ELECTORAL VIOLENCE: WHO CAN TAME THE BEAST?

By Dan Onwukwe, NBF News

In two different locations in the South-East last week – Owerri and elsewhere in Anambra state, a distance of about 40 kilometres – two major events took place almost contemporaneously. It is doubtful if the architects of the happening in Anambra were aware of what was happening in Owerri, the Imo State Capital. Or, it didn’t matter to them. But it brings to the fore the terrifying memories of an intractable political problem for which the event at Owerri was organised.

Indeed, inside Dr Sam Mbakwe Hall at Concord Hotel, a workshop on “The Prevention of electoral violence in Nigeria” was taking place. It was the brainchild of AMPROK Technologies Limited in collaboration of the |Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

Undoubtedly, our politics remains vulnerable to violence. How to tame the beast of political violence has become, perhaps more than ever before much more threatening and urgent to tackle. With the Anambra governorship election (February 6) just a matter of days, political violence has become, possibly, a more important national issue than the health of President Umaru Yar’Adua. But unknown to the speakers of the workshop which included the Chiarman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Maurice Iwu, Governor Ikedi Ohakim, Msgr Mathew Hassan Kukah, former Inspector General of Police (IGP), Sir Mike Okiro (retd), the current IGP, Ogbonna onovo, former Nigerians envoy to the USA, Prof George Obiozor, speaker, Imo House of Assembly, Rt. Hoon Goodluck Opia, a firestorm of two violent attacks had been unleashed on the campaign convoy of Prof Chukwuma Charles Soludo, the PDP candidate in the February 6 election in Anambra. The two attacks took place within four days.

It claimed the life of a supporter and critically injured several others. The Police said they are still investigating the matter. But the chairman of Soludo campaign organisation, Chief Okey Muo-Aroh had promised fire-for-fire. “We in the PDP have more than ample capacity,” he said, “to meet any exigencies that the present violence may introduce.” He warned, “this will be the last time we (in PDP) will be at the receiving end.” This might not be an empty threat, because over time, Nigerian politicians have shown their insatiable appetite to unleash violence in order to win elections.

What happened to the Soludo campaign train must be particularly dispiriting to Prof Iwu. Reason: few hours before the violence, Iwu had gleefully in his paper at the workshop in Owerri, praised the political campaigns so far in Anambra ahead of the election. Iwu had said in his paper: “In spite of the high noise, the numerous litigations and heated disputations within the various political parties and between political parties and candidates, there has been no report of violence in the campaign for governorship election in Anambra state. This is the way it should be. It is a mark of maturity and we hope and pray that the spirit and disposition which are currently at play in the state will continue all through the election and beyond.” INEC boss must have been shocked by the renewed political violence in Anambra State, just when he thought things are beginning to look up and the politicians perhaps learning their lessons the hard way.

All that, however means that we are entering an especially dangerous phase in our electoral process. That means in effect that political violence must be taken very seriously. That, indeed, is foreboding, says the CEO of AMPROK Technologies, organisers of the workshop, Prince Obinna Okwuaka. He must know, having been in politics for years and suffered political intimidation as a senatorial candidate of APGA in the 2007 elections, Okwuaka sees electoral violence as a threatening phenomenon that has, in his words, “featured prominently and dangerously in all elections conducted in Nigeria since 1963….” The truth is that from 1960s when the defunct Western region was derisively labelled the Wild, Wild West, and the then Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) (alias Demo) was scornly called the “Southpaw” of the feudal Northern People’s Congress, Nigerian Politicians and their supporters are yet to show any restraint nor finesse of language in elections matters. Violence has therefore become the fear factor. It is the fear of what violence can do against the will of the people.

This is why Msgr Mathew Hassan Kukah in his enriched paper in Owerri described election violence as the “first born child of an illegitimate government.” With unflappable zeal, eloquence and anecdotes, Kukah said “electoral violence shortens the distance of our path to collective destruction.” He warned politicians to note that as long as they continue to swim to power through the blood of electoral violence, one day, now or in the future, they will drown in the pool of that blood.” The sad thing Kukah added, is that our politicians will drag Nigeria to this precipice around their necks. Harsh words, it seems, from Kukah but that is really the terrifying thing about the consequences of electoral violence on the polity.

The sadder thing as INEC boss observes, is that the electoral body under the present law is helpless in reining in erring politicians. According to Iwu, the expectation is that in due course, Nigerian politicians and all stakeholders in the electoral process will realise that elections are not war and that the society will not be better off with the tension, plots and high costs that elections impose on the nation and the citizens.

