By George Onmonya Daniel
After the recent presidential, gubernatorial, and house of representatives and state house election, it is clear that there is something fundamentally wrong about how elections are conducted in Nigeria. The way and manner in which it has been conducted over twenty years now has been consistent and the Nigerian state has not done anything to curb all that is wrong.
Election is Nigeria have always been marred by fraud, use of intimidation to disenfranchise Nigerians by threat of violence and violence, and bribing electoral umpires to change results. In fact, the government in power almost always have a strong influence on the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, that are usually handpicked by the president to rig election on their behave. This process has become the new normal in Nigeria. INEC would ask you to go to court no matter what happened in the election or how it happens. The courts has upturned severally elections, but still many judges were armed twisted by politicians or are bribed a lot of money to make judgment in favour of certain politicians.
The worse part is the political violence as we saw in Lagos in 2019 and 2023, with Igbos being targeted by thugs sponsored by politicians because someone feared that their numbers can change the outcome of an election in the state and the nation. The actors who perpetrated this electoral crimes of violence to the extent that some people lost their lives are known and everything can tell you who they are working for, but the Nigerian state always looks the other way because the people who managed the affairs of the state are the same characters sponsoring the violence to stay in power at all cost.
Because they can win election through all these illegal and immoral ways, from vote buying to murder, they are mostly not obligated to the people. For the past over twenty years of Nigeria’s democracy, one can see not very much has been achieved if one looks at all the indices of development. The culture for politicians and politics in Nigeria is just to loot the nation’s resources by people in power and keep themselves in power by hook or by crook so that they can continue to enjoy privileges and powers that comes from being in power.
Why should politicians care about Nigeria if the votes of Nigerians do not matter? It is because the votes of Nigerians do not matter that has resulted to people in power taken everyone and everything for granted.
The 2023 election that saw Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s emergence as the president-elect as announced by INEC has continued to plunge some part and demography into despair, with any young people talking about leaving the country. This hopelessness is what is pushing other young people to enter the streets in protest to call the election a sham and a shame. From the looks of things we have not heard everything about this election, there seems to be chaos pregnant in the near future, with many Nigerians seeing the election as an outright robbery.
