By Jideofor Adibe
Elections everywhere tend to be divisive. This is because mobilisation of support hinges on a successful creation of a simplistic binary of ‘we-versus-them’ dichotomy, which is then nourished by all manner of scaremongering. This is why political campaigns are often likened to wars without weapons.
In Africa, it is even more so where politicians seem to have taken literally the exultations by Kwame Nkrumah, a pioneering pan-Africanist and Ghana’s independence leader (1957-1966), to seek first the political kingdom and everything else would be added unto them. In Africa, the allure of political office is exceedingly high. Apart from being perhaps the quickest means to personal material accumulation, there is a pervasive fear that the group that captures state power could use it to privilege its in-group and disadvantage others.
For these, electoral competitions tend to be
especially anarchic, deepening existing fault lines and even creating new ones.
In countries like ours where the basis of nationhood remains highly contested,
and where several groups have institutionalised memories of hurt, electoral
contests often re-open old wounds that raise doubts about the basis of
togetherness. This, therefore, makes it imperative that the task of healing and
reconciliation is prioritised after each election.
After a
very shambolically organised presidential election that, on the positive side,
witnessed some upsets across several states of the federation, the governors,
who reign like emperors in their respective states, seemed to have quickly
returned to the drawing board. By the time the Governorship and State Assembly
elections were held on March 18, 2023, they had regained the initiative. It
quickly dawned on many people that we were too quick in ascribing a game
changer status to the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS.
In several states across the country, there
were snatching of ballot boxes by thugs, alteration of figures recorded at the
polling units, voter suppression and intimidation and the weaponisation of
ethnicity, especially in Lagos State, the home base of the presidential
candidate of the APC, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who lost the state to the Labour Party
candidate, Peter Obi, to the chagrin of his supporters.
Amid the escalating tensions and profiling and
even physical attacks on Igbos and the torching of markets where they dominate
in Lagos, came a video purported to be a phone conversation between the
presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi and Bishop Oyedepo,
founder of the Living Faith Church Worldwide, in which Obi was heard repeatedly
calling the Pastor ‘Daddy’ and claiming that the election was going to be a
“religious war”.
Though Peter Obi has denied the authenticity
of the audio clip, and some have raised questions about what it portends for
our privacy laws, the Tinubu camp, like any political party would do, decided
to reap political capital out of it.
Amid the tensions came the allegations from the Tinubu camp that some people were plotting to foist an interim government on the country.
Surprisingly, the DSS chose to amplify this by corroborating what was apparently a mere political grandstanding. Lost in the politics of it all, is that even if people actually canvassed for an interim government it would be an expression of opinion which is not a crime under our laws. It was the American jurist Wendell Holmes who declared in a famous judgement, (Gitlow v New York, 1925) that: “Every idea is an incitement…
The only difference
between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is
the speaker’s enthusiasm for the results”. In essence you cannot criminalise an
opinion because an opinion becomes an incitement only when urgent steps are
taken to actualise what was opined. For interim government, not only is it not
in our Constitution, such a contraption cannot happen without the active
connivance of the President and the national legislature. So what was the basis
of trying to frame some people for allegedly ‘plotting’ to install an interim
government?
To further escalate the tension, the Minister
of Culture and Tourism, Alhaji Lai Mohammed travelled to New York to accuse
Peter Obi and his running mate, Dr. Datti Baba Ahmed, of committing
treason by allegedly inciting people to violence over the outcome of the
presidential election. He was not specific on which action of the two
constituted an incitement or treasonable felony.
In that posturing he conveniently forgot that
the APC had threatened to form a parallel government in exile if the 2015
presidential election was rigged or that as a candidate Buhari made worse
remarks than he was accusing Obi and his running mate of doing. Lai Mohammed’s
US trip only added to the prevailing tension as it led to a more aggressive
pushback by supporters of Peter Obi and his running mate.
Recently, Nigeria’s two most renowned living
writers – Professor Wole Soyinka and Ngozi Chimamanda Adichie – got into the
fray, apparently on opposite sides of the divide. While Chimamanda wrote an
open letter to President Joe Biden urging him not to congratulate Tinubu who
was declared the President-elect by INEC as that would confer legitimacy on an
election she thought was rigged, the Nobel Laureate picked on both the Obidient
Movement and Dr. Datti Baba Ahmed, describing them as ‘fascists’.
With the involvement of Soyinka and Chimamanda
whose voices re-echo powerfully on the international arena, we await how their
conflicting interventions will shape the responses from the international
community. It is obvious that many people are getting fatigued by the elections
and their aftermaths and would like the country to find a way of moving on. I,
however, don’t think it would be wise to just move on – as we are wont to do in
situations like this. I feel that we must seek to understand what
happened, give justice to victims of what happened and punish those who helped
to sabotage the processes.
I would recommend the following steps to douse
the tension in the short term: One, Buhari should try to be a statesman rather
than giving the impression that he has been blackmailed by his party into
handing organs of the state to them to use for incumbency advantages. The DSS’s
corroboration of the furore over calls for interim government was an unhelpful
partisanship. Two, the government should suspend or sack INEC Chairman
Professor Yakubu immediately. Not only did he over- promise but grossly
under-performed, Rotimi Amaechi, the former Transport Minister, had also
reportedly alleged that he was foisted as INEC chairman by forces loyal to the
Tinubu camp.
That allegation, to the best of my knowledge,
has not been denied. Three, government should bring immediately to book all who
were involved in electoral offences and ethnic profiling across the
country to signal that bad behaviour has consequences. Four, there should be
speedy, if possible televised, trial of the petitions against the declaration
of Tinubu as President-elect. Five, the leaders of the three leading political
parties can be persuaded to rein in their rambunctious spokespersons.
*Adibe, a professor of political science, is a commentator on public issues
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