Opinion: Nigerian elections will always fail

Posted by admin Anambra, Headlines, INEC Politics, State News Thursday, November 21st, 2013

The matters arising from the inconclusive Anambra State governorship election last Saturday were foreseeable. In Nigeria, elections are, cynically speaking, designed to fail. The process of democracy — from campaigns to voting and other post-election activities — is a practice of modernity. Anambra (and by implication, Nigeria) as presently construed, are pre-modern contraptions. Yes, as a people, we fly in airplanes, ride armoured cars, use mobile phones, access the Internet, and enjoy other paraphernalia of modernity, yet we lack certain attributes that make us remain a largely pre-modern society.

In his book, Africa Must be Modern, Prof. Olufemi Taiwo lists specific attributes of modernity: individualism, veneration of knowledge, hope (not one borne of the superstitions Nigerian religious cultures trade but salubrious expectations) and, a counting culture. One may disagree with any of Taiwo’s list but the last one, a counting culture, is fundamental to whatever progress Nigeria will make –now and in the future. We simply cannot find a way around it. Nigeria will never ever be able to either hold proper elections or run an efficient system if we do not learn to properly account for everyone in our society.

In Nigeria, one hears politicians say they have no idea of the barrels of oil flowing through the country daily; yet, they give out colossal amount of money as subsidies. In Nigeria, “bureaucrats” ask aged pensioners to physically show up for excruciating hours of verification when it is far more sensible to develop a mechanism that can track the living and the dead. In Nigeria, lots of monies pass through the system without proper monitoring. That explains why ministers and Director-Generals can inflate the costs of purchases and the buck won’t stop at anybody’s table.

Nobody has an idea of Nigeria’s population and yet we have politicians who, daily, pretend they are planning for our future. If a “statesman” cannot account for every child given birth to in their constituency, how can they ever accurately plan for the schools and hospitals that will cater for the children’s needs in the future? How does a country without the exact figure of its population provide for strategic upgrades in existing infrastructure and consider expenditure in projected capital projects?

If a country cannot count and account for people, how can it progress?

Was this not the point that the former Chairman of National Population Commission, Festus Odimegwu, made recently when he lampooned the 2006 census as fraudulent? As usual, one of the key beneficiaries of the hinterlands-being-more-populated-than-the-coast fraud, the Kano State Governor, Rabiu Kwankwaso, ridiculed Odimegwu by suggesting he was a “drunk”. Kwankwaso and the Arewa Consultative Forum even called for Odimegwu’s removal when all that was needed to do was to prove the man wrong. But who, in Nigeria, except perpetual deniers like the ACF and Kwankwaso, does not know what Odimegwu said was true?

To the likes of the ACF and Kwankwaso, it is all about politics and the gain their sparsely-populated zones get from false counting while they miss the larger picture of planned and sustained development programmes. Whatever happened to the meticulous records of man and beast that were used for taxation before Independence? What we have had from manipulators is a culture of inflation. And, sadly, this is not limited to the false-counting deniers.

Does it surprise that in 2013, we can barely conduct elections that would be free of crisis, acrimony and perpetual resort to judicial redress? I have been reading all the complaints coming out of the inconclusive Anambra election and personally, I am distressed that some of the failures associated with the election are barely an improvement on the rigging of the 1950s Nigeria. In the 21st century, we still stuff ballot boxes! It is a shame that even our problems refuse to get sophisticated with time. We seem stuck in time; like Sisyphus, we are condemned to undertake the same onerous task over and over again, without going forward or even learning a thing.

What stops Nigeria from utilising the various tools that 21st technology has provided to begin a painstaking and elaborate process of counting other than the fact that those who hold the reigns of the country profit from the arbitrariness? How different would Nigerian social and political process be if we had a databank of citizens’ information and it is regularly updated?

If Nigerian leaders would stop being short-sighted, they would profit from working towards developing an efficacious system of knowing their constituents. In 1987, the United States introduced its Social Security Numbers system and asked parents to list the SSN of each child in their tax forms. Overnight, over seven million children “disappeared” because the parents’ “magomago” became impossible. It saved their system a lot of money up till today and that is why they keep developing checks to counter schemes created to circumvent the system.

Nigeria’s failure at counting will arise again and again in every sphere of our lives. Whether it is the Nigerian Institute of Town Planners lamenting the slummification of the country and how a lack of digital maps and other basic data inhibit physical planning and crime prevention efforts; or the Chief Economic Adviser to the President, Dr. Nwanze Okidegbe, quarrelling with the World Bank’s figures on poverty in Nigeria; or the proposed National Dialogue and the issue of proportional representation, the fact remains that we have a number of problems. The rest of our social problems are hinged on the fact that we cannot even get the basic things right in order to kick-start an evidence-based policy formulation.

This was the point raised by Morten Jerven in his book, Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It. Jerven counters the prevailing wisdom that Africa –particularly sub-Saharan Africa — is truly making progress. Poor Numbers denounces the disarray afflicting the region’s data collection and posits that most of the claims being made by Africa and some international agencies are based on spurious data. What exists in Africa, he says, is “governance by ignorance.”

No surprise in his analysis. If you think Jerven exaggerates Nigeria and Africa’s problems, consider how much better the Anambra election could have been conducted if Nigeria has a tracking system that accounts for everyone in the country, can analyse voting patterns scientifically and, can reject spurious votes. We should get that right first.

-Punchwp_posts