NIGERIA HEADING TO POLLS

Nigerians to poll on 25 February

Nigeria set to hold  the seventh time polls in 24 years of uninterrupted democratization.

The Africa’s most populous nation,  will be heading to the polls on 25 February this year,  yet the upcoming presidential election is taking place amid deep economic hardship, record unemployment and inflation, persistent fuel shortages, the repression of civic spaces and worsening security conditions, particularly for the country’s youth.

The Nigeria’s estimated population is about 220 million currently, which has grown at one of the fastest rates worldwide, and is forecast to double by 2050. Proportionally, the country has one of the highest populations of young people in the world, with 42 per cent of its citizens under the age of 15 and 70 per cent under 30, while its median age is 18.

According to local media, these demographic features underlie Nigeria’s young electorate: nearly 40 per cent of registered voters (37 million) are between the ages of 18 and 34, followed by 35.7 per cent of middle-aged voters (33.4 million) between 35 and 49 years of age. Of the 93.4 million registered voters in Nigeria, over 75 per cent are 49 and under.

Since 2015, two recessions have left the country in its most dire state, while double-digit inflation, record unemployment, unrelenting insecurity, a heaving debt burden, pervasive corruption and government mismanagement, poor-quality education and healthcare are crippling the futures of Nigeria’s youth and fueling widespread feelings of hopelessness.

With 133 million people described as poor in terms of income, education and access to basic services by the country’s national statistics office, Nigeria’s poorest are often children suffering chronic food insecurity and deprivation which compromises their mental and physical development.

In addition, millions of young Nigerians are unable to find fulfilling and productive work; 53.4 per cent of youths aged 15-24 are unemployed followed by 37 per cent aged 25-34. The rate of unemployment in the youth population is 42.5 per cent. If Nigeria’s unemployed youth were its own country, it would be more populous than Tunisia or Belgium.

Nigeria’s tertiary education sector also fails its 2.1 million students. Academic staff in Nigeria’s federally funded universities have been on strike nearly every year in the past six – the most recent, lasting eight months, was called off in October 2022. The country also has the highest number of school-age children in Africa, most of them girls, who are not able to go to school due to under-funding and neglect of state primary and secondary education.

The reality is that Nigeria has invested fewer and fewer resources to ensure opportunity, security and a confident future for its youngest citizens and the country’s first truly democratic generation.

The bleak employment and educational prospects as well as worsening labor conditions have contributed to a workforce brain drain. Nigeria is reportedly the highest workforce-exporting country in Africa with 52 per cent of Nigerians keen to leave the country permanently. Highly skilled Nigerians, especially healthcare workers, are leaving in droves for Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and Saudi Arabia. Between 2021 and 2022, the UK received 13,609 healthcare workers from Nigeria.

These monumental issues and the precariousness of the country’s future will be on the ballot in Nigeria’s 2023 election. Whoever wins will need to quickly show that they recognize this demographic fork-in-the-road moment and that continuing the customary division of the spoils of electoral office will be disastrous.

Nigeria’s well-known political parties have not shown that they understand this moment or the growing dissatisfaction of the country’s youth. The flag bearer of the incumbent party, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, began his campaign by stating: ‘It’s my turn.’ Meanwhile the main opposition candidate, Atiku Abubakar, running for a record sixth time, claims he has ‘paid his dues’.

As a result, Nigeria’s youth and professionals, wanting a change from those who have held power for 24 years, have gravitated towards Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the lesser-known Labour Party. Though Obi, at 61, is not much younger than Tinubu, 70, and Abubakar, 76, he has communicated in a language and tone that have resonated with younger voters. As for his track record, Obi’s supporters point to his investment in education and fiscal discipline while governor of Anambra state.

Nigeria’s political elites are not known for responsive leadership.

Their capacity for corruption and enrichment through enduring patronage mechanisms has severely inhibited the country’s democratic institutions and state capacity.

With nearly all facets of the national economy in some way tied up with the Nigerian state, competition over control and access to government office is a zero-sum contest played out during every election cycle.

This culture of transactional politics partly explains why 77 per cent of Nigerians are dissatisfied with their democracy and 89 per cent believe the country is heading in the wrong direction. In this context, the precipitous drop in electoral participation over the years is unsurprising.

From a high of 69 per cent in the 2003 presidential elections, voter turnout in Nigeria’s last presidential polls in 2019 was less than 35 per cent of 82 million registered voters, the lowest of recent elections held on the African continent.

Yet, 17 months later in October 2020, young Nigerians – many of whom had been too disillusioned to vote – joined the weeks-long EndSARS protests against police brutality and extortion. They amplified their voices online while mobilizing across Nigeria as well as activating the country’s sprawling diaspora.

The force of the protests and the government’s brutal crackdown revealed the ruptured social contract between the Nigerian state and society. Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari misinterpreted the eruption of youth anger as an attempt to force him from office – revealing the tone deafness of his leadership.

Young Nigerians bristle at being so misunderstood, and there is a lingering sense of political betrayal after authorities shot and killed at least nine unarmed protesters at the Lekki tollgate in Lagos, violently bringing the EndSARS protests to an end. Yet this discontent will continue to bubble to the surface unless addressed.

Nigeria urgently needs to reflect on how its politics overlooks, excludes and dis-empowers.

 

For instance, fewer and fewer women are able to enter public office. The average proportion of women in elected office in Africa is 23.4 per cent while the regional average is 15 per cent. In Nigeria only 4.2 per cent of elected officials in 2019 were women.

