By Charles Okoh
“I cannot
say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must
change if they are to get better.” – Georg C.
Lichtenburg
It is no longer debatable that the only problem keeping this nation down is the problem of fixing the governance jigsaw. We have been held down by the fact that rather than a democracy where the wishes of the people reign supreme; we have practiced neo-feudalism where a few people lord it over the rest of us and dictate who gets what or into any office in the land.
This has never been as bad and brazen since independence as they
have been since the turn of the fourth republic in 1999.The result being that
there has been a steady and ever-increasing level of apathy towards elections
in the country.
For instance, in the 2019 presidential elections that secured President Muhammadu Buhari, his second term, only 34.75 percent of registered voters actually voted in elections, according data released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
The percentage represents 28,614,190 people who cast their votes
during the elections.
This is 0.91 percent less than the total number of accredited
voters who make up a total 35.66 per cent (29,364,209) of total registered
voters.
The data further showed that
just 33.18 percent (27,324,583) of the 82,344,107 registered voters were valid
votes that led to the final decision.
President Buhari polled 55.6 per cent or 15,191,847 votes of the
total votes cast to win, leaving his rival, Atiku Abubakar, with 41.22 per cent
or 11,262,978 votes.
The reason for the increasing voter apathy is not far-fetched.
The people simply do not believe that the exercise was worth the trouble,
because for many the outcome of these elections are usually pre-determined and
the process eventually rail-roaded to fulfill that script.
Behind this public façade called elections are selection
processes by some powerful individuals, who some have come to call the real
owners of Nigeria.
Between when the public exercises take place and when the
outcomes of the polls are read to the people, a lot of water would have gone
under the proverbial bridge. And so when these selected leaders emerge,
they clearly do not owe their allegiance to the people but to the almighty
godfather who pulled the strings and of course only to this individual’s tune
as Piper would the elected official dance to.
Again, in this whole charade all democratic structures that as
institutions should have saved the process have been compromised and therefore
complicit. From the electoral body, INEC, to the police, to the judiciary, to
the legislature all are willing partners and co-participants in the rot, while
the society is left to suffer for it.
The past week was indeed filled with some activities that would
have naturally attracted the interests of yours sincerely. Tuesday’s flagoff of
the first crude oil drilling project in northern Nigeria, on the boundary of
Bauchi and Gombe States, should have been something to be joyous about, but
given that our discovery of the blackgold has seen us leave our thinking cap as
a nation behind, you cannot but be cynical if this too will not further entrench
what academics have now come to call resource curse; which is our seeming
proclivity to fritter away resources, which some other societies, have used to
build their economies and better the lots of their people.
As the nation celebrates this find, we hope that we would have
learnt not to repeat the tragedy of the Niger Delta region.
Then, a day after, Wednesday precisely, President Buhari
unveiled the new notes of the three highest denominations of the Nigerian
currency: N200, N500 and N1,000.
Speaking at the event, the Governor of the Central Bank of
Nigeria, (CBN) Godwin Emefiele, said the introduction of new notes was a
deliberate step by the government to check corruption and counterfeiting of the
notes.
Emefiele had earlier said in October that N2.73 trillion of the
total N3.23 trillion currency in circulation remained outside the country’s
banking system, making it difficult for monetary policies to be effective.
“In view of the prevailing level of security situation in
the country, the CBN is convinced that the incidents of terrorism and
kidnapping would be minimized as access to the large volume of money outside
the banking system used as source of funds for ransom payments will begin to
dry up,” he said.
How this dream of Emefiele would be achieved is left to be seen
because one undeniable fact is that it is the same people who are within the
sphere of government and regulatory agencies that mostly scuttle these monetary
policies. The CBN would be dead to its responsibilities not to know that.
Important as these two activities are they do not come close to
being as important as the comment by the National Chairman of the ruling All
Progressives Congress, Senator Abdullahi Adamu, who in his usual devil-may-care
attitude and with no regards to public sensibilities kicked against the planned
decision of INEC to deploy the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System BVAS and the
INEC Results Viewing Portal IReV, saying Nigeria is not ripe for the use of
such technology.
That outburst by Adamu must not be taken lightly. It represents
a threat to democracy. And to that extent, Adamu and members of his party who
share that position are enemies of our democracy.
The reason the 2023 elections have drawn more attention and
raised a flurry of awareness among the otherwise docile electorate is no other
reason than the planned deployment of technology to reduce the level of human
interference in the process. Therefore, for anybody to seek and question the
wisdom behind this move is to attract the ire of the Nigerian masses who were
able, against the wish of the status quo, to achieve this feat through the
signing into law of the Electoral Act 2022. This more than any reason, is the
reason I consider that goof by Adamu as the most important issue of the past
week; because as we said earlier poor leadership remains our bane.
Adamu in his wisdom, while receiving a delegation from the
Commonwealth Election Observation Mission, said; “First, I was privileged to
serve as a senator. Our concern is how ready are we to deploy some of these
technologies as regards transmission because we are taking a major step in
transmitting election results in real time.
“To transmit results, every part of the nation Nigeria I’m not
sure that the network covers it, I know that even in parts of Abuja there
is no network and we have from now till February when in substantial parts of
the country there is no electricity.
“INEC must assure us 100 percent that as at when due in
transmitting results they are ready because they spoke about recharging batteries
but we had in previous elections when it says it can’t recharge”.
When you realize that it is only the ruling party that has
continued to resist the deployment of technology, and when you hear the lame
excuses of lack of connectivity and electricity across the country, you may be
deceived into thinking it is only the supporters and members of APC who live in
those inaccessible areas. The reason is simply because they want the status quo
and scenario we painted earlier in this piece to remain so they can continue to
manipulate the fraudulent process called elections.
Although the party made a volte face the following day,
Thursday, to say they are not opposed to the deployment of these technologies,
but we know better.
We are at the threshold of making history as a nation, and we
must achieve that, any attempt to scuttle this process would not only be
resisted but would be totally opposed. Enough of the shenanigans called
elections or is it selection, we want to be counted as part of the evolving
world where technology is being adopted to facilitate and ease the activities
of man.
And like Lichtenburg said, we cannot say whether things will get
better if we change; what we can say is they must change if they are to get
better. For Adamu and his cohort by 2027, this nation must embrace electronic
and diaspora voting. That is where the rest of the world is headed.
*Okoh is a commentator on public issues
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