Who decides Nigeria’s elections: the voter, the politician, or the mechanism standing amid them? asks PAT ONUKWULI
Wike’s statements, on their own, would not provide sufficient evidence to deduce that the electoral commission was an accomplice.
This inevitably turns attention to INEC. But Nigerians are entitled to question questions. If politicians can publicly speak of allowing one candidate to obtain votes here, stopping another there, or invoking federal might elsewhere, what exactly does this language mean in elections administered by an ostensibly self-governing umpire?
Potentially. Conceivably these expressions mean nothing beyond the swagger of Nigerian politics. They hear “we allowed”; they hear “we stopped”; they hear that “federal might” could have changed the outcome. But when a pattern of language repeatedly places politicians above processes, the country should take observe. Who eventually decides Nigeria’s elections: the voter, the powerful politician, or the platform standing in the midst of them?
Hapless Nigerians are watching.
Unlike elections, varied circumstances, but an unsettlingly relevant vocabulary of political power.
Again, this is not proof that Wike manipulated either election, nor should rhetoric be treated as evidence of an electoral offence. Rivers was supposedly a place where an outcome could be “stopped”; Osun, one where presidential determination and his presence could supposedly have produced a unlike finding. Yet the recurrence is troubling.
One is reminded of Icarus, whose tragedy was not that he had wings but that exhilaration made him forget their limits. Political effect is lawful; political omnipotence is not. Leaders may persuade voters, organise supporters and assemble coalitions. But a profound difference exists betwixt influence and management, persuasion and prescription, and mobilisation and manipulation. Democracy survives during these distinctions.
Yet community confidence requires further than holding elections and announcing figures; it requires citizens to consider that those figures stem from their votes rather than from arrangements amid powerful men. That distinction is the crux of electoral legitimacy.
INEC cannot reasonably account for every politician’s boast. The ballot must journey from voter to outcome, not from the outline room to the collation centre.
Rivers was unlike: “Obi will not win here,” he said, adding, “we stopped it.”
Speaking lately concerning the 2023 presidential election, Wike explained that the G5 governors had a tactic to deny Atiku Abubakar the standard PDP advantage in the South-South. According to him, Peter Obi was effectively allowed to acquire in Edo and Cross River.
That interpretation deserves aspect. But people officials moreover bear responsibility for the implications of their words.
Wike may well contend that his words merely structure political sophistication, the machinery, alliances and grassroots organisation by path of which elections are fought everywhere. When power speaks repeatedly as even though outcomes are in its gift, citizens are entitled to wonder whether they are hearing metaphor, boastfulness or something greater consequential.
He said that if President Bola Tinubu had wanted to win Osun “at all costs”, he would have been there and “we would have won it”, adding that the governor could have done nothing.
The worry deepens when those words are established alongside his other comments following the current Osun governorship election. He too invoked the formidable proposal of “federal might”.
Votes are cast, not allocated; mandates are earned, not dispensed; elections are contested, not assigned. It concerns who owns the Nigerian vote. Politicians are entitled to look for power vigorously, but the moment their language suggests ownership of electoral outcomes, democracy begins to resemble theatre rather than preference.
The concern consequently transcends Wike, Obi, Atiku, Tinubu, or any political party.
Elections consume enormous people resources and regularly leave behind litigation, bitterness and suspicion. What the country needs is neither partisan outrage nor convenient silence, but credible institutions competent of establishing where political technique ends and improper interference begins, and of demonstrating that boundary transparently.
Nigeria has travelled too far and paid too dearly for democracy to consider such questions casually.
That distinction matters. Campaigning to defeat an opponent is democracy; subverting the electorate’s freely expressed option is not politics but an assault on democracy.
Wike has because rejected interpretations of his remarks as an admission of electoral manipulation. He says he was describing political technique: mobilising voters, weakening an opponent, and directing political assistance.
Taken together, yet, they lift uncomfortable questions concerning Nigeria’s elections and voters’ sovereignty.
Most recent remarks by FCT Minister Nyesom Wike fall into the latter phrase.
Some statements politicians build disappear using the news cycle, whilst others linger owing to the point that they touch the foundations of audience trust. Taken separately, they may be dismissed as political bravado.
The mythology of Cassandra offers another warning. Nigeria risks a unlike tragedy: citizens hear so a lot of allegations, denials, boasts and counterclaims that they may sooner or later suppose nothing. She could see catastrophe approaching but was condemned under no circumstances to be believed. When trust collapses, even a genuinely credible election struggles to obtain legitimacy owing to the truth that institutional truth has become indistinguishable from partisan narrative.
Dr. Onukwuli is a legal scholar and people affairs analyst. patonukwuli2003@yahoo.co.uk
Source: WIKE AND THE BALLOT
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