By Festus Okoye
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The influence, activities, and tactics of political thugs in our electoral process continue to evolve and grow more sophisticated.
Political parties, consultants, middlemen, and contractors who hire and retain them seek new ways to keep them in business every day, while Nigerians seek ways to make their votes count and to make democracy meaningful in their lives.
It is a struggle of contradictions: politicians must either find more creative ways to keep them in business or do away with them altogether and embrace a new political culture that respects the people’s sovereign right to choose on election day.
On the other hand, the voters, the Nigerian people, must develop the courage to protect mandates and make greater use of technology in the electoral process to render political thugs and their sponsors powerless. There is no doubt that political thugs constitute one of the most important constituencies of the Nigerian political elite.
Politicians believe in them so much and invest so heavily that, to the political elite, political thugs are more important than voters. The resources invested in political thugs and the consultants who recruit and manage them often exceed what is spent on the diversionary exercise of campaigning for votes.
Some Nigerian politicians will not campaign without first preparing their political thugs. They buy sufficient quantities of psychotropic drugs for them. They also buy machetes, clubs, and other deadly weapons. Sometimes, the thugs determine the campaign locations and the routes to be followed.
They decide who will be neutralised and who should be terrorised. The political thugs are the campaign, and the campaign is the political thugs. I mean a campaign in the broad sense of the word—not one that appeals to voters for support, sells better programmes and policies to the public, or seeks their support for their implementation.
Neither am I talking about campaigns that showcase a broader, more carefully packaged ideological blueprint. The campaigns political thugs are accustomed to are campaigns of terror and bloodshed.
Their message is that you must stay in your house on election day if you do not support their candidate. Their mission is to spread terror, fear, and silence. They seek to force you to choose the instrument of your own annihilation if you dare to defy them.
I once observed a rerun election in one of Nigeria’s federal constituencies. The party in power at the time identified the “enemy” local government areas within the constituency and decided that their residents must either be prevented from voting or have their votes reduced to a bare minimum.
Overnight, the party mobilised its consultants, contractors, and middlemen, who, in turn, recruited political thugs and deployed them to the targeted local government areas.
The thugs did not need to attack anyone. You would simply wake up to find two or three people by the side of your house, smoking weed and armed with clubs, machetes, and guns. No soothsayer was needed to advise people to stay indoors.
At the end of the day, the local government returned an abysmally low number of votes, a caricature of its actual voting strength. In some parts of Nigeria, political thugs effectively control specific polling units. They print accreditation tags for all the political parties and deploy them to their designated polling units.
They serve as agents for all the parties and, at the close of voting, share and allocate votes according to the amount of money they have received from each party. Political thugs were prominent during the First and Second Republics and continue to wield significant influence in present-day Nigeria.
They are heavily involved in rallies and processions organised by political parties and, in some instances, still help determine who enters Government House and who does not.
However, the gradual integration of technology into the electoral process has sought to reduce the role of political thugs in election-day procedures.
The introduction of the Permanent Voters’ Card (PVC), the Smart Card Reader (SCR), the INEC Voter Enrolment Device, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), and the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) has curtailed some of their traditional methods of operation, prompting them to adjust their tactics and shift direction.
But the Nigerian politician is smart. Even those who have never set foot in a school are adept at finding crooked ways around the system. Politicians continued to snatch ballot boxes and ballot papers and to manipulate results after intimidating, and sometimes corrupting, presiding and collation officers.
The Commission then introduced the Smart Card Reader, which reads the chips embedded in the PVC and verifies voters’ details against the information stored on the card before accreditation.
However, the politicians found ways to undermine the Smart Card Reader and restore the influence of political thugs in the electoral process. They argued that the people listed in the voter register—both real and imaginary—were the ones entitled to vote, and that the Smart Card Reader was a stranger to the law.
They insisted that the Electoral Act, 2010 (as amended), did not recognise the Smart Card Reader as an accreditation device and that the voter register remained the dominant means of accreditation.
The Nigerian people exerted pressure, and the Smart Card Reader, its successor, the BVAS, and any other accreditation device designed by the Commission eventually found their way into the law. But the politician is smart. The political thug must remain in business.
The politician still wants the thug to vote on the voter’s behalf. To achieve this, they must hijack or kidnap the presiding officer, thumbprint ballot papers, and find ways to bypass the BVAS. They soon found ways to circumvent the BVAS, knowing that proving overvoting in court can be difficult. Nigeria currently has 176,846 polling units and 8,838 registration areas, also known as electoral wards.
Overvoting must be established on a polling-unit-by-polling-unit basis, using evidence that may include testimony from duly accredited polling unit agents or from voters who were present and witnessed the voting, as well as the voter register, the relevant electoral forms, and the physical BVAS.
In the present dispensation, political actors have adopted a multipronged strategy.
They prevent people from accessing polling units by creating a toxic, violent environment; hijack ballot papers and BVAS devices; and manipulate results before uploading them to IReV. They also interfere with people’s voting preferences or the results themselves through what is now known as “vote buying and selling”.
The influence of political thugs in the electoral process will begin to wane when Nigerians take the protection of their electoral mandates seriously. Political thugs do not descend from the sky. Some are recruited from their own or neighbouring communities. The people know them, and they know the people.
They know the terrain, and the people know it as well. They can overpower only those who remain docile and unwilling to defend their rights. Nigerians must decide for themselves what kind of democracy they want. It is clear that the dominant political elite does not want the kind of democracy envisioned by the Constitution.
They want coronation, not election. Nigerians want something different, and this contradiction poses a serious problem. The people must therefore rescue democracy from the anti-democratic forces operating within the country. Political thugs must not be allowed to continue defining our future and our democracy.
Nigerians have the resources, the courage, and the character to build a great nation. Yet many of the biggest challenges facing the electoral process, as well as the stunted growth of Nigerian democracy, stem from members of the political elite who do not believe in democracy or the democratic process.
To many of them, it is pointless to ask registered voters to exercise their sovereignty by choosing who governs them. They would much rather have a coronation than an election. Nigerians must change this narrative.
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