"Just for Saturday musing. Will the Occident intervene in Nigeria a la Venezuela?" Ike Udogu
Clarification
My response was to the above rhetorical question by Ike Udogu.
Sent: Sunday, March 3, 2019 6:27 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - This is Rigocracy, Not Democracy
But all this seems like red-herring. The real issue, from my point of view, is not whose country's democratic practice is more or less blemished than the other. Admittedly, there is no foul-proof or error-proof electoral system anywhere in the world. For me, though, every legitimate vote must count; every legitimate voter, anywhere in the world, must be allowed to vote. The closer to which any electoral system gets to that objective is the extent to which such a system deserves to be viewed as functional, reliable and dependable.
As I read it, Farooq A. Kperogi's article that prompted this forum's ongoing reactions did not dwell upon human errors or bureaucratic errors that are inevitable in any human-made system. The article asserted that deliberate actions by state/political party authorities were taken to significantly adulterate and upturn the outcome of Nigeria's presidential and some National Assembly elections of Feb. 23.
With all due respect, that charge ought to be the focus of our follow-up evaluative/speculative reactions/commentaries, and not whether Nigeria out-rigged/out-rigs the US or vice versa. That was not a point of that article. Should we be content with comparing ourselves with examples or perceived examples of how electoral procedures are or can be violated? Can't we aspire to do or be the opposite?
Second, it concerns me that several of the written reactions to Farooq A. Kperogi's write-up have tended to implicitly endorse election rigging as acceptable, and the commentators have tended to focus on pointing out or trying to point out what/which political party appeared to have out-rigged the other.
Some of these commentators appear to implicitly endorse intentional electoral malpractice, provided that the end justifies the means. What else could/should we make of the following question that one of notable contributors posed in response to Farooq A. Kperogi's questioning of the outcome of Nigeria's recent Presidential election: "Is it not true, in theory, that you do what is possible in a political culture to attain power?" This is troubling, to say the least! So, political culture accommodates any and all behaviors that make or could make possible the attainment of political power? I am truly troubled!
In other words, I don't sense an outright opprobrium of election rigging. I sense a display or endorsement of Machiavellian sense of morality, namely that the end justifies the means. I am troubled by this trend of thought on this otherwise esteemed forum of detached intellectual pundits.
Definitely not comparable, but at the same time, the US does not have the moral authority. The Brits or Germans are in better shape in terms of--
sound electoral practice, so far. Sarkhozy intimidated Gadaffi into giving him campaign funds so I exclude the French as well.
GE
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Professor of History
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Victor Okafor <vokafor@emich.edu>
Sent: Saturday, March 2, 2019 6:31:27 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - This is Rigocracy, Not DemocracyIn those USA instances that you cited, was the perceived "electoral malpractice" comparable in scale to the brazen electoral decapitation alleged by Farooq A. Kperogi and other sources? I really would like to believe—for the sake of Nigeria--that what has been alleged here regarding the just-concluded Nigeria's presidential election, did not happen. But another side of me can't help recalling that Nigeria has a unique way of generating electoral outcomes that defy both common sense and logic. For instance, the outcome of this year's Nigeria's presidential election eerily reminds one of the "landslide" re-election of Shehu Shagari of the NPN in 1983. It was a landslide electoral victory that occurred against the backdrop of mass disenchantment against the performance of the then ruling NPN's national administration. Time will tell, but let's hope for the best!
On Sat, Mar 2, 2019 at 5:38 PM Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emeagwali@ccsu.edu> wrote:
Don'forget that the Bush-Gore presidential election of 2000, as well as that of Clinton- Trump, 2016, are tainted by allegations of electoral malpractice.--
GE
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Emmanuel Udogu <udoguei@appstate.edu>
Sent: Saturday, March 2, 2019 12:32:02 PM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - This is Rigocracy, Not Democracy
Just for Saturday musing. Will the Occident intervene in Nigeria a la Venezuela?
Ike Udogu
--On Sat, Mar 2, 2019 at 12:18 PM Amobi P. Chiamogu <pamogu@gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry for the typographical errors occasioned by autocorrelationDear Farooq
I love your courage. At least for academic purposes you have opened the consciousness of many Nigerians who are tending to sweep the real issues under the carpet and join the songs of the Presidency bulwarks. As we throw in congratulatory messages to sham and massive rigging, we should remember that it would one day serve as reference point.
