The Virtue of Formal Democracy, the Need for Informal Action
In April 2007, Nigerian citizens in about half of the country’s states woke to find there were no polling stations at all for casting their vote. In other cases, polling stations were opened, but soldiers prevented people from entering. Across the country, observers gathered irrefutable evidence that the system could not produce credible results, yet results were announced. The declared winners took their seats, and two years later the courts are still choked with more than a thousand cases related to alleged acts of fraud.
All three of Nigeria’s most recent elections have been marred by such blatant acts of fraud. With international pressure and national discontent mounting, President Umaru Yar’Adua inaugurated an Electoral Reform Committee tasked with figuring out how to bring an end to these practices.
Questions remain, however, over whether the country’s political classes have the will to implement the radical reforms recommended by the committee. Civil society organisations and ordinary citizens are not waiting idly to find out. Jibrin Ibrahim, Director of Nigeria’s Centre for Democracy and Development, gave a seminar on civil society’s efforts to protect the vote in Nigeria through a campaign that is boldly making the case to the public: defend your vote because your life depends on it.
The case demonstrates how the essential institutions of democracy in Nigeria may not be able to stand firmly until they are buttressed by a citizenry with a clear sense of its basic rights. The battle over electoral fraud may be a crucible for the forging of a new democratic culture in Nigeria.
Last Wednesday, March 18, the President Yar’Adua’s Executive Committee finally gave its response to the recommendations presented by the Electoral Reform Committee. The 22-member Electoral Reform Committee was presided over by a former Chief Justice and included prominent figures such as a retired army general and police captain.
Only four members of civil society were invited to join the committee, but their extraordinary efforts placed their indelible mark on the final recommendations. The committee received more than 1,600 memos on the topic of electoral reform; nearly all of those memos came from civil society organisations.
“We inundated them and broke down the resistance of the army general,” Dr. Ibrahim, who sat on the committee, said of the process.
Still, the government flatly rejected the most progressive of the policy recommendations.
For example, the Executive Committee blocked a recommendation to strip the president of the power to appoint officials to the Electoral Commission. Such appointments should be made by the legislature, the committee had said. The Executive Committee also rejected the policy of holding elections six months before swearing-in occurs and fast tracking electoral cases in that time. At present, those who come to power by fraud are in office and able to sway judicial processes by the time the files are charged.
“The key question is: why would the parliament accept this if they rigged themselves into office?” Dr. Ibrahim said. “We have a political class that is complicit in the history of electoral fraud. Given this context, our position in civil society is that at the end of the day, it is direct citizen action that can make the difference.”
Civil society organisations in Nigeria had begun years ago with a basic approach to voter education: tell people to use their vote because it counts. The campaign triggered a backlash from frustrated citizens who knew that their vote – if they were even permitted to vote – would not count.
A network of organisations has since changed tactics. With the support of partners such as the UK Department for the International Development and the US Agency for International Development, they started a campaign of ‘mandate protection’. The message got to the citizenry that they should closely monitor the elections to ensure that their mandate was not stolen.
Simultaneously, civil society organisations lobbied for a change to the electoral law that would force polling stations to post local electoral results. Such small measures of transparency have been crucial to combating fraud in countries such as Zimbabwe and Kenya. Though this law was overturned at the last moment before the elections, strides have been made.
In a few states such as Kano, Lagos and Bauchi, the campaign did help to protect the voting process in 2007. With the public’s growing frustration, momentum is building. Focused on the aim of fair and transparent elections, civil society organisations will hopefully make an unprecedented push in 2011 to mobilise citizens to protect their own vote.
"Anger is very important to deepening democracy,” Dr. Ibrahim said.
Related Resources
Geographies of citizenship in Nigeria
2003, Wasasa-Zaria, Nigeria: Tamaza
Nigeria: in search of citizens?
TFDC Policy Briefing Issue 1
2003, Ahmadu Bello University: TFDC