By: Ikeogu Oke[1]
Email: ikeogu.oke@gmail.com; Tel: +234-(0)8034531501
By progress, I mean that genuine sense of improvement that comes with
comparing what is to what used to be, or where one is to where one used to
be. And with a past in which our former President, Olusegun Obasanjo,
openly declared the 2007 presidential election “a do or die affair”, and
with the election-related threats recently flung at our national
consciousness by various leaders of the All Progressive Congress (APC),
the peaceful conduct of the June 21, 2014, gubernatorial election in Ekiti
State is a major index of political and moral progress for the Nigerian
state.
As if to complement the “do or die” declaration by former President
Obasanjo, Chief Bola Tinubu, the APC leader, as reported in a publication
on page 60 of Saturday Sun of June 14, 2014, had said: “They are already
planning to rig elections but we are ready to protect your votes… It is
going to be rig and roast. We are prepared not to go to court but to drive
you out…”
As if Chief Tinubu’s prediction of electoral malpractices and promise to
respond by roasting vote riggers was not chilling enough, Mallam Nasir
El-Rufai, another APC chieftain, was quoted in the same publication as
having said: “The next election is likely to be violent and many people
are likely going to die. And the only alternative to get power is to take
it by force…”
So not only can we compare what happened in Ekiti to the “do or die” era
of election conduct where, having made the threat, President Obasanjo made
good his word by delivering an election that was marred by massive
irregularities even by the admission of the candidate declared winner, the
late President Umaru Yar’ Adua who, ironically, still went to court to
defend what therefore amounted to an underserved mandate.
We can also compare the Ekiti election to a scenario where, going by the
said utterances of Chief Tinubu and Mallam El-Rufai, some of our leaders
expect us to be headed as a nation with regard to elections and their
outcome. That destination, as it were, is a situation characterised by
massive vote rigging and other serious electoral malpractices and response
with violence by those who feel cheated by such irregularities, as
evidenced by the APC’s pledge not to seek redress in court but to take the
law into its hands by implementing a “rig and roast” policy that hints at
a plan to burn suspected electoral offenders as an alternative to
electoral litigation.
In passing, I have wondered if, in enunciating the “rig and roast” policy
and in declaring that “we are prepared not to go to court”, Chief Tinubu
gave any thought to the implication of such utterances for a leader who is
proposing his as an alternative leadership platform to what we currently
have, especially in comparison to President Goodluck Jonathan having once
declared that his election is not worth the shedding of anyone’s blood? It
prompts one to wonder if those who speak like the APC leader believe any
nation of peace-loving people would prefer any leader who sees violence as
a proper route to power to one who does not.
But Ekiti must have surprised even such prophets of electoral violence;
what with the rare grace exhibited by the loser and incumbent Governor,
Kayode Fayemi, by conceding victory to his opponent, Ayo Fayose, and the
general acclaim the election has received for being free, fair, and devoid
of violence. And having not roasted anyone in connection with the election
as it vowed to do in response to vote rigging, the APC has invariably
conceded that it was free of rigging.
My mission in this piece, however, is not to condemn the APC for
advocating electoral violence as evidenced by Chief Tinubu’s “rig and
roast” policy, though I expect anyone who associates good leadership with
civil utterance and conduct to be shocked by the policy and the
behavioural pattern its advocates, even as an antidote to vote rigging – a
wrong we generally agree should be abolished from our lives as Nigerians
which, as the Ekiti election has proven, can be eliminated without
recourse to violence.
Rather, my mission is to urge us to look at Ekiti and see that there is
hope for a better Nigeria. That that better Nigeria can be built by
Nigerians, since the Ekiti election was not conducted by foreigners, and
any role non-Nigerian elements like international observers might have
played in the election was insignificant compared to the roles played by
the Nigerian government and institutions like the Independent National
Electoral Commission (INEC) an the security agencies to ensure its proper
conduct.
It is also to urge us to see how the doomsday prediction that our country
would disintegrate come 2015 can be compared to the prediction of
electoral violence prior to the Ekiti polls. And that such prediction,
like the one of electoral violence, cannot come true if our people,
government and institutions conduct themselves responsibly, as in the
Ekiti polls. That, in all, our destiny is in our grasp.
It is equally to urge us to forgive those who advocate violence as a means
of gaining political power, who may have been sobered by the Ekiti
experience and the attendant lesson that Nigerians can conduct themselves
so well as to deflate their negative intent and expectations.
The End
[1]Oke, a writer, poet, and public affairs analyst, wrote from Abuja.