VOTE-BUYING AND VOTE-SELLING IN NIGERIA

Vote-buying so prevalent in the nation has become a singular factor that is working against democracy in Nigeria

Senator Ademola Adeleke and Governor Gboyega Oyetola.

Osun state governorship election will come up on 16th July. Then, either Gboyega Oyetola, the incumbent governor of the All Progressives Congress (APC) will be returned to the Government House in Oshogbo, the state capital, or Senator Ademola Adeleke, the candidate of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will defeat Oyetola and send him packing from the governor's lodge. The battle promises to be titanic. The incumbent governor said to be a relative of the presidential candidate of the ruling APC, Bola Tinubu, must return as governor to enhance the electoral victory of Bola Tinubu.

For Atiku Abubakar, the PDP presidential candidate, Ademola Adeleke must win to narrow the chances of Bola Tinubu in the presidential election. Both Gboyega Oyetola and Ademola Adeleke contested the Osun State gubernatorial election in 2018 where Oyetola was returned in very controversial circumstances. Now Adeleke with a huge war chest is willing to take vengeance and take the governorship this time around. Already citizens of the state are apprehensive that what played out in the recent Ekiti election where vote-buying determined the winner might also play out in Osun come 16th July.

Before the Ekiti election, a pensioner of the state told this reporter that the government reneged on the promise to pay the gratuity of the pensioners possibly because it had to reserve money to buy votes. According to reports, the party in government in Ekiti was the highest bidder paying as much as 10,000 naira per vote. It of course won the election. Ekiti electorates could not reject the allure of the amount as they voted in a party that had kept them poor for four years. It does not need a soothsayer to know that the Osun election will follow the same pattern. The amount might even be higher in Osun because Senator Adeleke is reputed to have very deep pockets too.

Similarly, Gboyega Oyetola apart from being rich and having a relative, Bola Tinubu who is super rich and very generous with money, especially where politics is concerned, also sit on the finances of the state. Nigerians in public offices have designed strategies to spend public finance for their elections. So far, the nation’s anti-corruption czar, Abdulrasheed Bawa of the Economic Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has not been able to tame that and may never be able to tame vote-buying by politicians. It is instructive that the EFCC was on standby during the presidential primaries of the two mainstream parties but was helpless as delegates were reportedly bribed with huge sums of money.

Vote-buying so prevalent in the nation has become a singular factor that is working against democracy in Nigeria and there does not appear to be anything in sight that can stop it. The more the laws are tightened, the more the politicians design loopholes and the more the lawyers explore the loopholes. It seems Nigerians will be at the mercy of these politicians and lawyers. The promise of good men and good women in government in Nigeria will forever remain a mirage. Our process of political recruitment is out of tune with our political experience. There seems to be a semblance of supernatural intervention, though. It could not be deciphered how President Muhammadu Buhari signed into law the recent amendment to the electoral law that tied his hands in the nomination of APC's presidential candidate. The promise of electronic transmission of election which was fought against can give free and fair election.

Clearly, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the winner of the nomination was not the preferred candidate of Buhari. Buhari's schemes to enshrine a consensus scheme to get in his preferred candidate nominated was intelligently thwarted by the intelligent and keen legal team of Bola Tinubu that pointed out that a consensus arrangement not assented to by Bola Tinubu, and all contestants will be a nullity according to the law signed by President Muhammadu Buhari. On his part, Bola Tinubu through a deft move also thwarted the move of the president and his cabal to stop zoning its presidency to the South by getting the governors of the party from the North to insist that the presidency must be zoned to the South. Just like it happened in the convention of opposition PDP where it was reported that the nomination was won and lost by the use of money, the APC nomination was also won and lost by money. A presidential contender in APC, Pastor Tunde Bakare pride himself to have resisted any urge to bribe the delegates. He lost.

Now Nigeria is jinxed, the nation is at a fix. Nigeria and Nigerians are hooked on the evil of vote-buying and vote-selling. Democracy, as practiced in Nigeria, has failed. There can be no forward thrust. The nation fails. Therefore the resolution of this issue of vote-buying and selling is crucial to the resolution of the existence of Nigeria, every other thing is secondary. Nigeria will forever belong to the rich who stole her money and continue to steal it to remain in power. The cycle is simple; win the election by bribing the electorates, keep the electorate poor by stealing their money, and in the next cycle of an election, use a little part of the stolen money to bribe an already pauperized electorate who will not be able to resist the bribe because of their extreme poverty.

There can be no solution except if the root of the problem is discovered. Where did it start? It started with the National Party of Nigeria, NPN. The party was made up of men and women who had either served under various military governments or been friends of the military milking the nation in inflated contracts or contracts collected and money paid but the contract was never executed. These two groups had known to steal money and become very rich doing nothing but just being in government or related in the corridors of power. At the return of government to the civilians in 1979, the Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN also joined the race of vote buyers. It did its own not with the electorates but at the party nomination level. UPN was an offspring of the Action Group, the party with which late Chief Obafemi Awolowo did wonders with the development of the Western Region.

The AG method of recruiting its candidates was by selection. That was why many of them were selected from teaching, law, and journalism. They were people who were known for competence, dedication to the party ideology, and discipline. They all followed the party policy. They discussed and agreed on their policies at the party levels and all conformed in government. That was the secret of the party's high performance in the old Western Region. Chief Awolowo's later romance with what we now call 'internal democracy' brought the crisis into the party. The choice of Chief Akintola to succeed Chief Awolowo as premier was not in accordance with the policy of selection. For two years party leaders pressurized Awolowo to allow the succession. When he succumbed, the party lost its cohesion and the first republic fell with the loss.

Again in the second republic, internal democracy was the demise of the UPN, the offspring of AG. Good examples of this ruin were the Ondo and Oyo gubernatorial nominations. Ondo became another war in the House of Oduduwa as various ambitious people brought ruin to party discipline. In Oyo State, the choice of Chief Awolowo was the late Chief Alayande, a prominent school principal known for discipline and dedication. Pressure again compelled Chief Awolowo to succumb to internal democracy. Chief Alayande lost the election to Chief Bola Ige who eventually won the governorship. When Chief Alayande was asked why he lost the nomination inspite of his well-acknowledged status, he reportedly said; "those young men, they are very rich", another way of saying the primary election was won and lost with money.

For the NPN, you can't be anything except you have money. In 1993, money played a great part in the victory of MKO Abiola both at the nomination and the main election. Abiola was in the military-created Social Democratic Party, SDP. By the time it got to 1999 between Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, who won the nomination and the consequent election, and former Vice President Chief Alex Ekwueme, it was money that played the decider. The chairman of a group of delegates from a state in the North told a foreign journalist, Karl Maier, that the group had settled on 150,000.00 naira per delegate as their price. Now in 2022 at the PDP nomination, the cost of the vote has jumped to a million naira, some got theirs in dollars. At the recent Ekiti election, the party that won reportedly offered 10,000 naira for each voter. Other parties offered between 7,000 and 3,000 naira

The solution, therefore, is to do away with this internal democracy. The nation can take a cue from China and the old AG which used a combination of selection and election. China was so successful in it that it boasted that with its system, a person like Donald Trump cannot emerge as president. AG’s success in the West is a local example of the superiority of a combination of selection and election. The nation should quit imposing any internal democracy on the parties. Each party should swim or sink with its preferred system. At our level of development, we cannot afford western-style political recruitment.