Moses:
Three additional comments to what is already comprehensive:
- Is "rigging" not part of the election variable in most parts of the world? It is the name we call it that is different. In the US, they call it "voter suppression". The ability to win an election must factor in rigging at two levels:
Master the art of rigging
And/or
Prevent your opponent from rigging you out. Saying "I am rigged out," does not work in competitive politics. Politics is not a game of morality or emotions.
It is depressing, but this is what shall continue to happen.
- In many so-called democracies, the choice is usually not between two good people, but two bad people. What this does is to produce a low voter turnout, as in the case of Nigeria—both Atiku and Tinubu are bad, and Obi is just a little different—he was a party insider in the PDP! Thus, the mass withdrawal, as you will see when Trump runs next year: should I vote for a bad Trump or a Biden who is in the entrance to heaven? And in the unlikely event that a third party emerges (always difficult in the US because only a super-rich person can do this), Trump is most likely to win.
- But the biggest challenge is not even the previous, but about governance. We are still not sure who can generate governance, as this is disconnected from character. Terrible characters like Mussolini and Hitler generated governance and one generated genocide in addition. In the case of Nigeria, today, if Jesus Christ is the President and Prophet Mohammad is the Vice-President, the structure and corruption will not produce governance that will move the country forward.
TF
From: 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday, September 9, 2023 at 3:00 AM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Preliminary Reflections on the PEPT Judgment and the 2023 Presidential Election
Outstanding write-up. The analysis is right on the money. I have nothing (or know nothing) to add to it. Thanks, Moses!
MOA
On Saturday, September 9, 2023, 01:11:07 AM GMT+1, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
Preliminary Reflections on the PEPT Judgment and the 2023 Presidential Election
By Moses E. Ochonu
The February 2023 presidential election looked like Atiku's to lose but through a combination of an inexplicable sense of entitlement and inevitability, he 1) mismanaged the conflict in his traditional PDP camp and allowed it to splinter, and 2) allowed Peter Obi, his former running mate, to walk away from the PDP fold, taking with him the traditional PDP strongholds of the Southeast and South-south and the Northern Christian zones.
Those inexplicable miscalculations sealed Atiku's electoral fate. I will never understand how he and his people couldn't see that these two factors were near-fatal blows, and how, instead of tackling or mitigating them, he continued to campaign confidently afterwards as though he could see things that the rest of us couldn't.
As for Obi, he had no viable path to the presidency and every objective analyst could see that. His role and goal were to disrupt the familiar and uninspiring two-party configuration and to catalyze enthusiasm and youth engagement. Judged on those metrics, he was a highly successful disruptor who punched way above his weight in the last election. But the electoral math was always against him as he had no presence or support in the vote-rich Northwest and Northeast.
We knew he could win more states than the other candidates, but winning more states does not give you the presidency under Nigeria's electoral rules. Winning more votes and securing the required 25 percent spread are the two criteria. There was no way he could do that.
I was one of those who thought Atiku could beat Tinubu big in the Northwest and Northeast, but he didn't. The Muslim-Muslim ticket and a last-minute Northern political and religious consensus proved decisive as a bulwark against Atiku. Even though, overall, he won the two zones of Northwest and Northeast, he did so by a hair, and his wins in some states there were not nearly enough to score a knockout over Tinubu, who kept it close by scoring big margins in APC strongholds in those two zones and in the Southwest and parts of Northcentral, while keeping Atiku's win margins small.
Atiku, moreover, essentially surrendered Kano, where Tinubu secured hundreds of thousands of valuable votes to increase his national tally. Atiku also predictably had trouble gaining the constitutionally required spread, largely due to the Obi factor.
In the end, it was the Tinubu people who read the electoral map accurately and planned for it accordingly. They focused on:
1. Securing significant vote numbers even in states they knew they would lose, to deny their opponents win margins that the opponents might not be able to make up in Tinubu's strongholds, where his people, by legitimate and crooked means, went on to amass big win margins.
