An electoral legacy for Muhammadu Buhari

Before he eventually won the 2015 presidential election, President Muhammadu Buhari had sought the same office on three occasions. He contested the position in 2003, 2007 and 2011. On each occasion, he was beaten to the crown. Though he challenged his defeat up to the Supreme Court on each occasion, the court could not found reason to declare him winner.

For a man who has gone through the crucible of Nigerian elections, you will think that he would do everything to ensure the sanctity of the ballot when he gets the opportunity to preside over the conduct of one. You will think that a man who had complained of being rigged out of the contest on three occasions would ensure a water tight electoral process which would neutralise election rogues.

But let me hereby place a disclaimer on Buhari’s oft repeated assertion that he was rigged out of the three previous elections which he lost. I am of the view that the then General Muhammadu lost the three elections because of his limited capacity to compete at the time, not necessarily because of the shenanigans that prevailed during the polls. Yes, those elections might have been flawed one way or the other; the truth should be told that Buhari was not just in a position to win any of them.

For instance, one of his financiers once told me that in one of those elections Buhari’s party never had money to pay party agents in the whole of Southern Nigeria. In all those elections, candidate Buhari had feeble presence in the South. So, regardless of the irregularities that greeted the 2003 to 2011 elections, President Buhari cannot be said to have won any of them. In fact, his defeat in 2011 was most profound owing to the introduction of a credible electoral register, the one we are still building upon.

Owing to the massive nature of the irregularities that greeted the 2007 exercise, President Umaru Yar’ Adua, the declared winner admitted to its flawed nature and promptly set up the Justice Mohammed Uwais Panel on Electoral Reforms. Good enough, Yar’Adua’s successor, President Goodluck Jonathan carried through a number of reforms kick-started by his late boss.  Those reforms yielded the standard electoral register and then the Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs) and the introduction of the Smart Card Readers. The continuation of that reform was to dovetail into the introduction of electronic voting in the country.

But contrary to the swift reforms ignited by the Jonathan government up to 2015 and which midwifed his eventual defeat at the polls, the Buhari administration stalled the process leading to 2019.

It is surprising that the same President Buhari, who had lamented about electoral injustice allegedly done to him in the past, would stall the passage of Electoral Act Amendment Bill 2018 on four different occasions.

It was apparent that the President’s men were content with the elements of “dandawi” or wuruwuru that surfaced in the 2015 process and went unchallenged and they believed that the process should not change in the 2019 cycle.

But it was heart- warming hearing the president declare just before the election of 2019 that he would like to leave a legacy of free and fair elections. Sadly, he did not walk the talk in February.

While inaugurating the All Progressives Council Presidential Campaign Council just before the polls, President Buhari said that he would like to leave a legacy of free, fair and credible elections,  adding that such is the  foundation of political stability and peace in any nation.

He had said:  “We have insisted that votes must count and have maintained a policy of non-interference in elections.

“INEC has so far since 2015, conducted fair and credible elections in 195 constituencies nationwide, which have been attested nationwide to be qualitatively better than previous elections.

“Let me reiterate my commitment to free and fair elections. If there is one legacy I want to leave is the enthronement of democracy as a system of government. And for democracy to be enthroned, elections must be free and fair.

“That means citizens have a right to vote for candidates of their choice without intimidation in any form. I have warned INEC and security agencies to that effect.

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“We will keep insisting that votes must count. Our campaigns will be anchored on our performance in the last four years,’’

But we need not repeat it here that the quality of elections handed Nigerian voters on February 23 and March 9 were below par.

Almost all the electoral gains that were recorded between 2011 and 2015 got eroded as ballot box snatchers, vote buyers; military interference and unhindered thuggery characterised the Buhari elections.

We now have a responsibility to tell the President to redeem his name and write himself into the positive side of the nation’s electoral history. He can do that by quickly signing the revised Electoral Act Amendment bill which is before the outgoing Assembly.

He needs to do that quickly to ensure that history recalls his name from the list of persons who benefit from oddities of discredited elections. If the president truly cares about the need for free and fair elections, he will immediately legislate vote buying and ballot snatching out of the system. He will orchestrate legislations that would end era of inconclusive elections. Forget about the blame game around the elections, and the tendency to shift responsibilities to INEC. The   success or failure of elections is a burden squarely weighed on the president’s shoulders.

It is not about Attahiru Jega; not Mahmood Yakubu. It could be Olusegun Obasanjo; Umaru Yar’ Adua; Goodluck Jonathan or Muhammadu Buhari.  And I suspect that this President cares about how history and posterity would categorise him in all this. Note that history cannot be undermined either by regime propagandists or purchased story tellers.