60 million votes for what?

I sometimes wonder whether President Buhari is aware that he has received the most votes of any Nigerian since 1914. In his five presidential contests since 2003, he has had a total of 62,182,942 votes cast for him. No doubt, the president has received, in total, more votes against him than for him through all […]

I sometimes wonder whether President Buhari is aware that he has received the most votes of any Nigerian since 1914. In his five presidential contests since 2003, he has had a total of 62,182,942 votes cast for him. No doubt, the president has received, in total, more votes against him than for him through all those elections, but no one has received more, first because he has contested more elections than anyone else, but also because in each case, he contested against different candidates.

More than that, I have often wondered what all those millions of votes actually mean to Buhari personally. But thinking through this requires starting with what votes mean to voters in the first place. Why do people vote at all?

Voting has direct personal costs to the voter. The time it takes to vote is inconvenient for most people. Unfriendly weather, unruly strangers, and in Nigeria, the real possibility of getting hurt all add to the inconvenience. For those who earn their bread daily, the long hours on the queue means loss of money. There is also the emotional cost that your favoured candidate or party may not win, which can be so high for some it takes many months for political and even personal life to get back to normal.

Yet, millions of people throng to the polling booths to vote during elections. One reason, pollsters and political consultants suspect, is that most voters can’t stand the other person or party, the opponent of the candidates they favour. During the just concluded US elections, for example, a CNN reporter asked an early voter how long he had been standing in the queue. “Four years”, he answered. Perhaps, Buhari’s voters simply couldn’t stand each of his opponents.

Social scientists, on the other hand, provide a host of reasons for why people vote, from the personal satisfaction voters derive for what they consider altruistic behaviour, to policy preferences, habit, identity or community. I vote simply because others around me do the same, or because I have always voted anyway. But a vote is also a stamp of approval for certain prevailing or anticipated economic states of affairs, and therefore, as self-interested as any other form of personal investment, like getting a university education or buying shares in a company.

Buhari’s voters have been derided for voting for him mainly because of religion, ethnicity or both, and he himself has often been dismissed for not having committed voters beyond the northern region. It is true that those 60 million votes have come predominantly from the north, but I suspect there is more to those votes than religion and ethnicity, even if these play a part too. Perhaps Buhari’s northern voters stuck with him because they believed he could do something about their living conditions.

If voting is an investment for voters, for the elected president, in particular, this investment is realised through one means above all: policy. What then has the Buhari presidency, now going into its sixth year, done for the north, and indeed for Nigeria by way of transformative policy? This is the area where the Buhari government has been most frustrating for me personally. Daring and original policy imagination or innovation is almost completely lacking in this government, probably more so than any other before it.

Nearly all of the president’s policies across all sectors are no more than tokenism. We now have the Treasury Single Account (TSA) and the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), therefore, the problem of corruption is over. Except,  of course, that it isn’t. Perhaps there is just as much corruption now as there ever was before. We may not know that yet, but we will soon find out when the President leaves office, as is the case for every Nigerian government.

We have driven the insurgents out of the local governments they once controlled in the north east, therefore Boko Haram are as good as defeated, at least “technically speaking”. Except that it isn’t true. We close the borders so that bandits and kidnappers will no longer have field day. Except that bandits and kidnappers are having even more than a field day: they now literally own the field. No one else can dare.

We banned the importation of sundry food and other items so that local producers can grow and flourish. Instead, local producers are groaning, like nearly everyone else. We are feeding school children, even when they are not in school, so that school enrolment figures can improve. Except that those figures have stayed the same, if not decreased. What about mass unemployment?  Simple  problem. Our N-Power programme has provided jobs to thousands, and our micro-finance and welfare schemes dole out money to millions every month, and will soon lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty. Except that millions more remain poor still.

Everywhere you turn, tokenistic gestures stare you in the face in the name of policy. And if you complain too much, it is because you do not appreciate our efforts enough, or because you do appreciate how bad things were before or when we came in, or because you simply like hearing the sound of your own voice. One way or another, 60 million shares in a collective investment for a new Nigeria appear to have gone with the winds. But should they?