The high cost of our elections

It is not the sort of information that excites our politicians. But we must occasionally throw it in their faces if only to remind them that small brothers are watching and feeling alienated. In its issue of May 7, 2018, the Daily Trust published an informed analyses showing that our elections are among the most expensive in the world. It is, in fact, the most expensive and yet the least productive in terms of returns on investments, as in good and effective governance and the quality of representation in the legislatures.

Everything in our country is the most expensive. Yes, I know. We are an oil-rich nation. President Shehu Shagari established that fact sometime in 1983 when, worried by the rising cost of contracts in the country, he called a group of experts together and asked them to do a comparative analyses of contract costs between Nigeria and some selected African countries. I think the late Gamaliel Onosode headed the panel. He and his team did such a satisfactory piece of work that the president appointed him his special adviser on budgets.

 The experts found, as perhaps the president indeed expected that, Nigeria was bleeding itself dry because it was spending at least four or five times more than any other African country on contracts, be they roads, water and even telecoms. A contract that cost, say, one million dollars in Kenya at the time cost four or five million dollars in Nigeria. 

The president was right to be worried. The quality of the contract work in Kenya was far higher than what our country received as return on its contract investments. Whatever the president planned to do about this went with him when the soldiers came back knocking at his door at the end of 1983.

No one should be shocked that our elections are very expensive for the simple reason everything in our country is expensive. The cost of elections is often mistaken for the cost of democracy, leading many among the informed to conclude that democracy is the most expensive form of government. It may not be so if you think of the human cost of dictatorship – arbitrary decisions, the suspension of the enforcement of individual rights and, of course, the systematic rendition of political opponents.  Countries must necessarily spend money directly or indirectly on their elections because the possible alternative, a government without elections, is a pretty nasty thing to think about. 

The distinction made by the newspaper is important. It deals with the cost of elections, not the cost of democracy. No one would ever know the true cost of democracy any where in the world. It is necessarily opaque. No one ever knows for sure what a nation spends to keep its government in power. Insecurity, an ever present danger under all forms of government, is the number one item in the cost of governance, if not democracy.

So, here is what the newspaper found. Between our first general elections in 1999 and the 2015 general elections, Nigeria had a total budgetary allocation of $730.9 billion for the conduct of its elections. In the 2015 general elections, Nigeria with 67 million voters, spent $625 million. Compare that to what Canada with 17.5 million voters spent on its elections the same year: $375 million. Or, according to the newspaper, what the Republic of Benin spent on its 2016 elections: $15 million. The country has 2.7 million registered voters. India, with 815 million registered voters, spent $600 million on its 2014 elections.

Why should Nigeria, a developing country, spend more than other countries to mostly put men and women with two left hands in elective offices? Comparisons, on their own, are often misleading. To get a clearer picture of the cost of elections, it is important that we know what make up election expenses in the various countries. In the developed countries, where people demand qualitative and focused leadership, candidates spend the bulk of their election expenses selling themselves to the electorate through media advertisements and other means through which they seek to win the confidence of the people in themselves and to the political cause or causes they are fighting or promoting. 

The political culture is the defining factor in election expenses. That is why ours is a unique case among democratic nations. What do our candidates spend their money on in their bid to win or, more appropriately, capture power? Not on self-promotion because our system does not lay emphasis on what candidates seeking elective offices stand for. Not on promoting cause or causes because our cultural emphasis is on capturing, not on winning power through reasoned arguments. Not on media advertisements when they can achieve the same objective with brown envelops. 

It boils down to this: in our own case, we have an electoral system built on the strong pillars of corruption. Candidates spend their money to buy their way into power, not to win power. It is a well-oiled system with no room for messianic fervour. First in the line of what we call settlements, are self-acclaimed but acknowledged owners of the political parties. These are the feared potentates who anoint their favoured men and women. Nothing goes for nothing, not even in the land of political godfathers. Anyone seeking an elective office must first put chunks of grease on their palms. Next in line are the party men and women who help to chant the chorus of the arbitrary decisions of the godfathers.  The last in the order of settlement are the voters to whom the candidates must throw a pittance to buy their votes. 

All these expenses add up to the very high election expenses in our country. A few years ago, a friend of mine decided to seek the consent of his people to become the governor of his state. One of the possible financiers he approached told him that from his calculation, he needed at least three billion Naira to cut his way through the thickets of briberies that have become the norm in our political culture. Of course, he did not have such money. And, of course, the party moguls, seeing no Ghana-must-go bags dropped by him, turned their attention to those who properly understood that this was not a game of grammar but of money, good money.

The way I see, it can only get worse. The downside is the deteriorating quality of leadership. The emphasis on money simply means that the good and competent men and women who do not have it or godfathers willing to gamble and take a rain cheque to put them in offices and call for pay-back-time later, will never have a chance to become leaders at various levels in our country. No Obama and no Macron The current system promotes mediocrity and poor governance. Our country is the big and sad loser.

The Daily Trust, tongue in the cheek, told us the money spent or wasted on election expenses, could give us these important facilities: The N298 billion spent in 2002 could build 1,318 well-equipped primary health care centres at N22 million each; the N45.5 billion spent in 2006 could provide take-off grants to 22 universities at N2 billion each; the N111 billion spent in 2010 could build 555 units of world class kidney dialysis centres at N200 million each and the N87.8 billion spent in 2014 could build 110 cancer radiotherapy centres at N800 million each.

We do not have a choice between getting these facilities and not having elections. We must have elections. At what cost? That is the question the godfathers would be loathe to address.