IT is usually said by political scientists that in a first-past-the-post simple majority electoral system, political parties tend to pair down to two in the final analysis. Needless, so to say, for so-called reformers to try to force a two-party system into existence by decree, since in the fullness of time, the logic of simple majority voting necessarily yields a two-party system.Well, this was promptly realized in the movement to the Federal election of 1964 when two mega parties emerged. As it happened, the NNA was made up of the NPC, NNDP and the Midwest Democratic Front (MDF), while the NCNC teaming up with the AG attracted many ideological siblings to a mega party called the United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA). Something was happening to Nigerian politics that future politics would hear about.As it turned out, in spite of the cross-regional nature of the coalitions, they were viewed as representing a battle between North and South. This was the context in which the NEPU and the UMBC, the two opposition parties in the North, reached a common understanding that it was best for them to come together as Northern outfits and stand up to the NPC in the North rather than align with Southern parties as they once had done.Intriguingly, while the two Southern parties aspired to be national parties, the Northern parties, even the most radical, insisted on remaining regional parties. As parties of the North seeking to rule the rest of Nigeria, they were united by a common bond that told the story of a country, which needed to a drastic rethinking of the future, if not the past.By this time, all the parties in the political system had simply realized that they were involved in a war rather than mere politics. In the 1964 elections, the ruling party in the Federation, the NPC, showed how well it could defend the mandate received from the hands of British riggers when it declared that 88 out of the 174 candidates of the NPC were returned unopposed. In the Western Region, 30 per cent of the candidates of their allies, the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), were declared unopposed.To even up, the National Council of Nigerian Citizens, NCNC had to have its own unopposed candidates to remain in power if not in fashion in the East, after an election, which it had initially boycotted. It was an election so-well orchestrated with violence and so much normlessness that, Nnamdi Azikiwe, the President of the newly declared Republic, initially refused to call Alhaji Tafawa Balewa, the Prime Minister, to form a government. Two forms of extreme address were directed at the Great Zik, which changed his mind.First, the Prime Minister, having no faith in a constitutional resolution at the Supreme Court, resorted to pressureincluding sending soldiers to protect the State House where the President resided. The British Head of the Nigerian Army at that time, Welby Everard, obtained legal advice, which indicated that although Zik was Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, only the Prime Minister could give an order he would obey.At any rate, as Billy Dudley, foremost Nigerian political scientist, has since revealed, Zik was made to see that it required only the presentation of a statutory number of medical opinions to confirm his unfitness for his post. He relented and withdrew the rejection speech that he had already caused to be published by his own West African Pilot. He sent another, an affirmation speech, which was published in another emergency edition of the newspaper.If you ask me, that was the first coup in Nigerias history! It was a coup that hid another that would have had Welby-Everard, the British Commander, looking down the barrel of his lieutenants guns because some of them had resolved to have a showdown in favour of the President. Meanwhile, things settled down somewhat with the NCNC jettisoning its ally, the AG, to return to the more lucrative coalition with the NPC at the centre.It was a coalition that now had the rationale and format of a national government because the NNDP was part of it. But it also meant that the rigging, which had taken place during the 1964 election, had emboldened the winners. Henceforth, the peculiar slogan of the NNDP, made famous by Remi Fani-Kayode, was a resounding whether you vote for us or you do not vote for us, we shall win.Indeed, electioneering had become another name for war. Each political party in the Federation, not wanting to be completely annihilated, had begun to amass weapons either for self-defence or for assault. All of them were bent on organizing para-military groups for self-protection and doing exactly what they had imprisoned Action Group leaders forthat is, organizing para-military groups. Pure and simple: treasonable Felony.The NPC had its ready toughs called Jamiyyar Mahaukata (Sons of madmen)who had semi-official sanction to fight against Southern dominance. As they often terrorized NEPU adherents, the latter retaliated with a Positive Action Wing (PAW). The NEPU, allies of the NCNC, were quite sophisticated at it, as they made Pan-African forays to help Camerounian opposition parties to train guerrillas in East European countries. As for the United Middle Belt Congress, it was waging a guerrilla war against NPC power, which was proving impossible to quell in Tivland.In the case of the Action Group, it had had its fingers burnt trying to resist the combined terror of the ruling coalition. It appeared to be lying low. When, however, unbelievable victories were being announced for the NNDP after the 1965 regional elections in the Western Region, only those who did not know about the famed capacity for organization in the AG were surprised that the streets exploded in riots. It was the beginning of the wetie scenarios that would give the name, Wild Wild West to the Western