Buhari destroyed all established protocols in the judiciary to perfect his sit-tight on power. It is not bad after all, we know him before now. What changed is just the name of administration and not personality.
Atiku should assist us the more by heading straight to the tribunal. At least, let Nigerians see the extent to which his team documented the irregularities, violence and vote buying by Mr integrity. Where did his minions got all the money from? Senator Chukwuka Umazi, member Senate Committee on Anti-corruption, revealed on radio that trader money is sourced from the repatriated Abacha loot. Who is fooling who? The result you published here is completely different from the INEC declared version.
As par turn out, if we registered about 84 million votes and about 72 million collected their pvcs, it is understandable that the election does not represent the views of the people. During Nigeria decides on national and private tv channels, there was not even a polling unit that witnessed 300 persons queueing up to cast their ballot. It thus worries me how many states from the north gathered the number of votes returned in the elections. Thence, allegations of massive thumbprinting, ballot stuffing are likely cases for consideration. In fact, many ad-hoc workers were reported to have changed figures at gunpoint.
Like Professor Jega, Mahmood should organized a postmortem in the form of a round table but before that, the academia needs to generate need for national dialogue on elections. The feat achieved by Jega is grossly frittering with reckless abandonment.
Thank you Farooq for opening up the space.
--On Sat, 2 Mar 2019 17:57 Amobi P. Chiamogu, <pamogu@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear FarooqI love your courage. At least for academic purposes you have opened the consciousness of many Nigerians who are tending to sweep the real issues under the carpet and join the songs of the Presidency bulwarks. As we throw in congratulatory messages to sham and massive rigging, we should remember that it would one day serve as reference point.Buhari destroyed all established protocols in the judiciary to perfect his sit-tight on power. It is not bad after all, we know him before now. What changed is just the name of administration and not personality.Atiku should assist us the more by heading straight to the tribunal. At least, let Nigerians see the extent to which his team documented the irregularities, violence and vote buying by Mr integrity. Where did his minions got all the money from? Senator Chukwuka Umali, member Senate Committee on Anti-corruption, state on radio that trader money is sourced from the repatriated Aba change loot. Who is fooling who? The result you published here is completely different from the INEC declared version.As par turn out, if we registered about 84 million votes and about 72 million collected their pvcs, it is understandable that the election does not represent the views of the people. During Nigeria decides on national and private tv channels, there was not even a polling unit that witnessed 300 persons queueing up to cast their ballot. It thus worries me how many states from the north gathered the number of votes returned in the elections. Thence, allegations of massive thumbprinting, ballot stuffing are likely cases for consideration. In fact, many ad-hoc workers were reported to have changed figures at gunpoint.Like Professor Jega, Mahmood should organized a postmortem in the form of a round table but before that, the academia needs to generate need for national dialogue on elections. The feat achieved by Jega is grossly frittering with reckless abandonment.Thank you Farooq for opening up the space.--
On Sat, 2 Mar 2019 17:01 Farooq A. Kperogi, <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:
Oga Falola,
You are right that I didn't touch on the rigging perpetrated by PDP. I also saw video evidence of PDP's rigging in Anambra and Rivers states, but I ignored it because APC's rigging wasn't only more extensive but actually went beyond that. After the thumb-printing of ballot boxes, disenfranchisement of opposition voters by APC thugs, etc. APC actually went ahead to force INEC officials to arbitrarily allocate figures to Buhari and APC National Assembly candidates, particularly in the north. That of Kano was the most scandalous, but it happened all over the northwest and the northeast. (Note that Borno, with it Boko Haram problem, had a nearly 90 percent turn-out! When videos of industrial-scale thumbprinting of ballot papers later emerged, we all knew why).
Your last poser strikes at the very core of the entire election: would Buhari have handed over power if someone other than him had been declared winner? The answer is no, and I've written about that in several of my previous columns and social media posts. Many friends in the Villa confided in me that Buhari said he would rather hand over to the military than hand over to the PDP. He first said this in the midpoint of 2018. His henchmen knew then he would countenance ANY measure to keep him in power. That was why we had the kind of election that we had last Saturday.
For me personally, this is an opportunity to finally divest emotionally from Nigeria. I have been off social media for nearly a week now, and it's been unbelievably tranquil. I recognize that I might not be able to sustain my emotional divestment from Nigeria for too long, but I hope I can because it feels good.
