next four years in line with the global economic cycle. Before then, the resilience of the Nigerian economy would be put to severe tests; more so, if the financiers of the All Progressives Congress (APC) campaign are impatient to recoup their “investment” in the election with profit.
3. Biometric authentication as a risky experiment: A pollster characterised the use of biometric authentication of voters in this election as testing the depth of a river with both legs. The biometric system recorded spectacular failures. It failed to accredit President Jonathan and the First Lady. It failed in enough places to throw the election into disarray. Once the biometric card readers began to fail in several polling units, there was nothing INEC’s polling officers did that reflected useful lessons learnt from pre-voting testing of the card readers, which INEC putatively carried out across the six geopolitical zones. It was a trial-and-error process – reportedly led by the intuitions of the voters – that led to measures which improved recognition of finger prints by the biometric fingerprint scanners. Although the intuitive simple solutions that worked included removing the foil covering the surface of the glass on which the fingers are placed on the scanner and washing of hands before the fingers are scanned, it was the commitment of voters to the good conduct of the election that saved the day and INEC’s blushes on introduction of a hifalutin technology.
4. Lopsided use of technology: The U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria James F. Entwistle humoured the INEC by saying the Permanent Voter’s Card (PVC) embeds superior technology than the one used in making the voters card in his home state of Virginia. However, the higher level technology used in producing the Nigerian PVC and the use of biometrics for the accreditation of voters were not matched with the collation process. Votes were being manually sorted; in one case shown on TV, a manual calculator was seen being used by INEC officials in calculating the votes. At its collation centre in Abuja, INEC could not display on an electronic board for viewers around the world to see the tally of results of the election as they were being announced. Instead, it decided to make a show of some professors verbally announcing the results when they probably should be busy in the classrooms or with research activities. Inadequate use of technology in collating the results contributed to the longer time it took to announce the final results partly because all the Collation officers from the 36 states had to physically transport the elections sheets to Abuja.
5. Bruises for the larger apathetic electorate but kudos to the voters: This election has instructed for the umpteenth time that wishes are not horses. As a member of the electorate, it is not enough to have a favourite candidate at an election. You have to vote for your favourite candidate for him or her to win the election. The level of voters’ apathy for this election was quite high. Fewer people voted in the pivotal 2015 presidential election than in 2011, although Nigeria has a growing population. The shenanigans of INEC with the production and distribution of the PVC does not fully explain away the fact that a lot of people who should vote (because they are interested in who wins the election) did not vote. Therefore, those who voted and those who didn’t vote may have contributed in their opposite ways to the victory of the President-elect, General Muhammadu Buhari.
However, kudos must be given to the voters. Nigerians grew impatient in the last weeks to the election; we wanted it to be over and done with. But as it turned out, the voters actually wanted more than having the election anyhow. The voters wanted a credible election and they were very ready to contribute to making it happen. They endured the late arrival of INEC’s officials at the polling units. Some voters reportedly had to help some INEC officials to manage the situation when they saw more voters than they had expected turn out at the poling units. (INEC stands accused of having deliberately underestimated the resolve of Nigerians to participate at this election. After all, INEC wanted to proceed with the election at the initial February 14th date when, by national average, just about 60 percent of the PVCs had been distributed.) Generally, the conduct of the voters was peaceful. They helped a great deal in realising the objective of President Jonathan to make this election peaceful, free and fair.
6. It was heartening to see the IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) interested in voting: Part of the enthusiastic voters were the IDPs – Nigerians who have had to flee their homes, villages and towns in the wake of the attacks by Boko Haram insurgents in North-eastern Nigeria. By voting, and going by the patterns of results we saw from the North-east, the IDPs expressed strong interest in the country and belief that a new leadership would better address their situations, instead of displaying hopelessness and apathy towards the Nigerian state. This advises Nigerians everywhere to be steadfast in hope that the country will provide the succour they need. Nigerians should also rely on the assured hope that they can regularly elect the leaders they perceive will serve their interests.
Some of the IDPs reportedly had to vote under extraordinary processes involving walking very long distances to the nearest polling units and then being confronted by INEC’s unreliable voting system. But happily, in the process of voting at this election, some of the IDPs met their loved ones for the first time after several months (or a few years) of separation.
7. Thumbs down to alarmist APC campaign strategy: The campaign strategy of the APC was alarmist. It generated much of the fear factor in this election. In the end, the APC won the presidential election by about 2.6 million votes. That is a very narrow margin to predict. It is nothing that should have led the party to create the impression that it was always going to win the election and that it was only going to accept nothing but victory. At different junctures, the APC accused the governing People’s Democratic Party of plans to scuttle the election. This was always implausible and contrary to knowledge; the PDP has no antecedents of scuttling elections. Moreover, elections had become more credible under President Jonathan.
The style and substance of the APC campaign was alarmist all the way. Even soon after he voted, General Muhammadu Buhari said he would not accept the cancellation of the election despite the fact that statutorily, INEC can cancel an election. In any case, while Buhari was making that statement, some senior APC members were calling for cancellation of the polls in Rivers State and Bayelsa State even as many APC leaders continued to make pre-emptive alarmist statements after the election as they did before it.