Region. Thus was fulfilled the threat by AG leaders to make the West ungovernable if the region was taken over by untoward means.Incidentally, the situation continued to remain ungovernable until the January 15 Coup of 1966, which ended the riots.Unknown at the time, the plan of the coup makers was to release Awolowo from Prison and to make him their own leader. If he refused to accept the leadership, according to Emmanuel Ifeajunas still unpublished manuscript, which Olusegun Obasanjo has made quite a meal of in his book on Nzeogwu, they had it as a plan B to lock him up in the State House and issue decrees in his name. That would have amounted to a kind of ultimate rigging because they were planning to make a Federalist run their own idea of a unitary state.Somehow, it did not happen. This was because the five majors of January 15 were out-manoeuvred by another group, which barged into their plans. Awolowo was not released from jail. It gave him time, it can now be argued, to finish the books that would provide the constitutional proposals, which in the following years, were to stand at the centre of arguments and debates about changing the way Nigerians do electoral politics.Once the soldiers took over, there was no way to do politics electorally. The release of Awolowo by the revenge coup makers of that year merely helped to popularize his idea, published in Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution that military rule is an aberration. It was an aberration that soon became the norm.Anyhow, the soldiers soon proved it that they were more divided, more disorganized and tribalistic than the civilians whom they removed from power. Many of them, in any case, had joined the Army on the ticket of ethno-regional warlords, who were preparing for the day when they got tired of the humdrum task of rigging elections and needed guns to settle some questions once and for all. In power, they proceeded to demobilize the whole society in their own interests. They soon outgrew their own godfathers in the civilian catchment of the ruling class and took over old petty political ambitions. In every way, they were prejudging the transition to democracy that was always in the offing.Under Yakubu Gowon, the longest serving member of the militariat, a vainglorious effort that was being made to civilianize the military leaders and to form a political party for them obtruded on the transition. It was defeated without trace when General Murtala Muhammed overthrew Gowon.After the assassination of Muhammed, it fell to General Olusegun Obasanjo to complete the picture of transition that his predecessor had sketched. Was he in a position to create the framework for free and fair elections in what people looked forward to as the Second Republic Second Republic and afterMY reading is that in the Second Republic, the election that ushered in democracy was rigged deftly but quite fundamentally. The ruling military echelon under General Olusegun Obasanjo had decided on what kind of Second Republic Nigeria should have as proved by the kind of party system it allowed. Billy Dudley, chairman of the committee on political parties in the Constitution Drafting Committee, may have provided the theory for it; but it was clearly the military class that rounded off the form.Although Obasanjo would later write a book in which he proposed a one party state as the ideal for Africa, he midwifed a five party transition. Somehow, the Nigerian situation had induced circumspection that made the military bosses to accept a party system in which there would be one national party and all the others would be reduced to regional bloc parties. This was partly achieved by the manner of the registration of political parties and the careful underhand effort made to tie Nnamdi Azikiwe and Obafemi Awolowo down to their old regional turfs before the lifting of the ban on political parties.I can attest to it that, while the eventual stalwarts of the original Nigerian Peoples Party under Waziri Ibrahim and the National Party of Nigeria were criss-crossing the country, Awolowo was halted in his strides and turned back to base by security agents whenever he stepped outside the old Western Region to meet with friends and potential allies. He was turned back from Ilorin. He was turned back from Osita Agwunas palace, turned back from Enugu, and from wherever else he could be sighted before the lifting of the ban on politics. The point is that they did not expect him to, and so were not going to allow him to organize a political party that would be national in nature. The bias of the so-called umpires was dressed up in security clothes that many party stalwarts later linked to actual shortages of ballot papers, extra electoral thumb-printing of ballot, announcement of results that had no relationship to actual casting of votes and the manipulation of bureaucracy to achieve a predetermined end.Usually, many claims made by political party bureaucrats deserve to be taken with a pinch of salt but the delivery of unfairness that overtook the 1979 election became so obvious that the room was widened for belief in efforts made by the military government to influence the returns. All the same, in spite of all the effort to create a mega national party above all the others, the chosen party, the National Party of Nigeria, could not achieve the geographical spread of 25 per cent of the votes in two-thirds of the country, as required by the Constitution.In all Federal systems, including that of Germany from which Nigeria actually adapted the electoral system, a leading party in an election, which fails to meet the requisites for victory by the fraction of a percentile, goes to the next stage stipulated by the Constitution or Basic Law. By the same token, political parties, which take a subvention from the state but fail to win enough votes to justify