Farooq
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorJournalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & MediaSocial Science BuildingRoom 5092 MD 2207402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogiAuthor of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
--On Sat, Mar 2, 2019 at 9:59 AM Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
--Great Farooq:
I want to assume that everyone knows that I am not a sympathizer of the APC or PDP. Once this is clear, my response to your essay will be purely treated as academic. Ethnic politics in Nigeria has damaged the Nigerian academy far more than one can ever imagine.
Questions:
- Is it not true, in theory, that you do what is possible in a political culture to attain power?
- If that means is violence, ambitious people resort to it, as in cases of military coups
- Is your piece not one-sided, to assume that the PDP, too, did not rig?
- In the southern part of the country, it appears to me that people voted their interest
Two additional complications:
- What evidence do we have that if Buhari had lost he would vacate power? People tend to forget that election is just one side of the story, transferring power is yet another. He could lose and refuse to leave
- What is there to rejoice about if the winner has 15 million votes in a country that says it is about to become 200 million?
The use of power
It is one thing to have power, what power is used for is the real issue.
TF
Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222 (fax)
http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooqkperogi@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday, March 2, 2019 at 7:50 AM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - This is Rigocracy, Not Democracy
Saturday, March 2, 2019
This is Rigocracy, Not Democracy
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter:@farooqkperogi
Critical scholars have characterized contemporary systems of government that claim to be democracies as mere "electocracies" because the vast majority of people actually don't vote, which denudes such systems of their claims to being governments by the "demo," that is, the people. Nigeria's situation is worse. It has institutionalized "rigocracy," that is, government by in-your-face rigging, not transparent elections, as its preferred system of government.
Although rigocracy has been institutional in Nigeria for a while, its brazen manifestation in the February 23 presidential and National Assembly elections, in spite of putative technological safeguards against it, should invite introspection from people who matter in Nigeria on whether it's wise to invest enormous resources, not to mention risk the needless deaths of scores of citizens, to organize periodic elections.
The last election was a sham and a shame. There is no question about that. The results INEC announced as the product of the presidential and National Assembly election are, in many cases, scandalously inconsistent with the figures officially declared at polling units. Given the deployment of technology for the election, you would think that arbitrary allocation of votes to candidates won't be a strategy of rigging. But it was.
At this point, we might as well have a fascistic monarchy with no elections at all instead of spending billions to organize sham elections that don't mean anything; that a bunch of mulish, nescient knuckleheads can overturn at will without consequences.
I am surprised that I am surprised by this. In several past columns and social media posts, I had cautioned against what I called "misplaced PVC optimism." In a September 28, 2018 post, for instance, I wrote: "Nigerians feel oddly empowered by the possession of their Permanent Voters Card (PVC). They think it's their bulwark against Buhari's continuing incompetence. I am sorry to be a party pooper, but the truth is that in Buhari's Nigeria, the PVC is worthless, as we've seen in most of the elections conducted while Buhari is president, the latest being the Osun State governorship election.
"All indices show that Buhari would lose the 2019 election if it's free and fair, but Buhari would rather die in power than hand over power to anyone… So your votes would be worthless in 2019." And that was precisely what happened: PVCs were worthless last Saturday.
In spite of propaganda to the contrary, last Saturday's election will go down in the annals as one of the bloodiest, most brazenly monetized, and most explicitly fraudulent presidential elections in Nigeria's entire history. Ballot boxes in polling units won by opposition candidates were seized, burned, or dumped in the sewers by APC-sponsored thugs in places like Lagos. Countless instances of massive thumb-printing of ballot papers in APC strongholds have been captured and shared on social media in the far North.
Nevertheless, in spite of the active state-aided voter suppression in PDP strongholds, murderous violence against PDP agents, ballot paper snatching, and sundry electoral malpractices, Atiku Abubakar still had a comfortable lead. Results that trickled in in real time showed that he won in southern and northcentral states with a wider margin than Buhari did his strongholds in 2015, and lost a majority of northwestern and northeastern states by a far narrower margin than Jonathan did his weak spots in 2015.
At the last minutes, however, votes from several states were arbitrarily inflated in favor of APC's Muhammadu Buhari, leading to a situation where there are now more votes cast in the election than there were accredited voters in the election.