It bears repeating: what drives or propels Nigerian politicians to employ violence in electoral contests? Or put differently, what is it about our politics that drives violence? Is it our environment that sows these seeds of violence? Is it in the gene of the politicians and their supporters? Better stills is our electoral process devised and designed in such a way that we cannot avoid the outbreak of violence? In other words, is violence an integral part of our political culture? I do not have all the answers, but those who should know such as Prof Iwu, Kukah, and governors like Ohakim say they have a handle why the sums cannot add up to the whole .

I will try to replicate what they have said at the Owerri workshop. According to the Imo State governor whose election is still a subject of disputation three years after, he was sworn in, the causes of electoral violence include weak electoral laws, non-independence of INEC, manipulation of the electoral process by the political parties; use of security agencies to rig election as well as tons of money at the disposal of politicians who use such funds to “purchase the instruments of violence and influence electoral officials and security agencies.” Other causes, Ohakim said, include collaboration and ignoble role of some electoral officials, lack of internal democracy in the political parties, unemployment, hunger and poverty and lack of adequate enlightenment of the electorate. These causes, Ohakim maintains, must be addressed squarely if violence in the electoral contest will be minimised.

But an institutional framework that will guarantee free and fair elections next year is absolutely necessary, says Ohakim. Words are not enough. Action speaks louder than words. And this is where the problem squarely rests. In this regard, Iwu insists that in as much as electoral reform is necessary for the sustenance of Nigerian democracy, it must start with the “reform of the attitude and behaviour of individual politicians”. And unless the politicians, the political parties, the voters, the media and, indeed, all stakeholders reform their basic attitude to politics and elections, nothing much will be achieved. But Kukah reserves the hardest words for the politicians, whom he describes as the “worst enemies of our democratic values, the worst transgressors of the rule of law” in the subversion of the moral basis of our politics.

The Road from Owerri

By Chidi Amuta, This Day

The burden of relevant politics and governance falls unequally on the shoulders of our state governors depending on what part of the country they hold sway in. This is precisely because Nigeria is a federation of unequal parts and unequal circumstances, unequal opportunities and disparate cultures and histories. We may all be partakers in the Nigerian festival of nation statehood. But we, as nationalities and geo-political aggregations, come to the festival dressed in assorted garbs, bearing the burdens of our separate histories and encounters with a past that many would swear is a bit unflattering.

The constitutional equality of states in no way relieves incumbents of the peculiar burden of geo-political history. On the surface, there is a certain identity of problems- unemployment, crime, urban filth, bad education, rotten infrastructure etc- that would tempt us to adopt a common measurement for evaluating governance across the states.

Consequently, crises of relevance, political desperation and electoral uncertainty have joined forces to produce a certain boring notion of governance especially among states. Every other state governor is clearing drains, bull dozing roads, erecting street lights, planting trees and grass, building bridges that sometimes lead nowhere in particular and mouthing the same worn clichés about dividends of democracy.

This development, sometimes lazy and unsystematic as it may seem, is a quantum leap. At least, there is a psychology of accountability underlying all these: governors feel compelled by popular expectation, opposition pressure and peer group emulation to “do something” at least to justify their mandate and the huge demands they make on the public purse.

But beyond this commonality of approach, there is something higher and perhaps less tangible that ought to help in distinguishing among our governors. How are the specific actions of individual governors informed by the general history of their part of the country? I raise this question because unknown to us, some of our governors may find that they have to be measured by standards and benchmarks established by a past that many of them were perhaps too young to understand. Let us be specific.

I doubt for instance that any of the governors of the core Niger Delta states can expect to detach their present efforts from the overriding imperative of development and equity previously underlined by their illustrious forebears. I wager that every kilometre of road built, every classroom added or every health centre built by these governors finds relevance primarily in terms of the historical burden defined by the nation’s untidy relationship with the Niger Delta.

In the South-west, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, at the height of his illustrious governance of Lagos State, had to consciously brand himself by anchoring his achievements on the Awo heritage. His self branding effort had to reach back to Awo’s round metal rimmed glasses and a variant of the ubiquitous Awo cap with some distant hints of Ghandi. Even now, the commendable strides of Governor Babatunde Fashola and some of his more serious colleagues in the South-west are being measured, by their electorate, against the background of a social democratic tradition of governance established by the great Awo.

