March 28, 2015. A date Nigerians will not forget in a hurry. We had our fifth democratic election. We have never had a more heated campaign or a better participated election. The current government, led by President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, had been plagued with incessant attacks from Boko Haram and blamed for lacking the political will to deal with them.
People could no longer hide their dissatisfaction. The opposition team, led by former military head of States Gen. Muhammed Buhari, squeezed the mass dissatisfaction for all it was worth. Nigeria is notoriously fractured along religious and ethnic lines, but this time, they didn’t matter. Gen. Buhari, a Northern Muslim who had contested unsuccessfully in the four previous elections, was widely accepted from every corner of the country as the “Change” agent. Opinions were strongly divided between those clamouring for change and those who refused to accept a former military dictator as an acceptable democratic leader, asking for continuity. Young people who normally stayed away from our violence-laden polity got heavily involved. Both social and local media were heated to frenzy. Between Boko Haram threats and the poor Permanent Voters Card (PVC) distribution, elections were postponed from the February 14th.
Terrified both by the previous trend of the Nigerian polity and the fierceness of the current campaign, people started fleeing for fear of their lives as early one month to the elections. Two days to the election date, airports and bus parks were filled up with people leaving Lagos and Abuja, traffic was monstrous, airlines were book over capacity, people were standing in planes.
So on March 28, 6 weeks after the previously scheduled election date, Nigerians trooped out massively to vote.Even though CNN would have you believe that it was a bloodbath and a total failure, it was actually a monumental success. Yes, there were a number of incidences some days before the election with no casualties, there was an attempt by Boko Haram to disrupt a polling unit, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had some logistic issues distributing voting materials, the some card readers malfunctioned. But all in all, we had a peaceful election.
The participation rate was overwhelming; everyone from young people to old women, past, present andaspiring presidents, startup investors and even Africa’s richest man. Heck a guy even proposed to his fiancé at a polling unit. We waited long hours under the sun and rain to cast our votes with no single report of hijacking or intimidation. At Places where there were delays caused by equipment and logistics setback, voting and counting of votes continued even up till early hours of the next day with no report of violence. PVCs in one hand, smartphones in other, Twitter and Facebook were invaluable monitoring and reporting tools. Our votes were our voices, our social media accounts were our mics. All in all, we had a peaceful, exciting election.
We had a peaceful election, yes, we had a peaceful election. We got caught up in our clamouring for change and continuity that we almost missed the amazing fact that people actually challenged an incumbent government, went to the polls and voted with no report of incidence. The ability of a people to express displeasure over a current government, openly criticize a leader, rally around an opposition and take all that to the polls without any incidence is a huge sign of a maturing democracy, and we pulled it off in Nigeria. That is almost unthinkable in many African countries and some other developing countries, where speaking out against government or supporting an opposition was effectively painting a huge bull’s eye on one’s chest. Buttressing this point is the fact by this time in the immediate past election, many young graduates serving as INEC adhoc staff and hundreds of other voters had been killed in election violence. There were reports of intimidations, hijackings and illegal thumb-printing of ballot papers.
One would think that it would take years and several elections to go from our 2011 election to what we experienced yesterday. But it only took one administration, a leader who believed in the democratic right of every Nigerian. Not even the blood thirsty Boko Haram could perpetuate their heinous enterprise. We were too angry speaking up against what was going wrong that we forgot to notice that we were doing so freely. We had gone from a (former) president who responded “Your papa jaga jaga, your mama jaga jaga” when his government is criticized to one who takes them calmly. We are way past political assassinations and threatening of journalists to people freely posting jail worthy slanders and outright lies against the government without fear of intimidations. We have a leader who openly declares that his re-election is not worth the blood of any Nigerian and means it.
He may have got a lot of things wrong. We still face serious Electricity issues, Naira devaluation and plunging oil prices. The kidnapped Chibok girls are yet to be found. But surely and steadily, we are making progress. Boko Haram is all but defeated, their strongholds recaptured one after another.
Personally I think that our biggest problem is neither power nor corruption, but the fact that our 170 million voices has not been strong enough to demand accountability from and drive fear into insolent and/or incompetent leaders. We had very weak “People power”. Nigerians are notoriously sluggish in demanding their rights. We are so used to being taken advantage of. It was almost impossible to get the Nigerian masses behind any cause because of fear. We had been intimidated and ignored for so long that we either try to run away from the country or sit tight and get used to it. It is better to stay alive and “manage it” than to “die throway” and the impunity will continue. Speaking up against anything will either be futile or life threatening and we aren’t really into “Spiderman, Robin hood” hero type stuffs. So we resorted to “God will help us” and we stayed there for a very long time.
But Nigerians took shots at this government from Day 1 and never felt threatened about it. Everyone had something to say, and said so freely. We kept at it until we started finding our voices. So whether intentionally or as a result of circumstance, President Goodluck became the punching bag we used to exercise and strengthen our democratic muscle and the target board we used for shooting practice until we moved “God will help us” to “My vote must count” without feeling threatened.
We had, Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military ruler as our first democratic president in 1998. President Goodluck Jonathan is only the second full serving president (President Yar’adua died in office) since Obasanjo. You will need horns of a unicorn and titanium alloy balls to convince me that if any of the current opposition leaders (Bola Tinubu, Gen. Buhari and Gov. Amaechi) were the incumbents, we will have this level of democratic freedom, bear this level of criticism or guarantee of peaceful elections.
President Jonathan may not be our greatest president ever but one thing is certain, he is a hero of our democracy and we will definitely have better presidents after him, because of him. If he gets 4 more years, Nigerians will have so much power over leaders, we may even start voting out our landlords and picking our National Football team. If he doesn’t, whoever comes next knows we aint playing with them no more. God bless Nigeria.
