Things will have to change across the board if we want a democracy that is truly representative in nature and reflects what the people want. Budgeting a trillion naira for elections whose conduct, more often than not, erodes the spirit and letter of our constitution and electoral laws is not democracy; we are only funding and underwriting the ambitions of desperate, depraved, uninspiring and unscrupulous characters.
Nigeria’s politics, especially in the fourth republic, isn’t known for its ideological richness. Politics is not rooted in the quality exchange of ideas, and power is not attained through riveting intellectual discourse or the superiority of knowledge. Manifestoes are nothing more than a schiff of inconsequential documents that hardly matter in the grand scheme. Politics and power, for the most part, are for those who pack enough punch to bludgeon their political rival and opponents on their treacherous road to power. Politics here is a byword for violence. It’s a dog-eat-dog contest. People who seek to do the right thing and toe the path of honour are soon to realise that the system is not designed to entrench altruism and legality and deepen the rule of law.
One reason that has been adduced for this repugnant, regressive and viscerally repulsive phenomenon is how people get into public office. In recent years, the assertion that how the nation’s election umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), conducts elections has contributed to the many malaise and socio-economic challenges the country is grappling with has dominated national discourse.
One of the intrinsic elements of democracy is periodic elections, which allow citizens to pick those who will govern them and preside over the affairs of the state. The best way to put a democratic nation in jeopardy is to frustrate the ability of the efforts of the electorate to choose their leaders in a free, fair, credible election or subvert their electoral choices and will through underhanded tactics. But this has largely been the problem with elections in Nigeria in the last decade.
Aside from the growing disillusionment of Nigerians with elections and other democratic obligations, the huge cost of conducting these chaotic and often massively rigged elections that then produce people who are unfit to occupy public office has been a source of jarring concern for many keen followers of Nigeria’s uninspiring politics. People are now questioning if it is prudent to continue expending humongous scarce resources on elections where the umpire won’t even adhere to its own guidelines and rules.
On Friday, INEC announced that the commission has received over N500 billion out of the amount it budgeted for the 2027 general elections. The body’s Commissioner for Information and Voter Education, Mohammed Haruna, who made the announcement said the amount received so far represents 50 per cent of the budget allocated for the next polls. What this means is that the commission is spending over a trillion dollars to conduct the general elections. The commission spent N355 billion to conduct the 2023 general election but it cannot be said that the outcome of the election justifies the massive amount the electoral umpire purportedly used to conduct it.
It would be recalled that the commission claimed its result viewing portal, which it had assured voters would allow for real-time uploading and viewing of results, suffered a glitch midway through the 2023 presidential election. To date, no convincing official reason has been given for this ‘glitch’. This is a system and infrastructure that the commission spent billions of naira to put in place only to be sabotaged at the critical stage of the election.
Now we are planning to spend a trillion naira on the 2027 election, three times the amount we spent conducting the 2023 general election, which was not only controversial but largely considered by many observers as fraudulent. The problem here is that nothing much has changed in the way INEC conducts its affairs since 2023, if anything this has grown progressively worse since then. So more money for it will not likely translate to improved and better efficiency, discipline, coordination, accountability and above all transparency. Already, we have an INEC chairman whose integrity and character leave so much to be desired.
There is also the question of whether these figures are massively inflated, that’s not the elephant in the room. The real issue here is the credibility of the elections that these funds are purportedly spent on. Not many Nigerians will raise an eyebrow if they are certain their choices at the polls reflect their will. People won’t be up in arms wondering why a nation with a lean purse is spending staggering amounts to count elections that will be violently rigged to produce a predetermined result.
Things will have to change across the board if we want a democracy that is truly representative in nature and reflects what the people want. Budgeting a trillion naira for elections whose conduct, more often than not, erodes the spirit and letter of our constitution and electoral laws is not democracy; we are only funding and underwriting the ambitions of desperate, depraved, and unscrupulous characters.
For this to stop, there must be a deliberate and conscious effort to demonitise our politics so that people start seeing it less as a one-way ticket to sudden wealth but more as an opportunity to serve the people. There is also a need to audit INEC and reconstitute its leadership so that it is led by an honest, strong-willed, disciplined and uncompromising character but for this to happen the president must be stripped of the power to pick and appoint INEC chairman. But these suggestion reads more like the idealistic musing of a naive nationalist than the practical thoughts of a realist. Our current crop of politicians and leaders will not implement a reform or initiate a change that will bring about these changes as it will mean losing their ability to continue the assault on our democracy and weakening the institutions that underpin it.
But whatever the case is, we cannot afford to continue this path of nihilism and self-sabotage where we spent an insane amount of money to conduct elections that lack credibility, fairness and transparency and let people who have no business in holding public offices impose themselves on the people. If we don’t change course soon, it will end destructively for everyone participating in the charade.
