Zimbabwe 2013 and Nigeria 2015: The quest for free and fair elections in Africa

Zimbabwe just had general presidential and parliamentary elections in which the ruling party simply swept the votes contrary to the expectations of many. The elections mainly pitted the Morgan Tvsangirai-led Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), against Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF). Mugabe remained true to type, once again pulling off a massive electoral heist, giving him 61 peercent of the presidential vote against 34 percent for MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

Nigeria’s former president Olusegun Obasanjo was there leading the AU election monitors. In the face of the serious electoral fraud perpetrated by Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, Obasanjo promptly said that he had “never seen a perfect election.” Then he repeated his infamous mantra that even if there were irregularities, they were not enough to affect the overall outcome of the elections. And so the AU endorsed the fraudulent ‘results’ and the regional body Southern African Development Community, SADC, followed suit with President Jacob Zuma of South Africa urging Tvsangirai and the MDC to “accept defeat.” The AU had only 60 observers while civil society and other groups had a lot more. For instance, The Zimbabwe Election Support Network, which had 7,000 observers around the country said the elections were fraudulent.

I will come back to Obasanjo’s hypocritical submissions shortly, but let us look at how Mugabe and his party carried out once again the well-documented electoral fraud.

The first thing they did was to secure the judiciary and make it an extension of the ruling party. That is always the first step. With the assurance that the judiciary is in its pocket, the incumbents usually feel free to carry out their electoral and other crimes, knowing that the ‘law’ not only covers them but also bolsters them. The MDC, failing to secure a court order granting them access to full details of the results from the electoral commission, had to withdraw their challenge to Mugabe’s ‘victory.’ And for daring to say that the judiciary is not doing its job, a judge has reported Mr. Tvsangirai to the attorney general for prosecution. In other words, first they refused him access to the electoral materials, and then they turn around and plan to arrest him for saying that they refused! Evidently the judge wants to be in the good books of Mugabe who could make life unbearable for him.

To Nigerians, this sounds very familiar. In the last presidential election, the President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Ayo Salami, was illegally sacked by President Jonathan for daring to ask the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to give the litigants access to the ballot papers that gave Jonathan his ‘victory’ so that it could be subjected to forensic test since there were credible allegations of multiple voting. Salami’s replacement promptly jettisoned that order and the Supreme Court wasted no time in confirming the ‘victory.’ The illegality of Salami’s sacking is still standing, but Nigerians seem to have forgotten, even after many lawyers went on public protest. Now Jonathan, counting on the legendary short memory of Nigerians, preaches his own brand of the rule of law. He even counselled Mugabe to let the electoral challenge take its course. But what is certain is that Mugabe and his party are not going to allow any Justice to question their ‘victory’ this time around. Who says the Zimbabweans didn’t learn something from Nigeria?

The second thing is tinkering with the voters’ register where genuine voters’ names are purged or substituted with phantom ones, including the names of the dead. Those phantom names ran into more than one million and they ‘voted’ for the ruling party. Registration was also made extremely difficult in opposition strongholds. The demand that voters’ register be tendered as evidence has been ignored by the judiciary. This is also very common in Nigeria where granting access to electoral materials so that litigants could subject same to forensic test suddenly became a national security issue!

The third fraudulent act is to turn voters away in opposition strongholds or simply make it impossible for them to vote, and then bus in voters from outside to cast votes for the ruling party. They have documented evidence of that in Zimbabwe. In Nigeria what usually happens is that a few people thumb print millions of votes prior to the voting day, which is why they always refused forensic tests of the ballot papers cast, ludicrously claiming it’s a national security matter. In the last election in Zimbabwe over a million MDC supporters couldn’t cast their votes.

The fourth way they stole the election was through the intimidation of voters whereby traditional rulers and others who wield power threaten their subjects if they voted for the MDC. Also many people were ‘assisted’ to vote under the pretence that they were illiterate.

There were allegations that an Israeli company which helped to cook the books in recent elections elsewhere in Africa helped Mugabe and his party to strategize on the rigging. When Nigerians were recently told that the government of Jonathan has hired an Israeli company to help it spy on Nigerians, it may also be to help them rig the upcoming elections by cooking the books.

