INEC Is Alien To The Nigerian Terrain

By Bob MajiriOghene Etemiku

When I sat down to reflect on what I wanted to say about my overall impression of the voter education campaign and tour that my organization, the Africa Network for Environment and Economic Justice, ANEEJ, embarked upon in Edo State recently, I decided on a title draft ‘Hold INEC responsible for the failure of the 2015 Elections’.

On further examination of the broad spectrum of events that I experienced, the people I spoke to, and those who interacted with me in the course of our enlightenment cum education campaign, I have had need to edit that title.

Not because it was going to be any difficult to articulate, but because I recently found out that certain assertions on the pages of newspapers merely point to the symptoms rather than to the source and cause of the problems.

The need to adjust my thinking and my title became expedient after the tour. The request to undertake this enlightenment campaign and tour came at the behest of the Resident Electoral Commissioner of Edo State, Mike Igini.

On Friday, 27th February, 2015, he called a meeting of Civil Liberty Organisations, CLOs, asking them to put the benefit of their experience, clout and network to bear on the INEC campaign to reach to the grassroots and add some rev to the drive to mobilize the grassroots.

ANEEJ was seconded to cover Akoko-Edo. Travelling to Igara, Aiyegunle, Ibillo, Ososo, Enwan, Okpe and Lampese opened my eyes to certain realities that the INEC had not envisaged in apportioning areas of voter enlightenment, especially with the kind of instructional materials they left us.

Therefore, I have had to travel to a very remote area of Edo State, mingling with the ‘ordinary people of Nigeria’ – for the very first time in my life I armed myself with a megaphone and entered a mosque with the permission of a revered chief Imam.

For the very first time in my life, I stood on the holy pulpit of our Moslem brothers and sisters and preached a message of wrong and right voting.

For the very first time in my life I have had to move from stall to stall in two large markets, canvassing, debating and trying to break down the walls of indifference in a people who already have made up their minds that this election was already lost and won.

Having done this and having moved about rural folk as rural and as folk as the ones I met, and having experienced the vastness of the Nigerian terrain, and having put myself in the position of any other colleague covering another vast expanse like Adamawa or Sokoto or Jos and who would likely do exactly what ANEEJ had done with Ibillo, Ososo, Igara, Aiyegunle and Lampese and Enwan, I knew for a fact that INEC does not understand the magnitude of voter enlightenment and education it needed to carry out before this past election.

For us to understand what I meant by ‘ordinary people of Nigeria, I would love to go back somewhere in time, around the early 90s.

I had read an article by Sam Kargbo titled, ‘Democracy is the answer!’ Those days were the days of Sani Abacha where several pro-democracy groups like the NADECO were in the trenches firing verbal missiles at the Abacha junta.

The target of the missiles that these pro-democracy groups were firing were mostly directed at the military, to the extent that if you were to listen to any one of these pro-democracy activists, you would at once come off with the impression that democracy cannot be a government of certain kinds of people simply because these people were military and wore uniforms and were only mandated to defend the territorial integrity of Nigeria.

That was the general tone of that article – that democracy can only be practiced by civilians and civilians alone.

But haven’t our contemporary experience proven otherwise to the extent that it is taking a court order to rein in the military, and force them not to be involved in the democratic process?

I didn’t think that democracy is only about civilian participation per se. So I wrote a rejoinder to Sam Kargbo’s then and to the Vanguard newspaper, asking the question, ‘Is Democracy the answer?’

My argument had two thrusts then: on one hand, I sought to argue that the military were people just like any other people and the fact that they wore uniforms didn’t make them any less than part of the democratic process.

I also wanted us to get our people ready for democracy, resting my plea on the fact that democracy cannot be effectively run by an uneducated and an unenlightened people.

I remember my punch line then that the harried and frantic imposition of democratic structures and institutions cannot make for an effective democracy; and that a people who have not been educated or who do not know their civic rights, duties and obligations pose the greatest impediments to the democratic process.

Therefore when we look around today what do we find? We find out that most of the people who have replaced the military only replaced the military so that they too can loot the treasury and become as powerful as the characters in the military who looted our treasury dry.

In flesh and blood – I saw ignorance of the voting process walk on two human legs. For instance, it all began with INEC – in the fact that a lot of the big ogas (big bosses) sitting comfy in their air-conditioned offices have no boots and are not on ground at all: most understand the demographics only on paper!

In one of the areas that ANEEJ visited in Akoko-Edo, the man representing INEC in one of the registration areas, RAs, had all the materials he needed to be able to do just what INEC was asking us to do – the posters, the handbills and the public address systems.

But he was unwilling to do so first because he had not been ‘mobilized’ and second, his superiors do not even have faith in his ability to carry out an enlightenment campaign.

“Are you sure that the people you’re going to talk to will listen to you?” he sneered.

A lot of the Nigerians that I met were willing to listen – but you first had to have something to part with.

Most couldn’t believe that my hands were clean, to mean that they were not sure what to make of one whose claim that he was not in their markets and mechanic workshops and barbing saloons to dole dollars and pounds in exchange for PVCs and votes. That was the Augean stable that INEC was asking CLOs to clean.

Bob MajiriOghene Etemiku is communications Manager with the Africa Network for Environment and Economic Justice, ANEEJ, writes from Benin City, Edo State. www.aneej.org