2. Gaining the required 25 percent. They did this by trying to use every means they could, including rigging in unlikely places where they had APC governors, such as Cross River, Imo, Ebonyi, Nasarawa, and Plateau. Wike was supposed to give Tinubu 25 percent in Rivers through his famed rigging machine but got carried away, determined to stick it to Atiku and impress Tinubu.
Premium Times and other media platforms analyzed the results uploaded to the I-Rev server after the fact and recorded on BVAS and found numerous discrepancies between INEC-declared results and results uploaded on its server for multiple states.
Notable among their findings was that 1) Obi won by a bigger margin in Lagos than what was announced, 2) Obi and not Tinubu won Benue, though it was close, and 3) Rivers was actually Obi's landslide, not a Tinubu's win. Nonetheless, even if you change these three states, Obi still doesn't come to Tinubu in total votes, nor does he overcome his 25 percent spread problem.
Other independent analyses of uploaded results found that in Southern states like Ebonyi, Imo and Cross River, states with APC governors, Tinubu's actual votes were well under the numbers credited to him by the declared results for those states. But the consensus is that even without the doctored numbers from these states, Tinubu might still have either met the two-third votes in two-third of states constitutional requirement or go into a run-off as a slight favorite on the back of his performance in the first round.
I personally think that Atiku would have been a slight favorite if it gone to a runoff as a two-man contest since most of Peter Obi's votes and states would have gone to him. And that was why the APC dreaded a runoff and rigged, manipulated, and engaged in other shenanigans to win in the first ballot and avoid a runoff.
The Logic of Plausibility and Possibility
Elections in Nigeria since 2003 have been won on the two interrelated premises of plausibility and possibility and not on the absence of rigging, manipulation, and other shenanigans or on the premise of free and fair voting and accurate vote totals. The two deterministic premises can be restated as questions:
1. Could/would the person declared winner have won in a free and fair contest?
2. Did the declared outcome broadly and roughly mirror or align with the will of the Nigerian people, given the alliances that preceded the election?
Whenever the answer to these two questions is a "yes" or a strong "maybe," the election's outcome is accepted as being well within the margin of expectation and accorded pragmatic, de facto, even if reluctant, credibility.
Nigeria's presidential elections are fairly easy to predict, given the alliances that precede them and the ethno-religious and regional cleavages and tendencies that produce block votes in particular directions.
As a result, in the lead-up to a presidential election, most attentive observers can predict the election's possible outcomes while allowing for a margin of error to account for the unknown and unforeseen.
In the case of the 2023 election, the realistic pre-election permutations pointed in the direction of a Tinubu or an Atiku win, so the consensus was that if either of them was declared winner by INEC, the outcome would pass the plausibility and possibility test, and political elites across the different regions would broadly accept it because they knew it was possible and within the electoral mathematics of the moment.
This logic of plausibility and possibility also dictates whether and to what extent the electoral umpire, INEC, is willing to acquiesce in rigging, manipulation, and other acts of complicity in electoral malfeasance. INEC honchos too can read the political environment and the unfolding electoral dynamics in the run-up to any presidential election.
If the dynamics point to one clear possibility, INEC will not make a declaration in the opposite direction. They will not risk the conflagration that could result. Moreover, in such a scenario, they would come under pressure from political elites who have reached a rough consensus on the possible and plausible outcomes of the election.
INEC rarely goes against such elite consensus and popular understanding of which outcome is possible and which is not. INEC, in short, usually manipulates elections or makes declarations in elections in favor of candidates it knows have a decent chance of winning and refrains from doing so when the political tea leaves contradict that outcome.
This is the explanation for the seemingly perplexing fact that, in both presidential and sub-national elections, INEC mostly rigs or authenticates rigging and manipulations in contests in which the declared winner's victory was in the realm of possibility but always resists the urge to declare an implausible, unpopular, and long-shot candidate a winner, no matter how much pressure and inducement is thrown its way by incumbents, desperate candidates, or even the federal government.
We have examples from multiple states under different presidencies, where opposition candidates were declared winners against incumbents, some of them supported by federal might, because everyone knew that only the victory of the opposition candidate was plausible and would be considered legitimate.
