This thing called rigging

Generally speaking, elections are said to be rigged when the officially declared results do not correspond to the wishes of the voters. There however follows the problem of determining what exactly the voters’ wish was. If an unpopular candidate wins an election because many people who oppose him somehow failed to turn up at the […]

Generally speaking, elections are said to be rigged when the officially declared results do not correspond to the wishes of the voters. There however follows the problem of determining what exactly the voters’ wish was. If an unpopular candidate wins an election because many people who oppose him somehow failed to turn up at the polls, could we say that the election was rigged? An election is not a test of popularity among the whole population but only among those persons eligible to vote, who registered to vote, who preserved their voter’s cards and who turned up at the polls to vote, for that matter within the prescribed time.
If for example an aspirant is very popular among 16 year olds but the law says only those 18 years and above could vote, then you could still lose the election despite your visible popularity with teenagers. In 1982 when Nicaragua’s Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega was contesting for president, he realized that his movement was more popular among the youth than it was among older voters so he reduced the voting age from 18 to 16 years. You might call that an advanced form of rigging.
It occurs to me that, in Nigerian politics, election rigging is not a black and white thing but a whole continuum ranging from clear cut cases to debatable instances to untrue claims by election losers who are trying to explain away their loss. What usually passes for rigging here is ballot box snatching and stuffing but recent changes to the election process have made those two to become rarer than before. Rigging could occur simply because you believe it could. So says Malam Adamu Ciroma. I was at Abuja’s Sheraton Hotel in 1991 when Ciroma held his first press conference soon after he entered the race for NRC’s presidential ticket. Someone asked him about the possibility that the elections could be rigged. Ciroma said, “Election rigging is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe that your opponent will try to rig you out, you take steps to prevent him from rigging you out and you end up rigging him out.”
When I hear talk about election rigging, I think of three cases that I personally witnessed in the Second Republic. Let me tell you the stories in some detail. On the day in July 1983 that we did our NYSC passing out parade in Enugu, word went round at the parade ground that the old Anambra State’s Assistant Commissioner of Police in charge of CID, who was a native of the old Sokoto State, was inviting all corpers from Sokoto to his house that evening for breaking of the Ramadan fast. It happened that most of the corpers left Enugu straight from the parade ground so only four of us went to the ACP’s house. When we arrived we found him standing at the gate; he told us to go into the house and eat because he was rushing to the Hotel Presidential for an important meeting.
He phoned several times from the hotel to tell us to wait for his return. He returned around 11pm and offered to drive us back to the NYSC hostel. Along the way he asked us who we thought will win the election in Anambra State. Coming as I did from the rural areas I unhesitatingly said, “NPP will win.” To which the ACP laughed and said, “No, NPN will win. I just had a meeting with the coordinator of NPN’s campaign in the East, Dr Ibrahim Tahir. Everything has been arranged.” I was back in Sokoto three weeks later when I heard on the radio the incredible news that NPN’s Chief C.C. Onoh had defeated Governor Jim Nwobodo.
I was so pissed off by what was happening that the following week I went to the polling station at Abuja Road in Sokoto determined to vote against NPN. When I presented my voter’s card to the presiding officer, he opened the booklet containing the names of voters. My name was number 16 on the first page but every name on that page was already ticked as having voted! The officer flipped several pages before he found a name to tick, then gave me a ballot paper. Right in front of him I voted for UPN.
It didn’t end there. The following week, the last in the series of elections, for State House of Assembly, was taking place. Two of my brothers and I left Sokoto at dawn that morning to attend a naming ceremony at Jega, 134 kilometres away. We arrived at our grandfather’s house shortly before 7am and as we walked through a narrow avenue, we saw our cousin Abdullahi carrying a FEDECO ballot box and other election materials. He was walking towards his polling station by the roadside. My brother Ibrahim playfully grabbed the ballot box and said, “Let me see if it is full.” lo and behold, it was full! We asked him when he filled the box and he calmly said, “Last night.” We asked him, “What will you say if people come to vote?” “I will tell them the voting is over.”
Probably the most outrageous case of election rigging in Nigeria as proved in court took place in old Ondo State in 1983. UPN’s Governor Adekunle Ajasin got 1.2 million votes while NPN’s Akin Omoboriowo got 500,000 but the state returning officer calmly added “1” behind Omoboriowo’s vote and it became 1.5 million. UPN was able to prove this in court because they had agents in all polling and counting centres.
Rigging could be thwarted if all parties have effective polling agents. I remember a story from the 1999 election that Malami Hukuma told me. He was an AD polling agent at Waff Road during the first election, for Senators. He said the APP agent successfully bought over the presiding officer, policeman, NGO election observer and the agents of other parties, including PDP’s. They wanted to thumbprint all the remaining ballot papers for the APP candidate but Malami alone refused. They tried and tried but he refused, and that was how the plan was botched. I told him that he was able to do that only because the polling unit was in the Kaduna City center. If it was in a remote location they would probably beat him up.
There was another story that a friend told me about the 1999 elections. That year INEC appointed vice chancellors of federal universities to serve as state returning officers and in one state the VC appointed a battery of Faculty Deans and heads of department from his university as local government returning officers. Somehow his party obtained the list and planned to give each one of them N10,000. According to him, they later heard that their opponent had already given them N50,000 each.
Sometimes politicians cry wolf where there is none. I was editor of New Nigerian in Kaduna in 2003 when a man who said he was “chief security officer to General Buhari” rushed into my office one night, days before the start of that year’s elections. He said I must go with him and inspect election materials that they captured from PDP. I went with him to a dusty store at the nearby Kaduna State Ministry of Works and he showed me the “materials.” The place turned out to be a Kaduna State Independent Electoral Commission [KADSIEC] store!
Now, regarding what I said earlier about shades of grey in election rigging. If a Nigerian candidate shares out money or other goodies to voters and they actually cast their votes for him, does that qualify to be called rigging?