2023 polls in rearview

 Nigeria’s 2023 general election has come and gone, bequeathing interesting insights into how far the country has come in electoral democracy. National elections into the presidency and national assembly chambers held on 25th February, and polls into governorship offices in 28 states and houses of assembly in all 36 states of the federation on 18th March. Governorship election did not take place in Anambra, Bayelsa, Edo, Ekiti, Imo, Kogi, Osun and Ondo states because those states are off the general election cycle. By now, races in most electoral constituencies have been called except in Adamawa and Kebbi states where the governorship contests were ruled inconclusive by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) pending re-run polls in some micro-constituencies, and legislative races in about 13 states where supplementary polls are impending. INEC has announced Saturday, 15th April, as the date for the outstanding re-run and supplementary polls.

Perspectives differ on how to rate the just-concluded elections, and it is healthy for democracy when views diverge as they do. But there are unmistakable gains that the 2023 polls signpost, just as there are helpful learning curves. 

To begin with, that the electoral commission pulled through successfully with conducting the elections nationwide is emblematic of how fairly rooted the electoral culture has gotten in Nigeria – yes, with all associated flaws. Lest we forget, a thick cloud of insecurity overhung the approach of the polls in some parts of the country, in particular the Southeast and some areas of the North, such that INEC a couple of times voiced its unease about the prospects of a safe environment for elections to hold. In the Southeast there was the fear of rampaging separatist agitators, while in North there was the fear of bandits and terrorists who had repeatedly staged sporadic attacks. By standard practice, elections hold even in remote nooks and crannies where evil actors could take advantage of the remoteness to obstruct the polling process. When INEC rolled out the 2023 elections, however, it did so in every corner of the country where the electorate had the will to vote. 

Of course, there were pockets of violence in some places and elections had to be called off, suspended or cancelled by the electoral body. But that did not efface the larger picture of simultaneous conduct of the polls across the length and breadth of this country, which bore testimony to the effectiveness of collaboration between INEC and the security agencies. Police Inspector-General Usman Alkali Baba has been frontal in appropriating praise for the service’s personnel as pertains to safe conduct of the elections, and you can’t blame him because the police is the lead agency in election security. But it wasn’t about the police alone. Going forward, the collaboration between INEC and security agencies on the platform of the Inter-agency Consultative Committee on Election Security (ICCES) needs to be further strengthened to standardise provisioning of safe environment for polls in the country.

Another positive indicator from the 2023 elections is how steady-handed election management has become. No matter what political gladiators who obviously are lacking in the sportsmanly spirit say, Nigerian elections have become genuinely contested and outcomes dispassionately moderated by INEC. Gone are the days of barefaced electoral heists, either as perpetrated by political actors or with facilitation by the electoral body – those days when results were announced from the blues without the faintest inkling among the populace on how they were arrived at. We may have forgotten too soon that this is the same country where the electoral umpire at the national level and the state level duelled openly over the result of the Ekiti State governorship re-run poll in 2009, which expectedly did not stand up to judicial scrutiny. Nowadays, politicians and interested members of the public do their own aggregation of emerging results simultaneously with INEC and even challenge the commission’s math. We have come a long way! Technology became a gamechanger since 2015 and is more formidably so now, while the electoral body itself has become an unyielding bulwark against manoeuvres to pervert the process. 

“A positive indicator from the 2023 elections is how steady-handed election management has become.”

Challenges are inevitable in sociological projects, which elections are. But the commission confronts and responds to emergent challenges as preserves and consolidates gains made in the electoral process. The 25th February polls, for instance, were hobbled by logistical challenges that the commission owned up to and promised to redress in the state elections; these included late deployment of polling personnel and materials and, consequently, late commencement of elections in many polling units across the country. In the interval following the national elections, the electoral body recalibrated its operations and recorded clearly discernible improvements in logistics for the state elections. The Biometric Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) device worked better and most polling units opened on time – some, before time – on election day as acknowledged by domestic and foreign observers.

The most vexing issue with the national polls was the technical hitch that hamstrung the electoral body from uploading polling unit results onto the INEC Results Viewing (IReV) portal as it had promised, and which it explained as a function of scaling up the portal from a platform for managing off-season state elections to one for managing nationwide general election. But even that challenge was remedied in the 18th March elections as many polling unit results got uploaded onto the IReV portal soon after voting ended. When partisans now fight furious that the credibility of the national polls was fundamentally impaired by the malfunction of IReV portal, you could ask whether their agents at the polling units were not obliged a copy of INEC’s EC8 form that was to be scanned by the commission’s presiding officer and uploaded onto the portal, and whether the figures they observed collated at the various constituency levels differed from what the party agents had. To be clear, the IReV portal bears only polling unit results by which interested persons may crosscheck that what transpired at the polling units is accurately reflected in INEC’s records. It isn’t a platform for displaying collated results as partisans made it seem. 

Upsets are a reliable index of umpire neutrality in the conduct of elections anywhere, and we have these aplenty in the just-concluded general election. We can cite only a few in the space available here. Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) was declared duly elected as President-elect by INEC, though not without nettling irritation by upstart Labour Party (LP) that won the presidential duel in Lagos State where the ruling APC is deeply entrenched. But neither should LP have presumed on that outcome, as it  did in sheer naivety, for its chances in the governorship contest where APC firmly held turf. Opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) won the presidential race in President Muhammadu Buhari’s home state of Katsina but was cut to size in the governorship race. Likewise did APC win the presidential duel in Zamfara State but lost the state in governorship race to PDP despite incumbency contest. In Sokoto, however, it took over the state in governorship despite the outgoing governor being the campaign arrowhead for PDP presidential bid, and despite PDP winning the presidential duel three weeks earlier. The reverse of the Sokoto scenario happened in Plateau State which APC lost to PDP despite the outgoing governor being the chief campaigner of the APC presidency. In Kano State, the elections settled a long-running supremacy duel between Governor Abdullahi Ganduje of ruling APC and his estranged predecessor, Senator Rabiu Musa Kwakwanso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), in favour of the latter. And in the Southeast and Southsouth where LP had a sweepstake in the national elections, it barely made an impression in the state polls. How could anyone say elections that produced outcomes as these weren’t credible?!

A downside to the 2023 polls was the voter turnout said to be about the lowest in Nigeria’s electoral history. Out of 93.47million registered voters, only 24.9million persons – representing 26.72 percent – voted in the national elections. Compared to 34.74 percent voter turnout in 2019, there was 8.03 percent decline in 2023. And that was against the backdrop of 52.3 percent turnout in 1999, 69 percent in 2003, 57.5 percent in 2007, 53.7 percent in 2011 and 43.7 percent in 2015. Despite a bourgeoning voter roll, Nigeria has the lowest voter turnout in Africa and we should all be worried – political actors more than the rest of us.