As the governing party-in-waiting, the APC has to repudiate the kind of campaign of fear it prosecuted in this election. As part of its needed internal reforms, the party must discourage such campaign strategy from becoming a template for winning subsequent elections. General Buhari as President should seek to improve the electoral system by ensuring that Nigerians are not directly or indirectly threatened by the campaign of any political party. That Nigerians had to desert the streets of Lagos and Abuja in the three days after the election tells the extent to which we felt threatened.
8. We should not overlook the violence-quotient of the election: The climax of this election was when news filtered to town that President Goodluck Jonathan had conceded defeat in a call he made to the President-elect, General Muhammadu Buhari. It automatically defused the tension in the atmosphere and allayed fears of any major violent reactions to the news of the defeat of either of the two major candidates. As we heave a sigh of relieve, it is still important to note that certain acts of violence and improper conducts were committed during the election and in the course of announcing the results. The major one was the attempt by a former Minister, Peter Godsday Orubebe, to disrupt the proceedings at INEC’s Collation Centre. We have had people commend the INEC Chairman Prof Attahiru Jega for a very mature way he handled the outburst of Orubebe before local and international TV audience. That is beside the point. He should have been taken away by the security operatives to face appropriate sanctions. Even now that he has apologised, his action should not go without the sanctions of relevant laws.
We still managed to record cases of “minor” violence during this election. Again, the incoming-president should seek to completely remove impunity from electoral offences and election-related violence. In this regard, General Buhari needs to start an early work in re-orientating his grassroots supporters in the North who spontaneously started killing perceived opponents of their man when the news came that he had lost in 2011. The safe assumption was that the rampaging fellow-countrymen Almajiris would have reacted the same way had General Buhari lost this election. To address the nuisances of the politicians and their threat to public safety, I believe the aspect of the Uwais Commission report which recommends banning of politicians who engaged in electoral malpractices should be either implemented or used to strength existing legislations which must now have bite. Also, the security agents must carry out extensive mop up of illegal arms in the system. The cost of doing this cannot exceed the heavy financial losses the country suffered on account of perception of political risk in Nigeria over the last couple of months.
9. We need to learn what it means to say that a state agency is “independent”: There needs to be some emphasis on what it means to say some agencies of the State are independent. This is important both in terms of affirming the independence as well as understanding its limits, especially because Nigerian agencies with statutory functional and institutional independence lack long-term experience in operating as such. For example, Lamido Sanusi became governor of Central Bank of Nigeria within two years of the passage of the CBN Act 2007, which grants independence to the central bank. In sum, independence of a central bank is construed by economists as a protection of the executives from the harmful effect of conducting monetary policy to achieve short-term political goals as opposed to achieving long-term goal of monetary stability. However, Sanusi exercised his independence as CBN governor by awarding contracts to opposition politicians without due process and squabbling with the executives on issues that did not border on independence of the CBN in the conduct of monetary policy.
Similarly, INEC has seemingly misunderstood what it means for it to be an independent electoral body. That INEC is independent does not mean its plan for conducting an election is not amenable to security consideration as might be advised by the state security agencies. Also, INEC is not supposed to undermine the very purpose of its independence – conducting credible elections – by introducing a technology that, in effect, disenfranchises significant part of the electorate, and nobody can advise it on the inauspicious deployment of such technology. To say the least, INEC has asserted its independence in the conduct of this election to the extent that it almost jeopardised it (the election), except for the careful intervention of President Goodluck Jonathan who was at pains not to rock the boat and well-meaning voters who were patient enough to wait for the new election dates and also use the opportunity to collect their PVCs.
10. INEC’s tardiness must not go unnoticed and hopefully corrected in the future: By making a spectacle of the announcement of the result, we saw a lot of tardiness about the INEC and the Chairman. At the press conference Prof. Jega addressed in the evening of Sunday, March 29th, at its media centre in Abuja, he came across as grossly unprepared for the event. He issued no analytical statements on any aspect of the conduct and emerging outcomes of the election. He, therefore, had to spend inordinately lengthy time answering speculative questions from the journalists present, issuing repeatedly the tired expression: “we are investigating it.” INEC did not recover from the hacking of its website sufficiently enough to use it to publish the results. It had to rely on Twitter and Facebook. In three days, INEC delayed its scheduled public announcement of the results several times by hours.
Announcing the results of the election state-by-state on television does not mean INEC’s procedures and processes are foolproof. The point is that the way INEC came across in the course of collating and announcing the results showed how much it needs to modernise its administrative procedures.
Conclusion
INEC cannot tell the public specifically what the value of using biometric authentication of voters has been for this election. The usefulness of biometric authentication of voters is in its ability to detect if a valid PVC has been presented for voting by someone other than whom it was issued. Unfortunately, INEC cannot tell us how this purpose was served empirically. This knowledge was compromised by INEC’s initial plan for the use of the Incident Forms to accredit voters who failed biometric authentication. INEC later admitted wildcard use of manual accreditation after large-scale failure of its card readers. Therefore, at best, INEC can only speculate that information about the deployment of the system prevented would-be offenders from going ahead with their nefarious plans. But this does not help in knowing the actual value of biometric authentication to this election in terms of preventing multiple voting or impersonation of voters. This should be sobering for INEC as the Commission may have wasted public funds in procuring unnecessary technology. Nigerians should therefore ensure that future elections are cost-effective and the technology used should not play out to almost jeopardise the election. Therefore, INEC is the villain of the March election.