All in all, in Zimbabwe, more than 2 million votes cast for Mugabe and his party were reportedly fraudulent, either because they were cast in the name of dead people or because they were cast by mercenaries who were bussed in to vote in areas where they didn’t belong. Conversely, millions of MDC voters were disenfranchised. Now 2 million votes out of the total of 6 million registered voters represent about 35 percent of the votes! That already gives the MDC, who were going to get at least 80 percent of those disenfranchised votes close to 65 percent of the overall votes cast. This is why they will never surrender the books for scrutiny. Like in Nigeria, the question is this: why should a student who claims to have passed an exam with flying colours refuse to have her answer sheet made public? Shouldn’t such a student be proud to display her papers? It’s a trite that if you hide something then it means that you have something to hide. In Côte d’Ivoire we saw the roles reversed. President Gbagbo had won the first round of elections. In the second round he got zero votes in the northern part of the country, an area where he had just won tens of thousands of votes, despite it being a rebel stronghold. This is a statistical impossibility. So he asked for a recount of the votes. His challenger refused because, just like Mugabe, he militarily had the upper hand, this time a foreign military might, so he opted for the military option instead. Again, when you hide something, it means you have something to hide.

As for Jacob Zuma, after the electoral fraud (more appropriately a coup d’état) that the French—with the help of the UN and the very powerful Western media and the ‘international community,’ and of course, their superior firepower—perpetrated in Ivory Coast at the end of 2010, the immediate past president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki urged his successor to stand up for what is right in order to prevent Côte d’Ivoire from descending into chaos. Zuma vacillated a little bit. The French, who had already secured the support of Nigeria for the coup through the malleable accidental president Jonathan, grew suspicious, then they invited him to Paris where he was given the French treatment. Reports allege that the French exploited his womanizing weakness. Upon his return, he began to recognize the French puppet as the president of Côte d’Ivoire, and the rest is history.

One year later, again in the face of massive electoral fraud perpetrated by Joseph Kabila in the DRC, Zuma, together with Mugabe, endorsed the farce. Like Mugabe, Zuma reportedly has some lucrative business interests in the DRC. So, his advice to the MDC to accept defeat should be understood in that light. The only country in the continent that said no to the fraud was Botswana, but unfortunately it had allowed itself to be misled by French propaganda in the Ivoirian conflict. So this time its voice was simply ineffective.

For former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo who led the AU observer delegation, an electoral fraud which affected two out of six million votes is not sufficient to change the overall outcome of the final results. The tragedy is that Obasanjo himself may actually believe his own lies. Obasanjo lives in a world imbued with fraud. He exudes fraud. He swims in fraud. He sees nothing wrong with fraud. In 2003, in the midst of a serious challenge to his re-election, he called the Appeal Court Justices to Aso Rock where he reportedly gave them a dressing down, then later offered them the carrot and the stick. Majority took it. But one Justice, namely Nsofor, who wrote the dissenting judgment, publicly prayed that the kind of electoral fraud Nigerians witnessed in 2003 should never be visited on the country again. Unfortunately, it has gotten worse since.

Nobody should therefore be surprised about Obasanjo’s support of rigging in Zimbabwe because he is a master rigger himself. I’ve already mentioned his re-election in 2003. During the election petition brought by his main rival Muhammadu Buhari, it came to light that in his home state of Ogun, Obasanjo and his party rigged the election massively and that Obasanjo also added 600,000 fictitious votes of his own, thus exceeding the number of registered voters in the state. If Obasanjo couldn’t win in his home state, where else could he win?

It was revealed via Wikileaks how The Chief Justice of Nigeria at the time, Justice Muhammadu Uwais, told the American ambassador to the country, Ambassador Campbell, how Obasanjo put him and other Justices of the Supreme Court under tremendous “pressure and harassment” to do his bidding concerning the petition on the 2003 presidential election that Buhari took to the apex court. In 2007, Obasanjo infamously said that the election of his successor was a do or die affair. Then his handpicked umpire went ahead to perpetrate the worst electoral fraud ever in the country, writing results of elections that were supposedly held on days that don’t exist in the calendar, like 31 April! At the end of the day, Obasanjo said exactly the same thing he said regarding the electoral larceny we just witnessed in Zimbabwe!

Actually, Obasanjo himself narrated how on several occasions people who rigged on his behalf came to him to tell him how they did it. In one famous case, a notoriously crude politician from Anambra state, noted for his rigging prowess, went to him and confessed, together with the governor that he rigged into power. Later Obasanjo rewarded that politician with very high promotion within their political party, namely the PDP, making him a member of the board of trustees. In another case, another person who rigged elections in Lagos went to him to confess, and Obasanjo reportedly said: “I told him God allowed it; otherwise, he would have been attacked by leprosy.” So far none of those who have been perpetrating electoral fraud in Africa has ‘been attacked by leprosy.’ So in Obasanjo’s political theology, God has been allowing election rigging on the continent. It’s time we said no to that odious theology.

