After the Ekiti governorship election, where it was bested by the All Progressives Congress (APC), the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) raised a terse allegation that it was outdone in that election by vote buying by its conqueror. The noise was so pervasive that it soon became a national anthem. Yea, Vote buying has become a new demon riddling the country’s electoral system and the survival of the country’s democracy was rested on crippling this anomie! Yea, it sounded good as that frenzy trended! Sure, the PDP must find a convenient alibi for its failure. It couldn’t fault the transparent manner the election was conducted. It couldn’t compare the election with the notorious brigandage it did in Ekiti in 2014 whose noxious trails still ricochet today. It can’t even see the similarity between the election and what PDP had been dishing to Nigerians as elections when its dubious reign lasted. So vote-buying suddenly ceased to be one of the ageless acrid tools in PDP’s multifarious election-rigging archive. It became a new invention and the entire country suddenly started belching hot airs against vote buying and efforts were made to pin the life of the country on it.
But then, days before the Ekiti election, visual images of PDP supporters and faithful queuing up in Ekiti government house and other public places to receive handouts to vote for the defeated PDP candidate were all over the social media. More gruesomely, several Ekiti indigenes advertised the transfer of cash to their bank accounts to sway them to vote for the PDP candidate and these were very prominent reportages leading to the conduct of the election on July 14. No one asked the PDP how it managed through these indicting evidences to start a fresh campaign against alleged vote buying to which it put no verifiable indexes to prove that its opponents were more culpable than it in that allegation. But an impressionable citizenry eagerly queued up to this clap trap and a frenzy of outbursts against vote buying started.
Again, it was in the same Ekiti where quite bizarre forms of inducements were used in 2014 to justify PDP’s outright ventilation of the state governorship election. It was then we added ‘stomach infrastructure’ to the rich lexicon of Nigerian electoral contests. This refers to the multifarious inducements the PDP unleashed on citizens of Ekiti so as to justify a farcical removal of a hard working governor and installing of an alternative that excelled in his acerbic and corrosive values. This anomie was christened stomach infrastructure and the impression was created that all a candidate needs to do during election is to deploy cash, rice, salt, clothes and other such freebies to get voters to his side. Pray, what else is vote buying?
Added to these, in the history of electioneering in Nigeria, no party had been more complicit in employing all manners of subterfuge to buy and cajole Nigerians to patronize it during elections than PDP. The bizarre monetization of the 2015 elections trumps all known plots to buy and seduce Nigerian electorates during elections. It got so bad that an incumbent president had to directly share foreign currencies and all manners of privileges to Nigerians on the streets so as to get their votes. The 2015 elections remain one of the most monetized elections in world electoral history and PDP reveled in this indecent lasciviousness as it lasted. It was a period corruption was unabashedly laundered for purposes of swaying voters and it was as tolerable to PDP mandarins and supporters as it lasted.
So how come PDP suddenly harped on ‘vote-buying’ as soon as it lost Ekiti election? Why was it that Nigerians pretended they never knew about this malaise even with the notorious 2015 case until the PDP started that deliberate hoax after it was trounced in Ekiti? How come many Nigerians displayed such hypocritical mien that shows they were jus