it, are required to pay back the extra. The exiting military leaders in Nigeria could not take the risk of running the state by insisting on form and exactitude. Had they tried, either Awolowo or Waziri Ibrahim of the Great Nigeria Peoples Party could have overturned even the most carefully laid plans at the Electoral College. Who knowsThe killer punch came from the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO), which was importuned to begin a process of reversing all the legal interpretations on the basis of which it had once claimed that twelve two-thirds of the states in the country was 13. Now, twelve two-thirds simply became so much less in theory and fact. This proved the bias of the military bosses even before it was shown that they over-determined the court processes to ensure that the verdicts followed their partisan tack. Ultimately, a loyal Supreme Court was empanelled under circumstances that were so thoroughly driven as to return a verdict so messily indefensible in law that the judges openly admitted that they did not want the judgment ever to be cited as a precedent. One of the judges argued that there was substantial compliance with the electoral law enough for a new President to be declared. The position hedged the order of values in the love of technicalities that were to continue to muck up Nigerias judicial system. As for the Supreme Court itself, it merely contributed by that judgment to the predilection for compromise that has become a ruling ethic across Nigerian politics.Down the road, another Supreme Court judgement would add fuel to compromise by contending that non-serialization of ballot papers makes no difference to the achievement of free and fair elections. Which does not say what may be taken as substantial compliance between an area boy and a philosopher king.At any rate, given the manner in which the Second Republic took off, it was no surprise that when it came to the turn of the declared winners of the 1979 election to organize a general election, they simply went the way of all flesh. Their 1983 general elections offered some of the most gory spectacles of electoral malpractices. The core feature, which over-clouded all others was the use of special mobile police corps, the notorious kill and go, which acted outside the normal code of the police force. They acted as private thugs of the party in power. Everywhere. Except for Ondo State where the rigging of the gubernatorial elections sparked off a decisive riot, the rest of the country was literally so pulverizingly conquered that people were reaching for divine intervention.Such uneasy calm attended the victory of the National Party of Nigeria in that election that the military coupthe divine interventionwhich removed the government a few months later was seen as a saving grace aimed at preventing a national uprising that could have caused a major power bloc to look on darkness. Why allow feckless incumbents in office to jeopardize ethno-regional power out of sheer electoral stupidity IT is of interest that the new military leaders, Generals Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon, were indifferent, if not hostile, to the necessity to transit to democracy. They were, however, instrumental to starting a trend in government response to finance of political parties, which continues to have unresolved implications for electoral politics. In their bid to sanitize the nation, they took to giving gargantuan jail terms to politicians, not just for usual corruption, but also for enriching their political parties. One would have thought that they would enunciate some principle or programme for the finance of political parties that could guide political money into the future. It never came. Decades after, it does not appear to be on the way!This may be why in 2011, with Muhammadu Buhari now making a third pitch for the highest office as a democrat, the issue of how the parties make money is shrouded in secrecy and mystery. It would seem to be just some side issue. Except that how politicians make money for their campaigns determine too much the kind of politics they play. This was proved quite grossly during the endless transition to democracy that General Ibrahim Babangida unleashed after over-throwing General Buhari and his unsmiling coterie.General Babangida simply turned the finance of political parties into a matter of out of pocket expenses that the Head of State makes in aid of friends intending to be candidates. He set himself up as the hub for the distribution of largesse rather than follow a prescribed law. At the end of the day, had he not annulled the June 12, 1993 presidential election, which was won by MKO Abiola of the Social Democratic Party, he would have deserved a prize for turning a perfect swindle into a national order.It was left to General Sani Abacha, Babangidas generally acclaimed Khalifah, to complete the mayhem of the endless transition. Abacha compounded the nightmare already well begun by his predecessor by refusing to revalidate the annulled election. He locked the presumed winner away in detention and set out on a demobilization spree of the Nigerian population in his own way. He invented phantom coups to remove claimants after his throne and sent murder squads after his perceived enemies or those who appeared too determined to truncate his rule.His pacification plans included bringing all civil society organizations together under one umbrella so that, given the leader-centred nature of such concentration of power, there would be no need to do business with diversity, only a unitary inclination. But the plan did not quite take off. Its last gasp, before Abacha himself succumbed to a mysterious exit, came after all five political parties in the country reached a very alchemic consensus to have only one candidate, the dictator himself, as the