Nigerian Presidential Election

The Win-Win Outcome! 
By Asonganyi Tazoacha in Yaounde
Democracy is a gradual and laborious process of working out in human interactions, how to reconcile those elements of human thought and behavior which are hardest to reconcile. Elections are usually at the centre of the transformative politics of democratic society because they allow the people to control the steering wheel of society. Elections may be some of the most passionate issues in which humans usually engage in apparently irreconcilable factions, but very few societies can be sustained without them.
    Even political giants like Mahamat Ghandi distrusted elections, mainly because of the unfulfilled promises of those who campaign for votes, but also because of electoral fraud, epitomized by Joseph Stalin’s saying that it is those who count the votes that decide an election, not the people who cast the votes! Yet, when these passions are overlaid on a political culture that sees elections as a necessary “evil” for the transformation of society, they can be easily transcended for the good of society.
    The recent presidential election in Nigeria has brought to the fore the intensity of the passions of factions, and the beauty of the human capacity to transcend them and bow to the will of the people. Because our African environment is strewn with sit-tight presidents, most against the will of the people, the capacity of Nigerians to transcend their passions and allow the people’s will to prevail, has thrust Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari onto the stage as both winners in the court of democracy. This time around, Joseph Stalin was proved wrong.

    Nigeria the giant of Africa has stepped forward and is turning round and round for each person to take the snapshot they may like to retain about their feat. As one who observed the 2011 election in which Jonathan scored 22.4 million votes to Buhari’s 12.2 million, who followed closely the buildup to the recent election because of my regular visits to Nigeria as visiting professor, and who has great interest in elections in Cameroon, I here highlight a few interesting issues.
    The main innovation in the Nigerian elections was voter registration and the conduct of the vote at polling stations. People may be interested to know why the combined vote of Jonathan/Buhari in 2011 was 34.6 million while it is just 28.2 million today. Like the Cameroon electoral system, the Nigerian system of 2011 used the biometric system to register voters and issue voters’ cards. To exclude double/multiple registration, the Nigerian system used the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) to weed out names, so the system had only single registrations. But that is not enough!
    Although indelible ink is usually used to identify voters on polling day, it is not a secure tool because some poor or dishonest election commissions make do with counterfeit ink or even ordinary stamp pads to “monitor” the voting process. Further, at the end of polling day, there is usually no way of checking the signatures or fingerprints put by voters against their names to indicate their participation. This means that dishonest election officials can thumb print or sign against the names of as many absent voters as they wish, depending on “consensus” among the agents. In the repressive context in Cameroon, and the serious north-south divide in Nigeria, such arrangements are easy.
    It is to prevent such manipulations that this time around, the Independent National Election Commission (INEC) introduced the voter card reader. The commission recalled all the cards issued in 2011 and replaced them with permanent voter cards (PVC) which have barcodes and fingerprints of the voters, readable by an electronic card reader. The PVCs are similar to the permanent cards Elections Cameroon (ELECAM) issued to Cameroon voters although card readers were not used.
    And so the success of the Nigerian election was due in large measure to the card readers: only the registered voter could vote because the card reader must confirm your fingerprint when you arrive at the polling station. The apparent “low turnout” in the Nigerian election was due to the impossibility of using the list of registered voters in polling stations to inflate the number of votes cast at the end of the day. Of course, human weakness and factional passions can still lead to the manipulation of the number of votes cast for each candidate; this can only be prevented by card readers that also allow electronic voting. With the introduction of the card reader, the possibility of having 100% registered voters voting 100% for a candidate as is usually the case in some places in the South region of Cameroon is near nil.
    INEC is very different from ELECAM because it is a creation of the constitution of Nigeria; ELECAM was created by a law which has loopholes that allow the administration and the presidency to influence the commission. The chief electoral officer in Nigeria is the head of INEC unlike in ELECAM where the chief electoral officer is the so-called director general of elections who is the secretary of the commission; the supposed “head” of the commission is always the loser in a tussle with the DG! Further, INEC seems to have come to terms with the fact that technology can only solve our problems if we are disciplined, have the will, and take personal responsibility for it. INEC has integrated information systems into key stages to allow operations likely to be contentious to be carried out by information that can be verified and controlled, rather than by people.
    In 2011, I observed the national assembly elections in Gombe state and the presidential election in Cross River state, so I lived firsthand the north-south divide in Nigeria on election issues along PDP/CPC lines at that time. Because of the serious divide, Buhari would never have beaten Jonathan except through making inroads into the south. He had already contested presidential elections three times and lost. Before the 2011 presidential election, the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) of Muhammadu Buhari and the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) of Bola Ahmed Tinubu tried to enter into an eleventh hour agreement to present a common candidate, but finally did not reach an agreement.
    Immediately following that election which Jonathan won, they continued their discussions towards the same goal for the 2015 presidential election. In February 2013, the CPC, ACN and the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) dissolved their parties into a new party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) which presented the candidature of Buhari. The ACN was like a mutant of the Action Group of the venerable Obafemi Awolowo which has controlled politics in south-west Nigeria for a long time. The governor of Lagos state and many other states in the south-west were ACN. Small wonder that Buhari got the inroads he needed to add necessary votes to his northern block of votes, and easily won.
    The win-win outcome of the recent presidential election in Nigeria has added a lot of value to Nigerian democracy. In fact, it can be said that Jonathan added more weight to the Nigerian political character than he would have done in four years if he won another presidential term. As Cameroonians ponder on the lessons to be learned from there, we should remember that in 1959, E.M.L. Endeley, first premier of Southern Cameroons, took the road that Jonathan has just taken. He called and congratulated J. N. Foncha when the opposition KNDP party beat his governing coalition in the general election. That DNA is still in the Cameroon character. All we need to do is clone and use it!