Political exclusion fuels disillusionment towards democratic processes that have helped sustain the hold of the country’s two major parties: the All-Progressive Congress and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

 

 

Together, they are responsible for escalating the cost of politics and running for political office, creating an insurmountable hurdle for young people.

There are signs of hope. Deep dissatisfaction with Nigeria’s metastasized problems seems likely to spur more young people to the polls: 84 per cent of the 10 million new voters added to the register in 2022 were aged 34 or less; only 3 per cent are over 65.

Nigeria has a myriad of entrenched problems that will be on the minds of many voters, and indeed much of West Africa as it looks to Nigeria for an example of inclusive governance and a democracy that delivers developmental dividends.

Key among these concerns will be the country’s capacity to shape a secured future, halt democratic erosion and renew the faith of its citizens, especially its youngest. Nigeria’s young people can no longer be expected to wait for a country that works for them.

When veteran politician Ayo Fayose contested — and won — the June 2014 gubernatorial elections in the southwestern Nigeria state of Ekiti, he mocked Kayode Fayemi, the incumbent who had lost. “People don’t want road infrastructure; they want stomach infrastructure,” Fayose said.

 Indeed, elections in the country have repeatedly been marred by allegations of votes being bought and sold. If the rate was allegedly between $8 and $13 a vote when Fayemi came back to power in 2018 in Ekiti, the stakes are even higher nationally.

As Nigerians prepare for one of the country’s most decisive and divisive elections since 1999 to pick their president, vice president and members of parliament on February 25, many believe that vote trading will play a determining role.

After all, the primaries of the two main parties, the governing All Progressives Congress and the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party, were particularly contentious in 2022, with allegations of delegates receiving as much as $25,000 each to vote in favor of those paying them.

Yet the focus on vote trading obfuscates far deeper problems with Nigeria’s electoral democracy, and risks covering up for those flaws.

To be sure, vote buying is a major threat to Nigeria, one that is not new. In fact, it is part of Nigeria’s history of transactional politics and elections, where votes are exchanged for food, favour and cash. Before “stomach infrastructure” there was “democracy of the stomach” coined by Ozumba Mbadiwe, a federal minister in the years just before and after independence from the United Kingdom.

The problem is also not unique to Nigeria: At least 165 countries have laws against vote trading. Like Nigeria, votes are influenced by payments or allurements in many other developing world democracies.

Tackling this menace isn’t easy. When the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) announced in October 2022 a move towards a cashless economy and declared that current notes would be no longer valid in the days leading up to the presidential election, many concluded that the move, in part, was targeted at politicians and their cash stockpiles used for vote-buying. Yet days later, the central bank governor Godwin Efemiele found himself in the crosshairs of allegations from the government that he was involved in financing terrorism, charges that many independent analysts do not buy.

Whatever the merits of the allegations against Efemiele, the large question remains: Are Nigeria’s electoral problems fundamentally about vote buying?

Today there are 133 million Nigerians in multidimensional poverty; living on or below the national poverty line of 376.50 naira ($0.51) in earnings a day.

When votes fetch several times that amount, voters are not illogical to sell.

They have delayed gratification, between one election cycle and the next, and are not swayed by narratives of future accountable governance and public goods they have never known.

Money, food and jobs are concrete and complete the calculation, hardwired into Nigeria’s political culture, that the bird in hand is the only bird.

Nigeria’s political economy is extractive and transactional – and financial imperatives are built into every process from the emergence of party candidates to securing judgments at election tribunals.

The Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, an autonomous agency set up by the government in 2000, estimated that 9.4 billion naira ($26 million) were exchanged in bribes for favourable judgements in election-related cases between 2018 and 2020 alone. Voters know this murky reality and expect their cut at the polling unit.

This explains why vote trading prevails despite the increasing sophistication of scripted ‘”do-not-sell-your-vote” messages in pidgin and other languages, and a formal ban against the practice. And if Nigeria’s corrupt electoral system is to be truly reformed, the attention that vote-buying draws must be put in context.

No politician can pay off 50 percent of Nigeria’s 93 million registered voters.

Vote-buying strategies work when there are fewer people to pay and when politicians can confirm, or convince voters that they can confirm, whom they actually voted for.

This requires at least three things: low voter turnout arranged through pre-election and election day violence; amplified narratives about the power of vote trading in determining elections to dissuade “unsold” voters from bothering about going to the ballot box; and politicians’ access to voters’ ballots.

Simply put, increasing voter turnout, checking violence and maintaining the secrecy of ballots deserve more attention than vote trading.

The 2019 presidential election, for instance, saw an abysmally low voter turnout — just 34.75 percent.

Those elections also saw a return to ballot box snatching and other violent disruptions, particularly around vote collation centres.

Had politicians perfected vote trading, they would no longer need to rely on other ways to compromise elections.

Indeed, collation centers are the black hole of elections in Nigeria and eliminating violence there and improving transparency of collation will improve voter confidence.

And if politicians don’t know how people have actually voted, it will reduce the effectiveness of vote trading, since voters can take the money and yet vote as they wish.

To focus on vote trading at the expense of these more fundamental problems with Nigerian elections is self-defeating for those looking for reforms. It discourages all but those who have access to bullion vans and public funds.

In fact, there is reason for hope. Peter Obi, the businessman-politician who was governor of Anambra province, is leading all presidential polls despite his popular slogan, “we no dey give shishi” (we give nothing), an allusion to the transactional nature of Nigerian politics.

This is an indication of a maturation of Nigeria’s political culture that democracy and election integrity advocates should recognise.

But this will only happen with the acknowledgement that it is meaningless to talk about vote trading without first addressing the deeper rot in Nigeria’s electoral practices.