2015 presidential election: Jonathan’s unviable rigging options

The reason is simple – the five years of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan’s Presidency has destroyed the basis of Nigeria’s development – economically, politically and security wise. On all the three counts, Nigerians are worse off today than they were in 2011. They thus see the president and his party like the biblical harlots whose lips […]

The reason is simple – the five years of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan’s Presidency has destroyed the basis of Nigeria’s development – economically, politically and security wise. On all the three counts, Nigerians are worse off today than they were in 2011. They thus see the president and his party like the biblical harlots whose lips in the beginning spit forth words as sweet as dripping honeycomb, with voices as soft as olive oil, but in the end turn out to be as bitter as crocodile bile, and as poisonous.
The promises and words of the incumbent to Nigerians in the past and the bitter result on the ground today attest to this analogy. This has made President Jonathan unpopular in the country, especially in the northern states. Having failed to halt the elections and now virtually too late for the president to turn over a new leaf and run a good government, the following seem to be the only options left for the government to operate upon – i.e., lying to the electorate, scapegoating the opposition, bribing stakeholders, intimidating voters, excluding strong opponents, rigging the elections and falsifying the results. But these are unviable options, as shown below.
Because the government in Nigeria has control on the mass media, lying to the public is very easy. What is more, since ignorance and illiteracy are widespread in our communities, electorate usually cannot tell the difference between truth and lies, especially when said officially. But the good thing is that officials of the regime have been lying for years, and since these lies never bore fruitful results, most Nigerians today discount everything the government says. Besides, with a strong opposition decoding these lies to the electorates this strategy has actually become a minus to the PDP’s campaign. So for the regime to count on this is to count on nothing.   
Similarly, over the years, the PDP-led government made much scapegoats of the opposition on virtually all its nationwide failures. The failure on security and insurgency is blamed on so-called northern opposition who ‘vowed to make the country ungovernable’ for President Jonathan; corruption is being blamed on the opposition who ‘are determined to discredit the regime because corruption did not start with Jonathan’; fuel scarcity is been put on the opposition because ‘they want to sabotage the government to score cheap political points’; etc. For a time it worked for the regime, but overtime people came to realize it is the government that is actually ineffective since it failed to bring its ‘saboteurs’ to book or bring forth any concrete evidence of their ‘sabotage’. So as the elections days draw close, scapegoating the opposition cannot help the incumbent – Nigerians now know better!
As President Jonathan’s government delivered little in its 6 years in power, it is depending heavily on using bribery to buy votes. This option worked for it in the 2011 presidential election. There were two modes of bribery then used, and now depended upon by the regime – wholesale and retail. The former is being done now as evidenced by the reported tour of the President in the Southwest and Southsouth and the Vice President in the North where large amounts of money is reportedly being doled out to traditional rulers, religious leaders, labour unions, local political big shots, etc. who are counted upon to give the lead and directive as to the voting pattern in their communities.
The latter mode is awaited until the election days. Having impoverished the populace to a state of destitution, the regime is banking on people to rather hard cash in their pockets during the elections as better bargain than promises. Although PDP has sufficient stolen money to carry out the bribes, both modes cannot work now as the presence of strong opposition will neutralize the latter and the disastrous effects on the former after the 2011 elections will render it this time around ineffective. Besides, as the voting is secret and with the campaign by the opposition encouraging voters to collect the PDP money but vote against it, nothing stops voters from doing so. I know for a fact that that is exactly what most voters intend to do; after all, it is their stolen money.
Another option PDP has been plotting is intimidating the electorate. Hence the vexatious issue of deploying the military during the elections in the guise of providing security. Apart from the fact that this is clearly an illegal venture, given the judgments of the Courts pronouncing the act as unconstitutional, the lesson of the current Ekitigate crisis is that nothing will guarantee the pliability of the military to the will of the ruling PDP.
Also, other than the military leadership, the majority of the rank and file foot soldiers would have no good cause to obey unlawful orders for a regime that has been so insensitive to their plights. Besides, most officers of the Armed Forces are sensible, and thus would not only be sensitive to their retired seniors such as Generals Alani Akinrinade, Paul Tarfa, Martin Agwai, and a host of others who are calling on the military to stay clear of politics, but also to the fact that the opposition can turn violent in the face of intimidation. With the advantage of numbers on the side of the opposition, the military could find itself on the receiving side of the fight which they will be deployed to face. These, along with very strong and fearless campaigns against intimidation by the opposition, will mitigate any attempt to intimidate the electorates by the regime.
The current myriad of courts cases against Gen. Mohammadu Buhari aimed at disqualifying him from contesting the presidential election is an attempt by the regime to restrict the political landscape to exclude the incumbent’s strongest opponent. Since Buhari’s personal and professional integrity remains intact, such flimsy issues as lack of requisite school certificate, perjury on oath, etc. were cooked up to disqualify him.
The major problem with this is that Buhari’s candidacy as of now has become too politically sensitive that there is nothing any court of law can do to disqualify him without upturning the entire national political applecart. Besides, taking into account that the same Nigerian judiciary has so far failed to disqualify President Jonathan as ineligible to contest another term of four years against the clear and unambiguous provisions of the constitution and the Supreme Court judgment in Marwa Vs Nyako, it is politically inconceivable for the courts to disqualify Buhari on the basis of the allegations currently put forth.
Finally, the last option left for the regime is rigging the elections and declaring false results. This option is what has informed the current hullabaloo on the vehement opposition by the PDP on the usage of the PVC and Card Readers. With the PVCs and Card Readers, three basic elements of election rigging are eliminated – multiple voting; irregular voting; and votes allocation.
Note: This Article is a paraphrase of Paul Collier’s book, Wars, Guns & Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places.
Dr. Ardo lives in Abuja