As the Governorship election unfolded in Kogi State on November 11, residents of Magongo in Ogori-Magongo area of the State were in for a rude shock.
While they were still queuing up for accreditation and voting, results of the elections, which showed a landslide victory for the ruling All Progressives Congress, mysteriously appeared.
The residents duly gave It a protest, during which they accused the APC and INEC for collusion and complicity to deny them of their choice.
Dino Melaye the PDP candidate during the election, may have gained notoriety for being a rablerouser despite previous stints in both chambers of the National Assembly. But to listen to him speak of how the votes garnered by the All Progressives Congress across different local governments were even more than the number of accredited voters was truly revealing. The harrowing revelations unveiled a country cantering into darkness.
The seeds that have now sprouted in the shenanigans in Kogi State may have been sown in February, but INEC’s notoriety as a biased electoral umpire bent on truncating the will of the Nigerian people endures.
It Is unimaginable and even unforgivable that more than two decades after Nigeria returned to democracy, INEC is still struggling to conduct free and fair elections in the country at any level.
But is it such an astounding failure by INEC or does it have something to do with the way Nigeria is set up at the moment?
There are many who argue that Nigeria is set up to fail as it is. They say that the country’s flawed federalism, endemic corruption and fierce ethnic and religious fault lines are a recipe for disaster. The fact that they have a point is emphasized by Nigeria’s steady cascade into the doldrums of disintegration.
At the heart of Nigeria’s mounting struggles as a country is a leadership crisis that has often threatened to spiral out of control and derail the country’s epileptic journey to fleeting stability.
The pattern is chillingly familiar and similar: mindless politicians, using whatever means they can, to get into office, grab power, and perpetuate themselves.
Once in office, they have shown that they can do anything to maintain their grip on power. Nothing has been beyond them recently, as seen in what appears to be devilishly calculated captures of key institutions of the Nigerian state.
The angst pervasive In Nigeria currently which was so strongly expressed by the disenfranchised people of Magongo is against the failure of leadership, poignantly expressed in the reduction of key institutions to appendages of corrupt patronage.
This angst, which has taken so many forms since Nigeria returned to democracy in 1999, threatens to derail the Nigerian project. Magongo was just a microcosm of the mendacity presently suffocating key Nigerian institutions.
The net effect is disillusionment for many of those who constitute key partners in the Nigerian project. The effect of this is evident in the fact that many Nigerians have lost their appetite for expressing any form of patriotism towards their country. Those who can are fleeing the country in their droves.
The election in Kogi State has revealed everything that is wrong with Nigeria and everything that can go wrong in a country where people bulldoze their way into power, stampede key institutions of states into submission with the law proving powerless to stop them.
Before the polls, the guns blazed freely in the state. .The home of Sheikh Ibrahim Jibrin,the Director General of the Murtala Ajaka Campaign Organization, was attacked. At the end of the gunfight, which lasted for hours, three police men were among the dozens who lay dead.
There were other instances of violence recorded in the state, as the ruling APC deployed everything in its arsenal to win the election. If violence was one part of the plan, the magic by which results preceded voting and accreditation was the second part.
It begs the question of Nigeria’s aspirations as a country. A country which can condone the kind of farce that went on in Magongo would struggle to convince anyone that it is a serious country.
INEC has also failed to convince Nigerians that it is an independent institution.Several elections have been scuttled under the watch of a commission which gulps billions of Naira in taxpayer’s money annually.
Nigeria needs to ask itself really tough questions. One of those questions is really whether INEC is ready for a country that works.
Kene Obiezu,