Throughout the 19 northern states, for instance, there is an abiding nostalgia for the legacy of the late Sardauna of Sokoto. As late as the last few days, this nostalgia found expression in the elaborate launch of well endowed foundation in memory of that fallen statesman. Actions and reactions of governors in what can be described as the greater North are more likely to be measured in terms of whether they re-affirm or betray the original vision and interests of that part of the country.

In the South-east, we come face to face with a contradiction of historic proportions. No other nationality in contemporary Nigeria has been as scarred and marked by Nigerian history as the Igbos. It is often said that something is wrong with any Nigerian community that is not host to some Igbo presence. Similarly, something is also said to be wrong with an Igbo adult who has not ventured out of his homeland. There is therefore a sense in which the health of the Nigerian federation at any time can be measured by the degree of tolerance or rejection of Igbos in any and all parts of the country. Yet, governance and politics in this part of the country thrives on collective amnesia, self ingratiation and the invasion of nauseating mercantilism.

Traumatised by war, driven to the margins of national affairs into menial undertakings and fruitless trade in inconsequential merchandise, the people of the South-east have had dealers rather than leaders in their political leadership. The result has been a disconnect between governance and history in the five states of the South-east.

Therefore, the general question that is invoked by the above concerns is simply this: Can a governor carry the historical burden of the people he defines as his own slice of the nation and still be effective as a chief executive officer of his state? In other words, can a given governor in our kind of federation be able at once to relate his actions, policies and programmes to the peculiar history of his part of the nation while being able to deliver the so called specific dividends of democracy?

In the context of the crisis of political leadership in the South Eastern zone of the country, I am attracted, by sheer curiosity, to the utterances and actions of the Governor of Imo State, Mr. Ikedi Ohakim. What is emerging is the defining character of Ohakim’s perception of his role in government is a self-assigned role of linking his specific governance tasks as chief executive of Imo State to the larger historical burdens of the Igbo nation.

In the two years that he has been governor, Ohakim has taken certain actions that suggest an unusual sense of history, specifically the history and particular circumstance of his Igbo roots. Anyone who has followed the utterances of the governor will have been struck by a certain recurrent theme that testifies to some consciousness of the history of his people. He has re-invigorated the annual Ahiajoku lecture series, an annual intellectual celebration of Igbo culture and heritage. He has brought back world famous novelist Chinua Achebe in what was greeted as a historic homecoming, a remarkable pilgrimage to ancestry and a tribute to the roots that bind. He has addressed the World Igbo Congress and the Black Congressional Caucus and used these occasions to link his present assignment to a larger historical role of finding relevance mostly in the context of his people’s tortured past.

Ohakim has indicated, in lecture after lecture, speech after speech, enough interest in the retrieval of the essence of Igbo culture from the jaws of a national history that has almost drowned the Igbo in collective amnesia and benign neglect by the federals. Of all the blights that confront and threaten the Igbo nation, perhaps there is none more lethal than the tyranny of bad political leaders.

Interestingly though, Ohakim’s thesis is a refreshing one from the anthem of marginalisation that has been the common currency of successive Igbo political opportunists. On the contrary, the governor posits a more pro-active and optimistic attitude. The Igbos must quit being sorry for themselves and for their past actions in the Nigerian federation. He defines a new need for the political leadership of the South-east to rise above the constraints of historically induced collective depression and amnesia to answer the call of modernity through rapid economic development. And this is where I guess the governor will run into trouble with his vision. His utterances demand that he must fast track the development of his state to serve as a viable model and galvanising centre for the South-east of his dream. But he presides over a resource poor state and therefore has to convert the entrepreneurial gift of his people into the resources he needs to develop his state.

By far the greater obstacle that I see in the kind of idealism that Ohakim has so far exuded is the tradition of rancorous politics that has bedevilled the South-east especially in the post civil war era. Ohakim presides over a state where petition writing is a recognised industry and in which the politics of acrimony overrides any form of consensus on development issues. I doubt that any other sitting governor has a higher number of law suits hovering over their incumbency than Ohakim. This environment defines a different challenge: that of reaching the relevant political accommodation both within his state and outwards in the context of the larger South-east.

Somehow, Owerri has something strategic and symbolic about it. Most roads to and from different parts of the country lead through it. In a place such as this, it is quite easy to get lost in the maze of possibilities and directions that make themselves available. For Ohakim, the possibilities here are both immense and frightening. If he can carry the burden of his emerging vision while running a credible administration, the road from Owerri can lead both Imo and the Igbos quite far. If he is crushed by the burden of his vision and loses his specific focus, the road from Owerri might lead right back to the political wilderness.