Obasanjo and free and fair elections should not be put in the same sentence. That the UN and the AU continue to appoint him to lead election monitoring groups says more about those bodies than about the man Obasanjo.

In the run up to the 2015 general elections in Nigeria, the opposition parties have merged into a big party called the All Progressive Congress (APC). The merger means that the new party now has a more national spread than the ruling PDP which has been effectively shut out of the south west zone of the country. This equally means that in a free and fair election, the new party could possibly win. But will there be a free and fair election in 2015? The opposition cannot afford to wait until after the election to talk about rigging. The best and winning strategy for them is to prevent the rigging in the first place (President Gbagbo has learnt that lesson the hard way after he agreed to go to election without first insisting that the UN enforce their pledge of disarming the rebels in the north months before elections). In Nigeria, presidential elections have never been overturned by the courts. If that were possible, Shagari’s election in 1979 would have been overturned, it would also have happened in 2007 when the rigging was so blatant that the beneficiary of the fraud, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, began his presidency by apologizing for the way in which he was given the job.

I have listed above the ways in which elections are rigged in Africa. The next major election coming up in Africa is the 2015 general elections in Nigeria. If the opposition progressives in Nigeria want a free and fair election, the kind of election Nigeria witnessed on 12 June 1993, then they should start now to counter the formidable rigging machinery of the PDP. This is because it seems that after the election that saw Moshood Abiola winning but which victory was annulled, the ruling oligarchs in Nigeria vowed never to allow free and fair elections again in the country, especially presidential elections. Obasanjo, to whom free and fair elections seems particularly anathema, famously said that Abiola wasn’t the messiah Nigeria needed at the time, despite the fact that he won the elections fair and square.

Again, if the opposition makes the mistake of waiting until after the PDP might have rigged again to complain or to go to court, they will fail once again. The time to stop the rigging is right now, not in 2014, and certainly not in 2015, and most certainly not through the courts.

They should begin to demand that the chairperson of the electoral body should not be appointed by the president because that gives undue advantage to the person who appoints him or her. They should go to court NOW to have that changed. It is only fair that an umpire should not be seen to have been favoured by a competitor in a game. If the courts don’t listen to them or claim that it is enshrined in the Constitution, they should remind them that for centuries, racial discrimination and segregation, including denying the right to vote to blacks and women, was enshrined in the American Constitution until progressive Americans, led by Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King changed that; that Apartheid in South Africa was also enshrined in the Constitution.

The president shouldn’t be appointing the electoral umpire as if he is an ambassador. It is unjust and it should not be allowed to stand. It is one way the ruling oligarchs have ensured that they get to choose who should be president, after they were almost sidelined in 1993. This is a fight that progressives can win. They should begin now to appeal to people of goodwill all over the world, to international bodies like Amnesty International, the UN, the EU, etc. They should make the simple case that the election has already been rigged because the umpire is an appointee of one of the contestants. That they are not going to participate in an election in which the umpire is working for one of the contestants. Since 1999 those umpires have always done the bidding of their employers. It is as simple as that!

They should also closely monitor the number of polling booths and the voters’ register to know how many people should vote in each and every polling booth. They should begin now to insist that votes should be counted at every polling station in the presence of party representatives and the results announced thereafter. Such results should reflect the number of people that came to vote. Most importantly, they should not allow the ballot boxes to be out of sight, luckily we have a system where people privately mark their ballot papers and then cast them publicly, like what happened at the election of the chairman of the governors’ forum last May or the recent Edo state governorship election. They should get the electoral body to commit, in writing, to all these procedures NOW, not in 2015!

Does this mean that the opposition will win in a free and fair election? By no means. But the process should be seen to be transparently free and fair. This will actually encourage people who have a lot to contribute to become part of the political process, thus raising the standard of our politics.

On 12 June 1993 Nigerians had a universally acclaimed free and fair elections, the best ever in the country. So, we did it before, and we can do it again. Yes we can! We should work hard to make 2015 and subsequent elections reflect that of 1993.

If Nigeria could get it right as it concerns free and fair elections, the rest of the continent can follow easily. Yes, in a decade, Africa could render contentious elections and the kind of electoral fraud we just witnessed in Zimbabwe obsolete. When that is accomplished, then our politicians can no longer afford to take the people for granted. We could then face the gargantuan task of building our nations, led by leaders who have to work hard to win the trust of the people they want to lead.

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