An election is ordinarily a process of choosing representatives or leaders by a given electorate. It should normally be a simple but effective means of selecting people who enjoy the support of the electorate for responsible positions. This is what elections represent in the politically advanced countries from where we copy the systems that we try to practise here in Nigeria.
But quite unfortunately, like everything we copy from elsewhere, we have transformed a simple and straight-forward election process into something else, something quite different from what we originally copied. The bastardization of the election process as witnessed in the last Ekiti election did not start today, rather it is a culmination of what began some decades back.
We can still remember the \”landslides\” of the 1983 NPN era which was the height of electoral brigandage at the time. It was the crude electoral strong-arm tactics and open ballot banditry of the time that led to the sudden and unceremonious termination of the Second Republic. We must not also quickly forget the electoral heists of the 2003 and 2007 Obasanjo\’s do-or-die era when elections were won and lost according to the Machiavellian the-end-justifies-the-means principles.
So, it would appear as if the Nigerian politicians develop their subversive tactics to counter whatever new methods are being devised by the electoral umpire to improve the system. Time there was when all that was needed to win the ballot in a particular polling unit was to congregate in a room and thumb print enough ballot papers for the special party which had been programmed to win and at the appropriate time, thugs would storm the polling centre, forcibly remove the ballot box and thereafter stuff the stolen box with the already thumb-printed ballot papers and pronto the \”special\” political party had won in that unit! With sufficient number of hoodlums deployed in sufficient number of polling centres to do the kind of dirty jobs as described earlier, the success of the anointed party or candidate was assured. Before the arrival of the INEC card reader, many Presidents, Governors, Senators, and Assembly members had been elected through such crooked methods in our country.
The matter became so bad that an \”elected\” President out of troubled conscience once publicly confessed that the election that brought him to office was tainted. Thus, it was our electoral antecedents that graduated into the spectacle witnessed during this Ekiti election. With the use of the electronic card readers at elections, it is no longer possible to simply thumbprint ballot papers and stuff ballot boxes as was formerly the case, hence the resort to the election bazaar or the \”see and buy\” that took place last week-end.
The election bazaar as a means of achieving electoral objectives was not new to our system as it appears, it had always been there. The difference is that in this last outing, it was improved upon and taken to a new level, the reason being that it is now the only window open to those predisposed to election rigging.
Another reason why the bazaar appears more widespread this time around is the fact that virtually all the parties took part in the trade. It was alleged that the two major parties in the elections openly engaged in the financial inducement of the voters at polling centres. That this was so should not be surprising. If we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that this is a reflection of what is currently happening in virtually all spheres of our national life.
In time past, before our national morality plummeted to this low, the mere fact that a political party offered money for votes was enough to put the voters off completely from such party. But things have drastically changed now to the extent that the voters themselves now demand money for their votes.
The way things now stand, it is doubtful whether a party candidate, no matter his pedigree or how well he campaigned, can win elections without participating in the kind of bazaar we just witnessed in Ekiti. With the Ekiti election in particular and the final figures garnered by the two leading candidates as presented by INEC, it is very doubtful whether the APC candidate would have won if the PDP candidate had been allowed to monopolize the electoral bazaar that took place.
The moral lesson here is that once circumstances compel you to wrestle with an opponent who dwells in the swamp, you must be prepared and ready to fight dirty without minding being smeared with mud. This probably explained what happened in Ekiti last weekend.
