President Muhammadu Buhari has retired to Katsina, his home state, preparatory to vote in the presidential election slated for February 16, 2019 when a bewildered nation was told early in the morning of the 16th by INEC that the election will not take place owing to logistic problems despite admitting that all funds they requested for the election was granted to them. Security reports indicated that power grabbers planned to hijack the election with the use of thugs to thwart the will of the people. The election was rescheduled to February 23, 2019. Our elections are still 100 per cent manually conducted and physical protection of men and materials are important for free, fair and credible elections to take place.
This situation infuriated the president and he said: “I really gave the military and the police orders to be ruthless. We are not going to be blamed that we want to rig elections. I want Nigeria to be respected. Let them vote whoever they want across the parties … I am going to warn anybody who thinks he has enough influence in his locality to lead a body of thugs to snatch boxes or to disturb the voting system, he will do it at the expense of his own life”.
When the president made this statement, one would have thought that everyone would rally round him and our security agencies to carry out this directive to ensure a violent-free election, after all the dictionary defines a thug as a cruel or vicious ruffian, robber, or murderer. Unfortunately, the PDP through its National Chairman, Uche Secondus, described President Muhammadu Buhari’s directive to security agencies to shoot on sight anyone snatching ballot box as a declaration of war on Nigerians. He said that in all democracies the world over, elections are civil matter that is usually handled by civil security like the police and wondered why the involvement of our military in this matter when they have enough security challenges to tackle. The PDP concluded that the directive to security agents was a direct call for jungle justice. Leading this campaign against shooting thugs is Senator Dino Melaye who agreed with his party that it was a directive that will lead to jungle justice and should be discarded. Most civil societies aligned with the PDP to discredit the directive.
The ruling party, APC, supported the directive by the president. The Spokesperson for the presidential campaign, Festus Keyamo, SAN, in defence of the directive said, “the law is that when you are found at the scene of a crime committing violence that will put the life of the people in danger, you can be shot dead on the spot…. Those who snatch ballot boxes are robbers because anybody who takes anything that does not belong to him by force is a robber and can be charged under the Robbery and Firearms Act…. If you try to intimidate and overawe the state, to take power by force other than by constitutional means, this can be treason or treasonable felony and you can be charged for treason”. He noted that the punishment for the two offences is death.
Ironically, at the end of the election, which saw the deployment of all the security personnel to protect the ballot boxes, the greatest beneficiaries were PDP members. They snatched APC strongholds of Bauchi, Adamawa and Imo. Dino Melaye won Kogi West Senatorial election, which the court cancelled for being rigged and marred by irregularities. One would have thought that the opposition would have seen the sincerity of the president that his directive was non-partisan and rallied round the policy of liquidating thugs in order to consolidate the gains, but they intensified the criticisms of the process and our security agencies and even encouraged international community to follow suit in the condemnation.
During the Kogi and Bayelsa elections, the recommendations of the opposition and most civil society groups were upheld. The military was withdrawn from the elections leaving the police to carry out their duties. Where did it leave us? At the mercy of the thugs from both sides. In Nigeria, the winners rig because they don’t want to be out-rigged by the losers while the losers rig because they want to take out the winners through unlawful means leaving us with a situation where most elections reflect the wish of the people, but still return some bogus inexplicable figures.
There is no doubt that the elections in the two states reflected the wish of the people especially when one considers the cantankerous primary elections from the opposition party in both states which saw the people of a former president of PDP rejoicing when APC won in Bayelsa and which saw people of the same family not agreeing on who will be the flag bearer of PDP in Kogi in utter disregard of the sensibilities of the minority groups in Kogi Central and Kogi West who vowed to complete their second term thereby paving the way for a landslide victory for Yahaya Bello. But the level of violence from both sides is unacceptable and intolerable in a 21st Century world.
The way forward is very simple. The opposition and the civil society groups should acknowledge that they goofed by criticizing the president’s principled stance on thugs and immediately meet to send a high powered delegation to the president urging him to use the strongest might against thugs in future elections. They should also pay courtesy visits to the leadership of all the security forces pledging their support for actions against these heartless thugs who could burn alive a harmless woman, Mrs Salome Abu, on the excuse of a reprisal attack, even when elections were over.
Our Electoral Act should immediately be amended to remove every bottleneck on the use of electronic system of voting. In this regard we support the efforts of the Deputy Senate President, Omo-Agege to ensure the early passage of the amendment to our Electoral Act. Presently, Section 52(2) of the Electoral Act prohibits electronic voting. It states: “The use of electronic voting machine for the time being is prohibited”. This is absurd in the 21st Century. The manual system of voting, apart from being more costly, is cumbersome, time consuming, prone to violence, subject to human errors and manipulation and almost impossible to secure owing to the security challenges we already have and the rough terrain we have in our riverine states and other states with tough topography.
We have to initiate a national movement against thuggery in our elections. We must recall that most of the terrorist insurgencies, militancy, banditries, kidnapping, robberies in our modern Nigeria have their roots in armed thugs groomed for elections by heartless politicians and discarded after elections were lost and won. We conclude by reiterating the statement by Festus Keyamo that “we have had a problem of election rigging in our country since election started in Nigeria and it is high time we took a definite harsh position on it supported by law and whoever does not like it that means that is the person that is the rigger and the person that wants to snatch ballot boxes”.