To Whom ‘Too Much’ is Given

Ahead of the 25 February 2023 presidential election, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) announced that 93,469,008 eligible voters had registered to vote. It was the highest registration level in Nigeria’s political history and an indication of citizens’ interest in being part of the transition to a new presidency (since, by law, President Muhammadu Buhari was ineligible to participate after his two-term administration).

Compared to 2019 when the number of registered voters was about 84 million, the 2023 spike in the interest in politics was arguably due to the large number of young Nigerians who registered to participate in the electoral process; the same demography that for a long time has been accused of voter apathy. INEC’s data revealed that 37,060,399 or 39.65 per cent of the eligible voters were between the ages of 18 and 34, making young Nigerians INEC’s largest age group.

The 2023 election has also been the most expensive in Nigeria’s history—the electoral commission spent N305 billion, a 62 per cent increase over what was spent on the 2019 general elections. The reason for this was not only to improve the electoral process but to also make the system more credible through the introduction of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and INEC Result Viewing (IREV) portal.

These technologies were expected to provide fool-proof authentication of voters and near real-time uploading of results to the point where electorates would have been able to do their own computation and calculation of votes even before the official declaration of results at the INEC collation centre in Abuja.

Instead, when compared to other polls in the past in terms of budget, logistical deployment and expectations of the electorate, the presidential and National Assembly elections were a failure in all parameters. Perhaps the only area INEC got right was conducting the election on the scheduled date, a situation that would have likely been forgiven if the election had been postponed to guarantee a more successful exercise.

The vote count during the presidential election was the lowest in more than 40 years especially when compared to the number of eligible voters. INEC accepted 24 million voted in the 2023 election representing less than 30 per cent of voters. Four years ago, valid votes were 34.7 per cent of the total expected votes.

The low number of votes during the 2023 presidential election also meant that the ultimate winner, Bola Tinubu, who scored 8.79 million, had the lowest number of votes for a presidential election winner in Nigeria since the country returned to democratic rule in 1999. Each winner since 1999 had scored not less than 12 million votes. In 2011, Buhari, despite scoring 12 million votes, lost to Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

When put into further perspective, Kenya’s presidential election which took place in August 2022 had about two-thirds (65 per cent) of the electorate participate in the exercise with the winner, William Ruto, finishing ‘with four-fifths the number of ballots that Tinubu received despite Nigeria having four times as many eligible voters’ according to Bloomberg.

In the 1983 presidential election which was won by Shehu Shagari before a military coup toppled his administration, 25.4 million Nigerians participated in the election, a number that is still higher than the 2023 turnout. Nigeria’s population in 1983 was around 80 million, a number has almost tripled in 2023.

Despite INEC’s repeated assurance that there would be no going back in the use of BVAS and IREV, the commission failed to live up to its promises and expectations. As of 05 March 2023, one week after the election, only 92 per cent of the results had been uploaded to IREV while Nigerians questioned the integrity of the information on the portal.

The election was also featured violence and ballot box snatching. There were reports of disruption of voting exercises in different parts of Nigeria, with one incident widely reported in Lagos of a woman who was stabbed in the face by thugs.

So what went wrong? Why did a record number of Nigerians express willingness to participate in the 2023 presidential election through voter registration yet fail to exercise their civic responsibility?

INEC had promised to correct all the electoral anomalies that characterized voting in the past and its new technology was expected to improve public confidence in the transparency of the election. Instead, cases of overvoting, despite the use of BVAS, were rife forcing elections to be cancelled in some polling units. Even before the results were officially announced, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, the leading candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party and Labour Party respectively rejected the election and vowed to go to court to ‘reclaim their stolen mandates’.

INEC had failed to deliver on its promises to ensure a credible election and preserve the sanctity of voting, the main process that differentiates between a military dictatorship and a civilian government.

ELECTORAL MALPRACTICE AND THE SANCTITY OF DEMOCRACY

In fragile democracies, election periods are delicate as they raise uncertainty about the sustenance of representative governance. It is in the period after elections that most coups take place as the military leadership in the guise of stabilizing the nation takes control of the government.

An election is a defining exercise that separates a civilian government from a military-led one. The more credible the election process is, the more enhanced its democratic legacy is. An election that lacks credibility, however, bears little difference from military rule as both are characterized by the imposition of unpopular leadership.

In 1983, following a military coup that prematurely ended the second-term administration of Shagari, Buhari who took over as military head of state said in his first speech:

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To Whom ‘Too Much’ is Given

ELECTORAL MALPRACTICE AND THE SANCTITY OF DEMOCRACY

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