Voters on queue in Nigeria.

Richard Elesho

In Nigeria, elections at the local government level are shambolic. Also described as the third tier of government, the closest to the grassroots, elections at this level are always won by the party in power in each state. They are perfect demonstrations of the unfair principle of ‘a winner takes all.’

The polls are conducted by State Independent Electoral Commissions, SIEC, whose workers are at the mercy of governors. Therefore, state after state, the elections end up as vehicles to impose a one party agenda. All parties privileged to produce governors, notably the All Progressives Congress, APC; Peoples Democratic Party, PDP; and All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA;  are guilty of this heinous practice. There are no reasons to think that Labour Party, LP; and New Nigeria Peoples Party, NNPP, will be different.

Following President Bola Tinubu’s legendary approval of local government autonomy and the Supreme Court pronouncement on the matter, governors have been rushing to conduct elections into the councils. Thus far, about 25 states have conducted LG polls. Everyone has followed this nepotic tradition. Last Saturday, two states, namely Kogi and Kaduna, observed the ritual.

In spite of a court order to the contrary, Kano State is to join the queue this Saturday, 26 October. It will not be the first state to conduct such poll in flagrant violation of a court ruling. RIivers state also did. In fact, even though the court banned the police from participating in it, the embattled governor, Siminalayi Fubara, went ahead with the polls with his preferred party. All Peoples Party, APP, winning all declared 22 LG seats. One seat remains outstanding.

In a way, the election was a promise fulfilled in Kogi. When 42-year-old Ahmed Usman Ododo assumed leadership of the state on January 27 this year, he promised to run a grassroots based consultative government. At that time, the local governments were run by freshly inaugurated transition committees. The following are the quick takes from the polls and the steady descent to one party state by the Nigerian federation.

– Laid down process and peace:

The SIECs usually follow laid down procedures in the Electoral Act as domesticated in their respective establishing legal instruments. These include giving early and appropriate notices of elections, windows of sales of interest forms, screening of aspirants, and party primaries. They were also unambigious about when campaigns would start and end.

However, while these laid down procedures were followed on paper, they were a flagrant mockery of the process in actual practice. Politicians explored loopholes created in the guidelines to manipulate the process. For instance, what passed for  primaries were outright impositions often disguised as consensus candidates. They are loosely called affirmation. Ruling parties are more notorious for this manipulation. In Kogi State, members of the dissolved caretaker committees simply transited into candidates of the ruling APC. Disgruntled interests were left to bottle up their frustrations, giving room to a semblance of peace of the grave yard.

– Election day dramas:

In almost all the states, elections only held in selected Polling Units, while others were left out. The electorate eager to cast their votes usually returned home in dissappntment after hours of endless waiting for poling materials and SIEC officers that refused to show up.

Examples of this abound across the country. On 5 October, when Rivers conducted LG Polls, many communities claimed they did not sight the ballot materials. Also, the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, bitterly complained about the same practice in Kaduna. In Kogi, most of the Polling Units in Lokoja, the state capital, and the hinterland did not smell a semblance of materials and officials on election day.

That is not all. The election witnessed significant infractions that reduced them to a travesty at the Polling Units where they held. Voters’ registers were not displayed contrary to the standard practice. Similarly, neither card readers nor bi-modal voters accreditation system, BVAS were used before the ballot cast. Money ranging from N500 to N1,000 was paid to voters in one of the states as inducement. State-created election observers were deployed to the field to thump up the process as an enviable model.

– Outcome without data:

The worst malady confronting democracy at the last layer of government is the non availability of the results of the elections. Usually, the SIEC Chairman (not to be equated with the Returning or Electoral Officer) just came to the stage to announce the winners without a load down of data sets of how they emerged victorious at the polls. Vital statistics such as total number of votes, valid votes, cancelled ballots, number of contesting parties, score of the parties, and the margin of victory are either non-existent or deliberately shielded, from the public.

Kadauna state chairman of CAN, Rev. Caleb Ma’aji, decried the clear disregard for democratic principles and values. Hear him: “Reports from our officials from the various local government areas in the state indicated that people waited for the necessary materials to cast their votes but all in vain after spending the whole day waiting for KADSIECOM officials, only for the same commission to announce the winners of chairmen and councillors in the 23 council areas in the state.

“The chairperson of the commission, Hajia Hajara Mohammed, only announced the winners of the elections without the number of votes won by the candidates as well as those of other candidates from other political parties that participated in the elections.”

It is often said that ‘when two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.’ Nigeria’s democracy is fast becoming the victim of the struggle for power among political actors. The descent to dictatorship is a direct fall out of the heat between estranged godfathers and godsons in states where such exst. An exampler: No one will contest that council polls in Rivers State was an arsenal in the warfare between Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Nyeson Wike, and his former stooge Fubara.

In states without notorious gladiators, the opposition is frustrated to its cocoon. In many of such states, the situation is, most probably far worse than the voters’ apathy on display at Polling Units. Opposition parties across the country are being forced to stay away from participating in LG elections, knowing the futility of the exercise. If the gradual emasculation of dissenting voices at the grassroots is not halted as a matter of urgent national importance, it may well signal the death of democracy.

God forbid.