Four years ago I almost gave up hope that the curse laid on this country by late Chief Obafemi Awolowo that Nigeria will never experience any credible election in my life time will ever be lifted. The great man laid the curse in a newspaper interview after he lost his 1983 presidential bid to Alhaji Shehu Shagari for the second time, the first time being 1979 after 13 years of military rule which followed the first coup on January 15, 1966.
As if to prove the efficacy of the great man’s curse, the army struck against President Shagari on December 31 that year, barely three months into his second term. This time the soldiers held on to power for 15 years.
During those 15 years we had three military regimes and at least two failed coups in between. In the last of those military regimes which started in November 1993 and lasted five long, brutish years, the head of state, General Sani Abacha, had almost succeeded in transforming himself into a civilian president at the end of three years of a self-serving transition politics he initiated in 1995, when he died mysteriously in June 1998.
His Chief of Defence Staff, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, who succeeded him promised to return power to civilians in 11 short months. He kept his word. Thus emerged the current Fourth Republic in May 1999 under a civilian General Olusegun Obasanjo, the man who, as military head of state, ushered in the Second Republic in 1979.
The general election through which Obasanjo emerged was generally regarded as free, fair and credible even though there were suspicions that the authorities could not have been completely disinterested in the outcome of an election in which their former boss and military commander-in-chief (Obasanjo) was a candidate.
However, even if the authorities favoured their former commander-in-chief, it could be argued that the 1999 elections were credible enough to make one hope that Awo’s curse was over for good.
Unfortunately President Obasanjo soon dashed that hope when he rejected calls from home and abroad to do a Mandela – i.e. serve for only one term and heal the wounds 15 years of military rule and its dubious transitions to civil rule had inflicted on the nation. Instead an Obasanjo determined to serve a second term superintended over elections in 2003 which lacked credibility.
His success apparently made the man even more daring as he soon plotted to amend the Constitution to remove its two-term limit. Mercifully he failed. But then in an election in 2007 which himself said was a “do or die” affair, he succeeded in imposing on the country an ailing president and his clueless vice. The 2007 election was so bad that no less than President Umaru Yar’adua, its highest beneficiary, admitted nearly as much in his inaugural speech and promised electoral reform as a priority.
However, less than half-way through his presidency his deteriorating health led to a serious constitutional crisis of succession when a protective cabal around him sought to stop the vice-president, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, from taking over, even though it had became obvious that the president was no longer in possession of his faculties.
A “doctrine of necessity” invoked by the Senate following massive civil society demonstrations against the president’s cabal finally resolved the crisis in favour of the vice-president and he took over in acting capacity. Shortly after that the president died and Jonathan became substantive president.
The insistence by some Northern PDP chieftains that Goodluck should only serve out the remainder of Yar’adua’s first term and make way for a Northern presidential candidate in the next election in 2011, based on the party’s power rotation arrangement, led to a serious rift with the ruling party. Predictably Goodluck used his incumbency to prevail and win his party’s ticket.
As president he promised to deliver on the promise of his predecessor to reform our electoral laws. And as if to prove he meant what he promised he replaced Professor Maurice Iwu, whose disastrous handling of the 2007 elections was almost universally condemned, with Professor Attahiru Jega on June 8, 2010, to universal acclaim, given Jega’s antecedents as an indefatigable and perpendicular president of Academic Staff Union of Universities in the late eighties.
Less than a year after his appointment, he conducted his first general election on April 9, 2011. This was after the initial date of April 2 turned into a fiasco because of late arrival of materials from the printers abroad, so late that he had to make a national broadcast postponing the election. This rescheduling led to a week’s delay in conducting the presidential election which then held on April 16.
The aftermath of that election has since gone down as probably the single bloodiest in Nigeria’s electoral history, with the dead put at 800, at the least. Depending on which side you are, the culprit was either provocative threats by leaders of the opposition party which lost the election or the widespread perception that it was rigged by the ruling party in cahoots with INEC.
However, whoever was to blame for the post election violence of that year, it must have created a widespread concern that a free, fair and credible election was simply impossible in Nigeria. If someone with Jega’s fabled character, with all the public goodwill he enjoyed at the time of his appointment – not to mention the fact that the National Assembly made sure money was not his object in conducting the elections – couldn’t do it, most Nigerians must’ve wondered who else could.
The answer, it has now turned out was Jega himself. The election he has just conducted has been widely acclaimed as the most credible in Nigeria’s history. Certainly, it is as much a final vindication of the public’s initial trust in him, in spite of the crisis of the 2011 election, as it is, hopefully, the end of Awo’s curse.
Jega was, of course, helped tremendously by technology, mainly the use of Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs) and Smart Card Readers (SCRs). The technology, however, was merely a tool and it would never have been deployed if the man did not resolutely stand up to the powerful forces that did all they could to discredit the PVCs and SCRs.
Not only did the man stand up to those against the use of technology to check election rigging, his courage and forbearance in the face of all moves by the same powerful forces to impugn his personal integrity was difficult, if not impossible, to match. Certainly, without such courage and forbearance the last ditch plot by these same powerful forces to disrupt the announcement of the result of the presidential election when their defeat seemed imminent, as displayed by former Niger Delta minister, Elder Godsday Orubebe’s shameful tantrums against Jega on live television on March 31, would have succeeded.
And had it succeeded, the story would have been totally different from its happy ending for a country that has longed for a universally adjudged free, fair and credible election since Independence in 1960.
Re: Death of a quiet mystic
Sir,
A small oversight in your article of April 15. MD Yusufu was a grandchild of Muhammadu Dikko and not a great grandchild. His father, Yusufu Lamba, as he was popularly called, was the son of Dikko and the Magajin Garin Katsina at the time of Dikko’s death.
+2348033498639.
Sir,
I beg to differ on MD Yusuf’s so-called heroics. It was clear that Abacha only used him as a kite or red herring to deceive the Western nations that there was some form of opposition, no more, no less.
+2348024607919.
Sir,
You are a mischievous being. You tried to demean OBJ by attributing his handing over power to civilians (in 1979) to northerners around him. You are a tribal bigot!
+2348037607722.
Sir,
- D. Yusufu was a true democrat with a passion to serve the people not to serve his pocket.
+2348055594567.
Sir,
You goofed last week when you wrote that OBJ was the first African military ruler to hand over power to a civilian regime. Contrary to the historical inaccuracy, it was General Akwasi Afrifa, a military ruler in Ghana, who handed over power to Dr. Kofi Busia in 1969. That was ten years before OBJ did so in Nigeria!
Femi Falana, SAN.
Sir,
This is just to respectfully observe that the political party which MD Yusufu founded in the Abacha transition era was named Movement for Democracy and Justice (MDJ) and not the Grassroots Democratic Movement as your article recorded.
Julius Ogar
MDJ was during OBJ’s Third Term bid between 2003 and 2007. MD Yusufu’s party during Abacha’s transition was GDM.