In all elections since 1999, the plausibility factor made it possible for Nigerians and the political elite to accept and reconcile themselves to the officially declared outcome. This plausibility factor legitimized the outcomes of the flawed elections we've had since the fourth republic began.
Nigerians would shrug their shoulders and say, "oh well, this candidate was going to win or could have won anyway, so it doesn't matter much that he was aided by manipulation and rigging. The rigging only padded a victory that could or would have happened regardless."
This was the case in 2007 in an election that the winner himself admitted was marred by manipulation. The question Nigerians posed at the time was whether Yar'Adua could/would have won without the irregularities and rigging, and the unanimous answer was yes. He was, after all, running against Buhari, who at the time was a provincial northern candidate without a national appeal or political infrastructure.
Even in the 2019 election that Buhari rigged massively to deny Atiku victory, many Nigerians rightly believed that despite his woeful performance in his first term, Buhari remained a live underdog and was competitive in that election because Atiku was not an inspiring candidate and because the country was divided on the question of going back to the PDP after four years. This reality made Buhari's victory plausible, even if unlikely, and caused Nigerians to acclimate to his declaration as winner by INEC.
In the 2023 presidential election, the plausibility and possibility of Tinubu's victory was always apparent but was magnified by the splintering of the traditional PDP political tendency into three factions—Atiku, Obi, and Kwankwaso, with the last of the trio dominating vote-rich Kano but not without Tinubu getting a sizeable share of the votes there.
The Absurdity of the Dual Citizenship Ruling
I agree with those who have called attention to the absurdity of the judges' dual citizenship ruling, which states that the petitioners did not submit Tinubu's second passport as evidence. This is incredible! Did the judges expect Tinubu to hand over his passport to his challengers so they could submit it to the tribunal? Was it not enough that they submitted copies of it and that Tinubu's lawyers admitted that indeed their client had obtained said foreign citizenship?
I had expected the judges to rely on an earlier court ruling that one interlocutor pointed to about only citizenship obtained by naturalization counting as dual citizenship under Nigerian law, but they opted for a ludicrous technicality.
Undoing Nigerians' Tentative Hope for Electoral Transparency
For me though the most disturbing part of their ruling is with respect to electronic transmission of results. If the learned judges are saying that no Nigerian law mandates the transmission of results electronically, are they saying that the crafters of the revised electoral law signed by Buhari in 2022, which was widely hailed as a game changer for mandating instantaneous electronic result transmission, lied to Nigerians or that the provision was removed?
Does this not mean we're back to where we began on electoral integrity and credibility? Does this not mean that future elections, much like past ones, are now legal rigging contests? Does this not make nonsense of all the work activists put in to legalize electronic transmission of results for purposes of electoral transparency and verifiability? I see this reckless ruling opening the door to unprecedented voter apathy.
The considerable enthusiasm and youth participation in the 2023 election was in part a function of Obi's effective social media campaign and his embodiment of a third option, but it was also catalyzed by the excitement over the mandated electronic transmission of results from polling units to the central server.
For once, it seemed to young people that their votes would count not because the politicians wanted them to count but because the law required technology that would make votes count.
With that provision in the electoral law now ruled illegal and legally unnecessary, how many enlightened and young voters will care to vote in future elections?
Moreover, are the judges saying that the N300 billion INEC "spent" on the BVAS and I-REV infrastructure was wasted and was an illegal expenditure with no utilitarian or legal value to the country? What do the judges make of the fact that, for the House of Reps and Senate elections held on the same day as the presidential one, real-time electronic transmission of results worked perfectly but either broke down or was sabotaged for the presidential election?
Anyway, a message has been sent clearly to politicians. Forge the right alliances and then rig and manipulate the electoral system to get yourself declared winner. If it's a presidential contest, history and precedent tell us that the judiciary will preserve the status quo and search and find both reasonable legal bases and ridiculous technical grounds to do that. You cannot hope for judicial redress after the fact. That's a depressing and deflating message.
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