presidential candidate.Bola Ige, very promptly, long before he became Obasanjos Minister of Power and Steel and then Attorney General of the Federation, had quipped that the five political parties were five fingers of one leprous hand. Unfortunately, those who murdered him on December 23, 2001, did not let him see how further down in the Fourth Republic more duplicitous ways would be found to realize the full measure of Abachas paradigm in one behemoth of a political party called the Peoples Democratic party. Otherwise, General Abacha, it now seems, was merely a sorcerers apprentice, working according to a very illustrious agenda already provided by retired General Olusegun Obasanjo whom he had put in jail for a coup attempt.Once released from jail after Abachas death, the great lover of a one-party state got his chance to put his vision to work. He got it from the largesse of a military bequest of power in 1999. It is important to state that his emergence was a cooperative job between the exiting military managers of the last gasp of the transition and an ethno-regional group, which was convinced, first, that only a child of the brides chamber, a soldier, should be allowed to take over power, and second, that the soldier must come, as a placating measure, from the zone of the aggrieved opponents of the annulment of MKO Abiolas June 12 victory.Obasanjo, from the same hometown as Abiola, truly fitted the bill. As if turning a planned coup against the electorate into a very normal science, the testimony of Professor Jubril Aminu, a sharp-shooting gentleman of impeccable pedigree in Nigerias power nexus, has revealed that the 4th Republic was the product of a signed undertaking by the President-to-be. Of course, President Obasanjo said he did not sign any undertaking. But he has not said that he was not given one to sign.What may be added, given all the malpractices that went with that election, is that in 1999, the failed presidential candidate, Chief Olu Falae, before he was harassed to give up the fight, had a good chance of proving that Olusegun Obasanjo did not win even if he could not prove it that he, Olu Falae, won the election. This is another way of admitting that we live in a society in which out of sheer lack of will or due to moral and mental lethargy, we all acquiesced to being governed by people who never won an election. It is the case of a nation that has become adept at allowing rapes to take place and swallowing phlegm in the name of whichever deity we worship.As it turned out, under President Obasanjo in the Fourth Republic, the organizing principle of electoral politics was threshed along the same lines as that of the Elder Remi Fani-Kayode in the First Republic. The difference is that instead of the quip whether you vote or you do not vote for we shall win, the latter-day principle as magisterially put and with impunity by Alhaji Adamu Ciroma is: if we won an election organized by the military, how could we lose an election that we ourselves organized. Activation of this principle was very much the soul of business under Obasanjos control of the PDP.On top of the agenda, other political parties were treated as dispensable in the electoral process. A one-party dominant state was so openly canvassed that the destabilization of other political parties became the norm of politics. The electoral commission was routinely starved of funds. Thus, it was made impossible for local government elections to be held throughout the federation. Incidentally, local government elections could have proved the hollowness of the victory that brought his government into office. The biggest party in Africa feared the electorate so much that a principal plank of the democratic structure of the Federation was simply allowed to wither. Worse, all the electoral malpractices that had featured in all the other elections in Nigerias history were simply spruced up and then emboldened.Specific to 2003: people who never registered as candidates were declared as winners. A governor stayed in office for more than three of a four-year term before whistle-blowing found an anchor in a Supreme Court verdict to overturn his stolen mandate. This, the case of the Anambra State proto-Governor, Dr. Chris Ngige, became celebrated because the prime culprit, Chris Uba, confessed.He said: We, the PDP, did not win the 2003 election in Anambra State. I have gone to church to confess. The election had no document. I called the result before midnight. I gave INEC money and asked them to announce the result. Then on another occasion, he said: In the presence of the President of Nigeria, I asked Dr. Ngige whether he actually won the election. He (Ngige) confirmed he did not win. The President drove us out from that point (TheNews, Jan 10, 2005).It told a lot about the level of desuetude that the Fourth Republic had sunk that Chris Ngige, the gubernatorial beneficiary of that rigged election, who had been harassed and almost crated out of power before the Courts took him out, also looked the president in the eye and said your election and my election were rigged on the same table. And, all that the president could do was to say Get Out of my sight. They got out of his sight but they did not get out of the system.No law enforcement officer had the temerity to slap a charge on them for so brazenly admitting that they committed the equivalent of a coup détat by determining those who could rule outside the rules and the Constitution. And, nobody was punished for setting a whole state virtually ablaze in order that a purloiner of mandates might have his way. By the time a correction was effected by the Supreme Court, enough had happened to contribute to the truism that the rigging of an election is possible only if the Executive in power is determined to use it for self.
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