Absurdity in Kogi

I first encountered the word “gerrymandering” in my post-graduate constitutional law research at the University of Lagos in 1988/1989. I was doing a paper on “Colonial Legacies in Commonwealth West Africa” with Nigeria and Sierra-Leone as my case studies. In both countries, I found that apart from the cultural and administrative legacies of British colonial rule such as the English language, English common law and judicial systems, the civil service, the structure and orientation of the military, Christianity and fraternal associations such as the Freemasons, patterns of economic linkages, and independence constitutions modelled after the British parliamentary system, the most pervasive political and constitutional legacy of British colonial governments, not just in Nigeria and Sierra Leone but in many colonies especially in Africa, was the extent the British went to foist whichever power structure it deemed favourable to British interests or sentiments in the newly independent nations it was departing.

This usually involved a lot of political manipulations designed to ensure the preferred outcome of the colonial establishment, in terms of the locus of political power upon attainment of independence, was achieved through all means possible including “gerrymandering”, defined by Wikipedia as “in the process of setting electoral districts, gerrymandering is a practice that attempts to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries to create partisan advantaged districts”. In Nigeria, gerrymandering related not just to the relative size of the regions, consistent with the classical definition of the word, but also to the transitional calendar and processes, the leadership and composition of the military (which was understood to be a default political power centre in the event of failure of the democratic model), refusal to attend to the demands of minorities, population censuses, variances in the structure of national education policies and by some credible accounts, even to the actual conduct of elections. I have come to have an expanded application of the word that extends beyond fixing electoral boundaries such that the predetermined outcome is manifested, but to include all processes, especially political, in which an authority fixes and adjusts the processes, procedures and milestones in order to accomplish a pre-determined result! As I watched the Kogi elections unfold over the past three weeks, only two words came to my mind – absurdity and gerrymandering!

During and after the recent general elections, I listened to many (usually youthful) voters speak passionately and authoritatively about how they wanted change and if Buhari and the All Progressives Congress (APC) disappointed them, they would vote them out in 2019! Those assertions confirmed that Nigerian voters had discovered their power – that voters in a democracy could vote for and against any political party or candidate and could remove any government once it fell short of their expectations. Curiously, such confidence in the electoral process and in the integrity and sanctity of the voters’ will was a recent development in Nigeria’s politics – during the first republic, it was next to impossible to remove a ruling party from power either at the federal or regional levels; in the second republic, it would have been laughable to hear any voter speak with confidence about voting out the National Party of Nigeria (NPN); and under President Obasanjo, I doubt that any opposition party had serious expectations that it could vote out the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) from power, especially at the federal level. It was only from 2010 under ex-President Goodluck Jonathan that voters discovered their power as a pattern of the PDP losing state elections in Anambra, Ondo, Ekiti, Edo, etc. began to unfold, culminating in Jonathan himself being defeated by Buhari in the March 2015 presidential vote.

So as I have found usual with passionate youths, the confidence that an African president may be easily thrown out of power was probably naïve, been long on passion but devoid of historical context and political insight! The shocking conduct of state governorship elections in Kogi and Bayelsa establish that at least in relation to the conduct of transparent elections, it was too early to shout “eureka”! The process in Kogi, to my mind, in fact resembles a comedy, except that INEC and those “gerrymandering” it are not joking at all! The facts suggest that having successfully concluded the Kogi governorship vote with now deceased Abubakar Audu and his running-mate James Abiodun Faleke emerging clear winners, some people having become aware of the unfortunate demise of Audu and seeking, it seems, to prevent Kogi State going to an ally of their “frenemy”, decided to abort and “re-calibrate” the process, prompting INEC to declare the elections inconclusive. The matter may now be potentially sub judice, but my opinion has consistently been that in the aftermath of Audu’s death, Faleke was the only one who could have inherited or sustained that mandate; and even if a “supplementary” election was required, which I do not concede, Faleke had to be the candidate of the APC.

The current situation in which a stranger to the original election, Yahaya Bello, became the candidate in a supplementary election, on an inchoate and defective ticket in which his purported running-mate had publicly withdrawn from the polls to the knowledge of INEC, is an absurdity that is abhorrent to law and common sense! We hope the courts will not be complicit in the emerging gerrymandering of Nigeria’s electoral processes, which may be dangerous for our democratic development.

 Opeyemi Agbaje