PDP + army / elections = time bomb

Even though some newspapers have cited the problematic distribution of permanent voter’s cards in the wake of the election delay, this was not the reason for the postponement.  By last week 45 million people had collected their PVCs. The remaining 24 million were already at collection points. It is inconvenient for many people to leave […]

Even though some newspapers have cited the problematic distribution of permanent voter’s cards in the wake of the election delay, this was not the reason for the postponement.  By last week 45 million people had collected their PVCs. The remaining 24 million were already at collection points. It is inconvenient for many people to leave their homes or work places to go looking for their PVCs but since these will not be delivered to us in our homes, we must find the time to go and collect them. Some people will never go to collect theirs even if you give them a year so elections cannot be delayed for that reason.  
However, the moment the military service chiefs and the National Security Adviser wrote a letter to INEC to demand for a six weeks’ election delay, postponement was inevitable.  The reason the soldiers gave looked reasonable on the face of it; that a major operation is underway to eliminate Boko Haram with the active cooperation of Chad, Cameroon and Niger Republic. The military brass’ letter said elections cannot possibly hold in four states while the operation lasts. The four states that they named was a stretch because Gombe State is mostly bedevilled by IEDs placed near mosques and motor parks. The answer to Gombe’s problem should be a discreet SSS operation rather than a major military sweep. Of the other three states, it appears that insurgents are rooted in two local governments each of Adamawa and Yobe states while the rest of their territories are relatively secure.
Now, the soldiers went beyond making a case for non-holding of elections in the four states to say that polls in the country as a whole should be delayed because they do not want divided attention and they cannot spare any troops for election duty. With respect to the issue of divided attention, I can imagine that the Defence Chiefs of Chad and Cameroon would be annoyed if their Nigerian counterpart is looking over his shoulder at election security when they left their countries and came to help him defeat Boko Haram. After all, elections are not such a big thing in Chad and Cameroon.
Army Chief Lt General Minimah reportedly told the Council of State meeting last Thursday that if INEC goes ahead with the polls as planned ‘the army cannot’ spare any men for election duty. Why? An authoritative news report that I saw on the wires last week said the Nigeria Army had stationed 15,000 soldiers in the North East to fight Boko Haram. That means it has at least 70,000 men outside the troubled region. Why can’t these ones, together with the Air Force, Navy and the police help with elections for only one day?
Any General who says that he does not want divided attention and wants to concentrate on one operation at a time cannot be serious. What happens if, in the midst of the Boko Haram war, skirmishes break out in Bakassi and on our border with Benin Republic? Will the service chiefs say they cannot attend to those because they already have a war going on in the North East? During the Second World War the American Joint Chiefs of Staff was directing wars across two oceans. They had millions of men under General Dwight Eisenhower in Europe and they had two major war theatres in the Pacific, one commanded by Admiral Chester Nimitz and the other by General Douglas MacArthur, each one with millions of men but they did not complain of divided attention.  
Similarly, the Deputy Supreme Commander of the Soviet Red Army Marshal Georgi Zhukov recounted in his memoirs that the Supreme Defence Council of the Soviet Union chaired by Marshal Stalin was permanently in session for four years while the Second World War lasted. It was directing wars on eight fronts stretching from the Baltic to the Caspian Sea with another front in the Far East, each with millions of men. Zhukov said there were no breaks for lunch or dinner; anyone who was hungry could step out to the corridors and help himself. There was also nothing like going to bed. There were camp beds in the corridors and any General could have a nap provided his theatre is not being discussed. No Soviet General asked for anything to be postponed so that he will not be   distracted.
Now let us ask ourselves, why do we need soldiers to guard the polls in Nigeria? It is not like that in most other countries. However, I remember what the then INEC Chairman Dr Abel Guobadia said in 2003. He said that year’s general elections cost N35 billion but “most of it is the cost of our indiscipline as a society.” He pointed out, for example, that in India, what we call here “sensitive election materials” such as ballot papers are distributed all over the country through the Post Office. In Nigeria ballot papers are flown in by the Air Force, kept in Central Bank vaults and moved around by armed soldiers.
Prof Attahiru Jega also told the story of something he saw in Kenya during its most recent election. He said they went to a rural primary school at night on election eve and found an election officer sitting alone with his ballot box and with all his election materials. There was no electricity in the school; the man had only a lamp and he was waiting patiently for morning to start receiving voters. Imagine what will happen in Nigeria if a youth corper sits overnight in a dark classroom with ballot papers by his side.
I got a premonition of things to come when I drove to Sokoto last week. I arrived at Maru in Zamfara State when a PDP rally was about to start. Three Isuzu trucks which locals call dogon barrow arrived at the scene full of thugs. They jumped from the trucks brandishing daggers and swords and they were shouting, “Najeriya sai Gudulok!” So, the plotters who told the army to withdraw security cover for the February 14 election capitalised on a well-known weakness of Nigerian society.
Why did the presidency and PDP hatch this very dangerous plot? The inescapable conclusion is that they did an internal polling and it produced a very bleak electoral outcome. The gamble is that the six-week breather that they got will afford them the chance for a rebound. You see, every cloud has a silver lining. Personally I will not like a situation where the result of the presidential election gets in the way of the effort to eliminate Boko Haram. I mean, if the Commander-in-Chief were to suffer an election defeat in the midst of this operation the service chiefs will not be able to get his attention again. On that account alone I see an advantage in allowing the military to conclude the operation before we vote. Besides, we now have the service chiefs’ word that they will eliminate this country’s Number One problem in the next six weeks. Nor are we going to wait for six weeks to see whether they succeeded; we will begin to count the number of Boko Haram-occupied towns and villages they liberate right from next week.
One of the Presidency’s calculations is that a storming of Sambisa Forest, liberation of occupied towns and possibly freeing the Chibok girls could gain much political traction for PDP. But it is a gamble because the operation could fail. Or it could succeed but Nigerians could still say that Jonathan deserves no reward because he should have done it four years ago. The fear therefore is when the six weeks of election delay are up and PDP sees no change in its fortunes, what will it do next?