All this reads 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. We are not outraged?
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 or the 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, concomitantly, 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. Would they posturize in this politically morally-repugnant manner to their American audience? I guess that for Nigeria, anything goes! What else could/should we make of the following stomach-churning question that one of the notable/outstanding contributors posed in response to Farooq A. Kperogi's courageous questioning of the equally-stomach-churning outcome of Nigeria's recent Presidential election, even as he professed/proclaimed his non-partisanship: "Is it not true, in theory, that you do what is possible in a political culture to attain power?" What then can the politicians learn from this non-partisan scholar? 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? What then distinguishes us from the rest of crowd? I am truly troubled!
In other words, I don't sense an outright opprobrium of election rigging. I sense a display or endorsement of a Machiavellian sense of political morality, namely that the end justifies the means. I am troubled by this trend/train of thought on this otherwise esteemed forum of detached intellectual pundits.
--The truth of the matter is that PDP also rigged using collation officers, smart you will say. The money shared to many interested in collecting is scandalous. They should stop shouting, they are also guilty.Nkolika Awka.
Sent from my iPad--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
104 Inner Campus Drive
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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