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For Nigeria and Nigerians, tomorrow, February 25, 2023, holds a lot. It is a day for the country’s presidential and National Assembly elections. Both are consequential elections. But the election for the President is the star event. It is not just the fulfillment of an electoral obligation by Nigerians but indeed a date with history; an opportunity to reclaim the country or continue with slide to hopelessness.
Whatever decisions the voters make will have enormous effects on the country in the next four years and probably beyond. Actions have effects. For some months running, the citizens had looked forward for the election. From the Presidency to the National Assembly, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to the man on the street, the expectations have been high.
Since the INEC lifted the ban on presidential campaigns on September 28, 2022, the political parties – 18 of them going for the election – have literally been on the heat, each marketing itself and telling Nigerians why it should be voted for. Out of the lot, four have been most persistent – the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Labour Party (LP) and New Nigerian Peoples Party (NNPP). Among the four, APC, PDP, LP, in no particular order of importance, have been slugging it out fiercely. Their standard-bearers, Bola Tinubu (APC), Atiku Abubakar (PDP) and Peter Obi (LP), had within the period of the campaign, toured all the states in the country, including Abuja, selling their programmes.
Tinubu is torn between running on the mantra of continuity, as candidate of the party in power and advancing his personal ambition, which he expressed in ‘Emi lokan’ (It is my turn), as the reason he should be handed the APC ticket. Atiku, former Vice-President, is asking for another chance to right the wrongs of the PDP in the 16 years it was in office. Obi comes as the face of a new Nigeria – a radical departure from the years of transactional leadership, which the APC and PDP have manifested in their poor management of the country.
The candidates have different programmes and strategies but are agreed that Nigeria is broken and needs to be fixed. That tallies with the opinion of most Nigerians. With daunting security challenges in all parts of the country, deplorable infrastructure base, widening corruption index, crippling economic uncertainties manifested in youth unemployment, dwindling fortunes of the national currency and debilitating poverty among the people, the country is without doubt, on a sorry curve. There is a compelling need to rescue the country. This is why the election tomorrow means a lot. In democracy as we practice, the presidency is a big deal.
You can understand why Gerald R. Ford, the 38th U.S. President, argued that the presidency is not a prize to be won, but a duty to be done. John Dickerson, an essayist, adds it is the hardest job in the world. According to Dickerson, when the national fabric rends, the President will administer needle and thread, or at least reach for the sewing box of unity.
This is a big lesson for Nigerians as they cast their votes. They need the poll to make a bold statement on a departure from parochial and provincial ethnic and religious considerations that had held down the country to a genuine leadership recruitment process. The election falls into what the great economist, Joseph Schumpeter, called creative destruction. At such points in a nation’s history, the old order gives way for a new wave of thinking; new sectors attract resources away from the old ones; new firms take business away from established ones; new technologies make existing skills and machines, obsolete. That approximates to paradigm shift, in age and orientation for leadership. Nigeria is ripe for that.
On approaching the ballot, the critical question before Nigerians should be whether they were better off in the last eight years or the era before. Not many, I am sure, will truly answer in the affirmative. Yielding to financial inducements or mundane considerations of religion and ethnicity will leave Nigerians dry in the years ahead.
We had earlier stressed the importance of the 2023 elections to Nigerians on this column. Our position was that what we have at hand is not just another election year. It is for the citizens a call for social revolution, a watershed, a defining moment to change the trajectory of the country’s history and chart a course for the better.
The youths in particular have shown to be the arrowheads of this momentum. From the east, west, north and south, they are united by the burning desire for change. From their unusual response to the INEC voter registration exercise, they have exhibited the enthusiasm to take their future in their hands. They either win it or lose it. For this, they are not taking chances. Their animation approximates to William Shakespeare’s lines in his great work, Julius Caesar, that “There is a tide in the affairs of men; which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”
For the first time in recent years, Nigerian youths seem decided on the country getting it right. They are not looking back.
INEC must, therefore, ensure that the election is not mismanaged. Knowing the culture of desperation among the political players, INEC is one institution that will be targeted to be undermined. How tomorrow’s exercise goes will impact on the March 11 state elections.
It is good that the National Assembly has acceded more powers to the commission in the 2022 Electoral Act to ensure that it conducts free, fair and credible elections. One major clause in the Act is the electronic transmission of election result, the use of Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) and other technological devices to check rigging. With these expanded powers, INEC has no excuses for not delivering. This places a heavy burden of trust the commission and its chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu.
The rest is for President Muhammadu Buhari who has repeatedly promised to bequeath a legacy of free and fair elections to Nigerians. With the signing of the Electoral Act Amendment Bill into law and the massive support for INEC, he has taken a bold step in actualising the pledge. What is left is providing the enabling environment and demonstrating the needed neutrality for free polls.
