The treatment of politicking as a transactional exercise by which politicians profit has been with us for some time. After the annulment of June 12 presidential election which was acclaimed the freest and fairest election in Nigeria, the then military dictator midwifing the election, identified the inappropriate use of money as one of the reasons for the annulment of the vote.
“There were proofs as well as documented evidence of widespread use of money during the party primaries as well as the presidential election. These were the same bad conduct for which the party presidential primaries of 1992 were canceled. Evidence available to the government put the total amount of money spent by the presidential candidates at over two billion, one hundred million naira (N2.1 billion). The use of money was again the major source of undermining the electoral process.” General Ibrahim Babangida claimed in his public statement trailing the annulment.
Babangida pressed on to explain that another reason for the annulment borders on moral ground, “There were cases of documented and confirmed conflict of interest between the government and both presidential candidates which would compromise their positions and responsibilities were they to become president.”
Without taking away the public perception of the election as free and fair, he concluded, "We believe that politics and government are not ends in themselves. Rather, service and effective amelioration of the condition of our people must remain the true purpose of politics.”
I dare say the conflict of interest is not between the political aspirants and the government as Babangida put it, but between the political aspirants and the Nigerian constitution on the one hand and the Nigerian people on the other side because the goal of public service is to serve the people with loyalty to the law of the land. Where a politician had used money to buy votes, there would be a conflict of interest between service to the people and self-seeking.
Taken Babangida's hypocritical position for the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential election, has anything changed since then?
The 2015 presidential election was another case of use of money to unduly induce voters in an election. The election initially scheduled for February 4 was postponed to March 28 for security reasons according to the electoral umpire. Within the period of the postponement, we witnessed a dollar rain in the country from the ruling PDP. Revelations after the election the erstwhile President Goodluck Jonathan lost to the incumbent President Mohammed Buhari indicated that the $2.1b meant to fight terrorism was the one diverted to induce electorate in the election.
The most recent Ekiti election was no exception, thanks to BBC Pidgin that exposed the use of money to induce the electorate by the two dominant parties in the election.
The winner of that election, Kayode Fayemi, had denied the use of money by him and his party on his visit to the President after the election. The denial is expected because any politician in Nigeria has never publicly admitted that he/she used money to induce voters and buy their PVCs from them.
The stand of career politicians on the validity of the allegation of money inducement was busted, however. The recent experience of the Nollywood diva in Nigerian politics, Kate Henshaw, was not different. She confessed she had to bribe party delegates to vote her in the primary. She eventually lost. According to her, to win an election in Nigeria, it is either you have the money to spend, or there is a political godfather that would influence your electoral victory. She had neither of these in abundance to coast her to the national house of representative.
The trending monetization of democracy is cloaked in government policy. Buhari’s administration decision to share $322 million, out of Abacha’s loot, to indigent Nigerians in 19 states is an exemplary monetization of democracy. The initiative is a right one. As a country with about 80% of her population in poverty, it is desirable we have a social welfare program that takes care of the poor ones and other socially excluded members of our society.
However, the initiative is provoking more questions than answers, more vagueness than clarity and more perception of an ulterior motive than a perception of the sincerity of intention. The database from which the government intends to identify the poor Nigerians is not available. The government is yet to give the reasons for prioritizing the selected 19 states over the remaining 17 states and Abuja.
Supposing the government starts the disbursement with the 19 states, it is yet to tell us when the remaining part of the country would be included. The endurance of the policy is in doubt as the Nigerian economy still depends on the fate of the volatile crude oil in the international market.
Until Buhari government can address all these grey areas, its social welfare program seems more like a smoke screen hiding money inducement of the electorate than a well-planned social welfare program that would outlast 2019 general election and Buhari’s administration. We are in some months away from the election and failure to clear the grey areas leaves discerning Nigerians with doubts about Buhari government’s sincerity of purpose regarding its social welfare policy.
President Buhari has been reported to abstain from the use of his money in inducing voters before ascending to the presidency, but he is a beneficiary of the crooked money politics that has pervaded the Nigerian system. It falls on him to initiate necessary laws to correct the anomaly and champion the execution of existing laws preventing the undue influence of money in Nigerian politics.
© Tawfiq Abdullah
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About Me
I am a marketer, communicator, and blogger. I worked extensively in the private sector as a business executive and organizational communicator, precisely in sales training. I bagged a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and English from Olabisi Onabanjo University, a Chartered Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing from the National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria (NIMN), an MBA from the Lagos State University. I am an associate of NIMN and currently living in Lafayette, Louisiana where I am about to defend my Master’s thesis to bag the MS Communication degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
I am a marketer, communicator, and blogger. I worked extensively in the private sector as a business executive and organizational communicator, precisely in sales training. I bagged a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and English from Olabisi Onabanjo University, a Chartered Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing from the National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria (NIMN), an MBA from the Lagos State University. I am an associate of NIMN and currently living in Lafayette, Louisiana where I am about to defend my Master’s thesis to bag the MS Communication degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
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