President Buhari, why didn’t you do this in 2019?

In his now familiar short and sharp style of speaking to the nation, usually after so much harm and damage has been done to Nigerians, President Buhari reminded Nigerians of three things in his national broadcast last Thursday. The President made it clear that the naira redesign policy is his and his alone; that he […]

In his now familiar short and sharp style of speaking to the nation, usually after so much harm and damage has been done to Nigerians, President Buhari reminded Nigerians of three things in his national broadcast last Thursday. The President made it clear that the naira redesign policy is his and his alone; that he has had enough of our whining about it and can do no more than release a few 200 naira notes to show his “sympathy” for us; and that the whole wahala we have been through these past few weeks, and still going through to this moment, are meant to end all forms of “vote-buying”, in order to purify our elections and raise them to a saintly level; a level that we must assume, he himself now occupies in our politics.

I can live with the first and second, but not with the third. I really don’t care much which way this election goes at any level, but I can’t stand the injustice, the betrayal, the double-standards, and the self-righteous pretensions belying the entirety of the president’s latest speech. As a much younger Nigerian who supported Buhari in my own little ways throughout his most difficult years in Nigerian politics, it even hurts to have to pen these words. However, some things must be said, not just for the significance they hold today, but that which they could hold tomorrow.

First, President Buhari is happy to play by one rule for himself, and a very different rule for others, the truest definition of double-standards. I agree entirely with the president about the need to eliminate the negative influence of money in our electoral processes, particularly the perverse practices of vote selling and buying, even if by means of a policy as dubious as naira redesign. But a more sincere and honest approach for doing it would have begun in 2019, when the president was himself a candidate in the election, and when the main opposition party probably had a higher chance at clutching back power. An honest doctor must first test their own medicine.

Let me give an example of a more sincere approach to electoral reform in our recent past. During his inaugural address in 2007, the late President Yar’adua admitted, publicly, that the election that had just brought him to power was marred by wanton malpractices. He then promised reform for the next election in which he himself would have been a candidate for a second term. Unfortunately, Yar’adua did not live long enough to participate in that next election, but the reform of our electoral system he singularly and so honestly initiated has lived well after him as an enduring legacy of his government. Had Yar’adua lived and participated in the 2011 presidential elections, he would have been putting to the test his own electoral reform pills, and quite rightly so. Still, the 2011 election was universally declared as the best Nigeria had had up to that point, and would be bettered only by that for which Buhari was the greatest beneficiary in 2015.

By contrast, President Buhari waited until he is done his two terms before unleashing this most weird—to say the least—of election reform policy on Nigerians. Where is the justice and fairness in this? Where is the sense of one rule for everybody and myself first? Why didn’t the president implement naira redesign policy during the 2019 elections to demonstrate its effectiveness as a counterweight to vote-buying? Does vote trading happen only when Buhari is not a candidate in an election? Yar’adua did not wait one day to kick off the reforms that have made our elections better and better since then. Why does Buhari have to wait eight years if he so much believed in naira redesign as the cure all medicine of electoral maladies in this country?

Indeed, it is not just that the president waited until the rule would no longer apply to him, it is that he has not enacted a single policy designed to better our elections in his eight odd years in office. Even the Electoral Act 2022 he signed into law in February last year, which has been acclaimed as a significant advance in our election system, did not come from Buhari or his government. The amendments to the 2010 version of the Act that now make the Electoral Act 2022 were proposed largely by INEC, donor countries and agencies, and local non-governmental organisations concerned about the integrity of elections in Nigeria.

Moreover, the same amendments were first proposed for the 2019 elections in which Buhari was a candidate. He did not sign them into law until last year when he would no longer have to abide by the new provisions. It is difficult to see any of these as any more than double-standards. What should younger Nigerians capable of thinking for themselves and not beclouded by the twisted logic of the political moment think of the breach of personal example underlying all this pattern of events? And if reducing the influence of money in our elections is the goal, where was the president when his party fixed N100 million, N50 million, N20 million and N10 million for expression of interest and nomination forms respectively for president, governor, senate and House of Representatives seats back in April last year?

And then, there are a few more. Vote-buying is certainly bad, but truncating democracy via a military coup is infinitely worse. Buhari was an architect and supreme beneficiary of the latter, unlike any of the candidates in this election. That this was long ago does not remove the fact that it happened. Besides, if naira redesign will curb vote trading in this election, does it mean we will need to redesign our currency every four years to purify the elections? Are we going to redesign the naira notes again in 2027 to prevent vote-buying in that election?

Equally important, President Buhari would have Nigerians believe that he only seeks to remove the influence of money in our politics and elections, and to which I say, all good. But one wonders, for all his new found verve for fighting the influence of money in elections, President Buhari ever asked himself whether the private jets he flew around campaigning all across the country during the 2015 and 2019 elections ever gave him unfair advantage over more than a dozen other candidates in those same contests, or indeed, who paid for the jet trips.

But more significantly, money is not the only thing that can influence elections; it certainly does not have the most effective influence on electoral outcomes. Anyone who has read enough quality political science material can easily see that. Regulations, in the form of electoral laws or as we now have in Nigeria, the naira redesign policy, have the most effective influence on elections; they certainly have by far more influence than money. By taking all cash out of circulation in the country, the president has already influenced the elections one way or another, and done so in a way worse than any kind of vote-buying could do. And that too must be said.