'Bloody Lagosians!'

In Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial melting point, the mood preceding the elections was anxious. Buoyed by the dark memories of the #EndSARS protests and the incongruent legacy of the All Progressives Congress’s 24-year political hold on Lagos, both old and young rallied together to perform their civic obligation as guaranteed by Section 77 (2) of the 1999 Constitution. However, the promise of a free and fair election as pledged by INEC chairman, Professor Mahmoud Yakubu, was not effectively delivered to these voters.

In pictures and videos shared across social media on the day of the presidential election, an array of Lagosians expressed their exasperation at having to idle around polling units before INEC officials arrived with the election materials and waiting while voting, though riddled with delays, began. Enthusiastic voters complained of the general tardiness of the election procedure, which resulted in a backlog of prospective voters in states like Bayelsa and Edo, whose citizens voted the following day. What’s more, the commission’s Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IREV) both suffered malfunctions supposedly due to the workload placed on them. These issues are despite the commission having enough time to prepare for the elections and having earmarked about ₦355 billion specifically for the civic exercise.

Beyond INEC’s logistical incompetence, both elections in Lagos State brought to the fore a salient affair that has pervaded the state for a long time now: citizen suppression at the polls. At the presidential polls, video footage made the rounds showing certain extra-state actors bullying, harassing and intimidating voters against voting for any presidential or legislative candidate outside the ruling APC. Two weeks later, electoral observers of the state elections in Lagos were no less inundated by stark scenes of cross-cutting voter suppression and election violence at the gubernatorial polls.

‘Today we came to cast our votes as good citizens, but then before we knew it we had thugs came in here with bottles and canes’, one young voter disclosed to me. ‘They kept on saying things like if you’re not voting APC get out of here because we’re going to beat you and kill you.’

These observations make a mockery of Lagos’ teeming democracy, especially since the ruling political actors in the state have a demonstrated history of unnerving voters both at pre-election and election points. In 2018, there was widespread voter disenfranchisement at the APC primary election which sought to unmake then-Lagos State governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, as the party’s gubernatorial candidate in the 2019 election. In the 2015 and 2019 state elections, there were reports of targeted ethnic remarks and voter suppression attempts, especially against Igbos. Both years saw concerted efforts by APC’s political apparatus to install Ambode (2015) and Babajide Sanwo-Olu (2019) as the governors of Lagos. This dystopian political culture is more disconcerting given Lagos’ long-standing public relations move as a ‘mega city’ deserving of attracting the best global commercial investments.

The unchecked culture of voter suppression in Lagos doesn’t seem to begin or end at polling units. On 27 February 2023, newsrooms reported that hoodlums attacked shops and businesses of many Lagosians of Igbo extraction who were believed to have voted for the Labour Party’s Peter Obi, an ‘Igbo candidate’. The attack came after INEC declared Obi, as the winner of the presidential votes cast in Lagos state. Officers of the Nigerian Army had to be driven in to quell the ensuing tension, but this was not before Ben Hundeyin, the Public Relations Officer of the Lagos State Police Command, further incensed the situation by stating that ‘Igbo traders’ purportedly reneged on a stay-at-home agreement, hence the attack on their livelihoods. The untoward ethnic profiling of Igbo traders by Hundeyin deservedly drew the ire of many social media users who questioned the truth of his assertion. Hundeyin’s comments, among others, revealed deep-seated tribalism present amongst a sizable section of the security and political hierarchy within Lagos State.