The title of my last column is, "Buhari, 'remote control' is worse than ballot snatching." "Remote control," remember, is Buhari's euphemism for changing results after the vote, which he confessed to have done in the Osun State governorship election. "I know how much trouble we had in the last election here," he said on January 27 during a campaign event in Osun State. " I know by remote control through so many sources how we managed to maintain the [APC] in power in this state."
Well, he and his henchmen did precisely that again in Saturday's presidential election. In the actual votes declared at polling units nationwide, which have been captured in real-time and stored in cloud-computing technology, Buhari lost the election. Troves of anecdotal evidence, including intercepted phone conversations and video recordings, have emerged to show that INEC officials fudged the figures in parts of the northwest, the northeast, the southeast and the south-south after the vote, to give Buhari a fraudulent lead.
This is in addition to massively brazen ballot snatching, ballot burning and outright, barbarous disenfranchisement in PDP strongholds in places like Lagos where, in spite of everything, Buhari only managed to squeak out a narrow "win."
The signs were always there that Buhari would not accept any result that does not declare him a winner, and I and other commentators have called attention to them. For instance, his refusal to sign the Electoral Bill, which would have frustrated the rigging his minions perpetrated in this election, was deliberate. One of the provisions of the bill was to make on-the-spot transmission of election results mandatory.
He also knew, as I pointed out in a previous column, that his blatant rigging would invite a robust judicial challenge, and that the overturning of his fraudulent victory would be a slam dunk in an independent, unpredictable Supreme Court. That was why he exploited CJN Walter Onnogen's asset declaration infraction, which most government officials, including Buhari himself, are guilty of to illegally remove him and replace him with a pliant, acquiescent alternative from his geo-cultural backyard.
This is not an election Atiku and other opposition politicians should accept. It was a brazenly disreputable daylight electoral heist, which has completely destroyed the last vestige of faith most Nigerians had in the integrity of the electoral process. Unfortunately, the judiciary is now so intimidated and so compromised that it's incapable of dispensing even a semblance of justice. Nevertheless, for the sake of history, I'd encourage Atiku to proceed to the courts to present evidentiary proofs of the enormous rigging the Buhari regime has perpetrated to perpetuate itself in power.
In all of this, the person I am concerned with the most is Professor Mahmood Yakubu, the INEC chairman. Even Maurice Iwu would be alarmed by the shameless sham Yakubu supervised and legitimized. As I've pointed out before, Yakubu is straight-up one of the smartest people I have ever related with. As a professional historian, and a top-rate one at that, I thought he would be self-conscious of the judgement of history. Apparently, he is not.
He will sadly go down in the records as the worst INEC chairman Nigeria has ever had. He frittered away billions to invest in technology to organize elections and ended up not using it to determine the outcome of the election. Well, at least Maurice Iwu can thank him for displacing him as Nigeria's most audacious election fixer in favor of a ruling party. That's such a sad end for such a brilliant man.
But he might be able to redeem himself someday by writing a manifesto of rigocracy. At least he would make an original contribution to knowledge from the vantage point of someone who supervised an unsophisticated rigocratic process. Such a manifesto would also help cure the illusion that Nigerians have elections.
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & MediaSocial Science Building
Room 5092 MD 2207
402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State UniversityKennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogi
Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will--
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Amobi P. Chiamogu
Special Assistant to the Rector and Lecturer Department of Public Administration
Federal Polytechnic, Oko Nigeria
+2348034306261, 2348123232658
amobi.chiamogu@federalpolyoko.edu.ng, sarectoroko2011@gmail.com, pchiamogu@gmail.com, panomanikz@yahoo.com
www.federalpolyoko.edu.ng, www.ijmpas.org
--Amobi P. Chiamogu
Special Assistant to the Rector and Lecturer Department of Public Administration
Federal Polytechnic, Oko Nigeria
+2348034306261, 2348123232658
amobi.chiamogu@federalpolyoko.edu.ng, sarectoroko2011@gmail.com, pchiamogu@gmail.com, panomanikz@yahoo.com
www.federalpolyoko.edu.ng, www.ijmpas.org
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--
--Sincerely,
Victor O. Okafor, Ph.D.Professor and HeadDepartment of Africology and African American StudiesEastern Michigan UniversityEmail: vokafor@emich.edu
Tel: 734.487.9594
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