By now—a day after, the entire Nigerian nation must be ruminating over the dramatic outcomes from the first part of the 2023 general polls, which held yesterday with elections into the offices of the President and National Assembly legislators. With the second phase of the polls that will feature the election of state governors and members of the state assemblies, coming up in two weeks’ time (by March 11, 2023), the election fever has hardly abated. Meanwhile the symbolism of this first phase cannot be over emphasised as it marked the onset of what many had referred to as a make or break dispensation for the country – the beginning of a new Nigeria for good or otherwise; given what the country had gone through in the past seven and a half years. Details of the circumstances under consideration had been elaborated upon elsewhere with space constrains restricting this piece from delving into such for now.
Expectedly, the polls attracted fever-pitch tension with sundry, violent and often fatal skirmishes between rival political families and groups erupting in both traditional flash points and even new killing fields. For instance, as part of the build up to the polls, while anomic developments featured in virtually all parts of the country, areas like the five states of the South East and Rivers State led the spree of election related blood-letting, as they recorded several deaths resulting from the outrage by armed thugs. Hence, when seen from the general pattern of elections in Nigeria, the 2023 polls fall in sync with the typical electoral exercises in the history of the country.
Yet when it is placed in sharper comparative context, especially in terms of organization and expected dividends from it, the 2023 polls exercise offers more than the regular election run, which the country had conducted since 1923 with the chequered character of various electoral ventures – each of which manifested its own peculiarities, when specific features are reckoned with. Firstly it marked the first 100 years of general elections in Nigeria as a single political entity, since the country’s second Governor General Sir Hugh Charles conducted the first one in 1923 for the country. This fact makes the 2023 general elections the centennial polls for the country and offers significant room for taking stock as well as lessons for guiding future ventures.
However the 2023 elections are also most significant for other reasons – one of which – and perhaps the most important being that it launched the country into a new dispensation of better management of polls exercises, with well-disposed legal protocols as provided for by a new Electoral Act 2022. Courtesy of this landmark electoral legislation, the country is now better equipped with the framework for administering elections even with the advantages conferred by the marvels of technology, with the most iconic of such being the Biometric Voter Accreditation System (BIVAS). In specific terms BIVAS – with whatever imperfections that it may manifest, has offered the country the welcome capacity to guarantee the uniqueness and sanctity of the voter’s identity. For the purpose of clarification, it is without doubt that the entire complement of fault lines and glitches in past polls had their roots originating largely from the compromise of the voters’ identities, and manipulating them as faceless and undefined statistics.
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By obviating that syndrome of facelessness of voters alone, makes the mere conduct of 2023 polls an ultimate victory for the Nigerian nation. Even as vote counts at the polling units may throw up individual winners to various elective offices, their respective victories will in no way diminish what the country has gained in the polls. Rather, even their respective runs in office will be defined largely by the leverage from and shadow of the polls.
The unique selling point of the 2023 polls remains the dispensation of diminishing significantly the intervention of human idiosyncrasies, which range from vote-buying to theft of ballot boxes, thumb-printing of stolen or fake ballot papers, and falsification of otherwise valid electoral results. These and other sins not mentioned here, constitute the wide range of electoral incontinences which cumulatively constitute what Nigerians refer to as the ‘bogey of election rigging’. In fact, so pervasive have these tendencies been in the country’s electoral terrain that even as the build up to and conduct of the 2023 polls were on course, not many Nigerians give credit to the integrity of any polls in the country even with the landmark safeguards provided for in the 2023 polls.
However, just as the cliché goes that ‘Rome was not built in a day,’ it will be presumptuous to expect that all of Nigeria’s electoral sins will be wiped out by the 2023 polls—notwithstanding the elaborate processes and protocols deployed in it. Rather the country needs to settle for it as serving as a testing ground and source of insights that will guide future polls. It is at best a starting point towards building a new nation, with leaders elected on the basis of credible electoral processes.
Congratulations therefore to Nigeria, for getting it right this time, even with much room for improvement.
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