Daily Independent Online.
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Wednesday, July 14, 2004.
Elections 2007: Lessons from America
By Mike Ikhariale
[email protected]
One of the key areas over which democracy is
considered superior to other forms of state management is its capacity to
continuously correct shortcomings arising from its operations. In other words,
while the fundamental principles of democracy appear to have been settled,
there is however the general understanding that it remains eternally amenable
to improvements. At the level of normative prescription, in terms of protected
values and fundamental principles, the fact that even the supreme law of the
land, the constitution, is opened to amendments once the need for the change
has acquired considerable acceptance by all those over whom it is meant to
apply, is an additional proof that the system is ever at the disposal of the
citizens rather then the citizens being at its disposal.
The process of democratic governance remains opens to
improvements and that has led to more effectiveness in the deployment of state
powers in the overall interests of the governed than other competing systems.
No system is perfect and the earlier we learn from our numerous mistakes or
deliberate abuses, the better for us. The evidence so far in our inchoate
democracy is that we are mired in a catalogue of errors crying for correction.
In the last American election that produced President
George Bush, some of the weaknesses in the system were exposed to universal
ridicule by the unfortunate events in Florida in which many potential voters
were schemed out of the voting process as well as the deliberate voiding of a
lot of votes through the cumbersome “butterfly” ballots system. It
would be recalled that as a result, the votes of many Blacks and other
minorities who habitually vote for the Democrats, the party under which Al Gore
contested, did not count as they were voided. It is now history that Gore lost
that election partly as a result of his loss of Florida to Bush. But the nation
took the development as a challenge and went ahead to rectify the mess. The
result is a very extensive reform in the voting systems across the country all
with a view to simplifying them for easy comprehension by the poor and lowly
educated voters of many American inner cities.
It should also be pointed out that even though the US
is a federation, it does not have a central electoral body like INEC. Every
state has its own method of conducting elections and the results are then put
together through a collegiate system that allocates certain points to states
according to their electoral strength. That is why it was possible that even
though Al Gore got more votes, it was Bush who had more points based on the
Electoral College system that was declared the eventual winner in very
controversial circumstances. What comes out clearly here is that local
communities do most of what we have given to INEC to do centrally in Nigeria
and that is why it is so easy for our electoral bodies to tamper with the
outcome of the people’s choice. I recall that we were already well aware
about how much Abiola trounced Tofa in the 1992 presidential polls before the
figures were shipped to Abuja for tabulation during which time Babaginda
arbitrarily annulled the results. Even though the last 2003 election was not
annulled by another IBB, the results were so tampered with by those who were
supposed to guarantee its sanctity that they effectively destroyed much of its
credibility.
Unlike the Americans that promptly rose to redress
the mischief that became obvious after Florida, we are pretending that all is
well. The nation may not be able to withstand the tsunami that may be generated
by another electoral fraud in 2007. In this connection, I think the nation
could easily save itself from this impending catastrophe by falling back on the
system that has once produced viable and credible election results. That is the
now discarded Option A4. The Abiola/Tofa election was conducted under the very
simple arrangement in which voters could see the outcomes of their electoral
decision “on the spot” thereby leaving very little room for
manipulation by officials. If INEC is truly serious about a credible election
in 2007, it must now abandon the present fraudulent system. Apart from INEC, I
think the politicians must themselves insist that the nation be returned to
Option A4 in their own interests.
President Obasanjo would be doing the nation a great
favour if he insists that the next election be conducted under a system that
allows the voters to be the first auditors of their ballots. In that case, it
would be very difficult to falsify the results that have already been seen by
everyone at the polling stations and, indeed more difficult, for true losers to
cry foul because the people would shout them down. There are just too many
baseless election disputations under the present system.
If America could change their voting arrangement in
order to eliminate problems such as they suffered in 2000, why should Nigeria,
a young democracy stick to a formula that is not working? The present voting
arrangement by INEC is both too expensive and too amenable to fraud. It should
be a matter of concern that we are spending more resources as a factor of the
national economy than say, South Africa, Ghana and even Benin Republic, not to
mention far more developed countries like the US and Great Britain. Under
option A4, INEC would need just about two-thirds of what it is spending right
now and for better performances too.
Another thing that we can learn from America is how
they select their presidential candidates. Of course, under the law there,
everyone is free to contest the election. If there is no party to sponsor him,
he can go in as an Independent candidate as long as he has enough supporters to
put him “on the ballot”. Right now, America is griped by a campaign
fever. The incumbent, George Bush, faces the prospects of being out-staged by
John Kerry, no thanks to the misadventure in Iraq and the sluggish domestic
economy. As the campaign heats up, preparatory to the Conventions during which
the presumptive candidates would be formally adopted by the parties, it is
already very obvious that winning elections in America is a very well-defined
process that involves the power of the electorate to choose from the contending
candidates whose antecedents, ideologies, private lives and characters are
openly on display.
That has meant also that whoever wants to be a
candidate must be sure that there is nothing on his personal records that would
vitiate his candidature. In many respects, it would seem that the Americans
demand from their would-be presidents a lot more than they do from themselves
as far as morality and probity are concerned. That has created the image of a
Superman for whoever becomes the president. Even the choice of a running mate
is not without its complexities. The presumptive Democratic Party presidential
candidate, John Kerry, has just nominated a former opponent at the primaries,
Senator John Edwards, a trial lawyer from North Carolina, one of the group of
southern states that are habitually conservative and, therefore, largely
Republican. The choice of Edwards by Kerry is calculated to neutralise the
strong suspicion by rural southerners for North Eastern “liberals”
of which Kerry, like the Kennedy clan, are well know. Critics are already
debating the fact that Senator Edwards being a trial lawyer would generate some
aloofness to his candidacy by those who think of him as one of those attorneys
they call “ambulance chasers”. Thankfully, Edwards is more than
that. He is a well-known fighter for the oppressed, injured and down-trodden.
Under such a situation, it would be unthinkable that
a serious political party would ever think of sponsoring a person as evilly
notorious as IBB, the man who once murdered democracy, as a candidate. While it
is true that IBB has not yet been nominated by a political party, the mere fact
that he could summon the courage to declare interest and that there are
actually a few renegades rooting for him, in spite of all, tells a lot about
the moral bankruptcy of politicians in Nigeria.
