The first elections in Nigeria after amalgamation of the two protectorates of Northern and Southern Nigeria in 1914 and the forcibly annexation of the Egba City-State after the Adubi War in 1918, took place in January, 1923. It was a mild and temperate affair, restricted to the two metropolitan centres of Lagos and Calabar. The pre-independence and post-independence Nigerian political class was still in its embryonic formation. Divisions among Nigeria’s emergent political elites were not as deep and sharply accentuated as they became in the run up to independence. Before then, a full-blooded Fulani person , Malam Umoru Altine, was elected as the mayor of Enugu township. In Lagos at the tail end of the forties, an Obafemi Awolowo sided with Ernest Ikoli against the competing claims of his kinsman and comrade in arms Samuel Akisanya, aka General Zaki, in the elections to determine who was going to head the Nigerian Youth Movement after the president, Kofo Abayomi, resigned to go abroad on an Ophthalmology scholarship. The movement disintegrated thereafter. BuyMaps
Beyond such kerfuffle which degenerated into an ethnic brawl, there was nothing really to contend with or contest for but the direction in which the new country was heading. But if anything, the early election seemed to have provided the colonial masters with early warning signals about what heady and uncontrollable stuff the coastal elites, particularly its Lagos brand, were capable of. They were heady and headstrong in their militant opposition to colonial rule and the whole idea of being supervised like children by imperialist overlords many of who they regarded as intellectually inferior. Tipped off by the growing resistance to colonialism, the authorities promptly forbade mingling and cohabitation between the two elite formations of the north and south and encouraged each to develop along its own culture and political antecedents.
It was designed to prevent the more radical and combustible Southern agitators from politically contaminating the more stable and cohesive northern Nigerian society. After militarily subjugating the native Fulani conquerors in 1903, the British imperialists found that their hegemonic worldview, particularly their insistence on stability and order even at the expense of justice and fair play, was very similar to their own weltanschauung. The British have found a home-made nationality they can do business with in the heartland of Africa. It was to have drastic consequences for Nigeria’s political evolution.
Fast forward to three decades later and to federal elections held in 1959 on the eve of independence to determine who was going to rule the country. The electorate maintained their distinct identity and self-worth. A pattern of sturdy independence which had been established in earlier regional elections when independent and local politics candidates prevailed over the candidates of established parties continued. But this time around, the stakes appeared to be too high to be left to the electorate. High-wire hegemonic politics which always thwart and trump the will and wish of the electorate either directly or indirectly reared its head into Nigerian political competition for power. The colonial authorities were alleged to have manipulated the post-election bargaining from the background to ensure that the favoured party and local hegemonic bloc triumphed. They had already loaded the military, geographic and demographic dice in favour of the northern ruling group.
Five years into independence, the nascent national electoral cohesion had disappeared. The prelude to this was the hostile restructuring of the federation which led to the summary excision of the mid-west section from the old western region in what was widely perceived as a move to weaken the opposition Action Group and its hegemonic hold on the most politically volatile sector of the nation. This had been preceded by the unconstitutional takeover of the entire region as a result of widespread unrest. Unable to withstand the external and internal pressures, the Action Group, which was at best an unstable coalition of royalist, conservative and progressive elements, fractured and disintegrated into its component parts. In the event, elections held in the region in 1964 and 1965 were marred by widespread violence, massive rigging, vote-snatching, result-switching, summary abductions, kidnapping of candidates and collusion of electoral officials on a scale that beggars belief. It was a massive assault on the electoral psyche of the nation.
The ensuing political conflagration which earned the region the unenviable sobriquet of “wild, wild west” led directly to the majors’ mutiny and the first military intervention which led to the fall of the First Republic and the termination of civil rule. After thirteen years of untrammelled military rule in October 1979, the country returned to constitutional order and civil rule after elections adjudged by local and international observers as being fair and passable, reflecting the strength of the region-based parties, with Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s party, the UPN, maintaining its hegemonic hold on the old western region despite the restructuring of the nation into a nineteen state arrangement by the military, while Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe’s party, the NPP, held sway in the old east even as the NPN, the coalition of emergent northern power brokers, trumped them all with the size and scope of its electoral dominance.
Despite its surface attraction and superficial allure, the 1979 election was undermined by the fact that no candidate won an absolute majority. But contrary to the constitutional stipulation that in the event of an electoral deadlock the matter should be resolved by an electoral college, the military, wielding their veto power in the background, railroaded the contestants into challenging the result in court. The result was the infamous 12 2/3 verdict by the Supreme Court which held that Alhaji Shehu Shagari, as the candidate that satisfied the electoral requirements in the main, won the election. In a bizarre twist, the court ordered that the judgment should not be cited in future electoral disputes.
It was a decision that cast a pall of doubt on the legitimacy and authority of Shagari’s tenure. There were murmurs of disapprobation from the critical sectors and some opposition writers insisted that it was “a stolen presidency”. It is to be noted that in a subsequent interview, General Theophilus Danjuma, a leading member of the junta, voiced his opposition to the process insisting that the matter should have been left to an electoral college where he was sure that Chief Obafemi Awolowo would have been beaten hands down. There were others who also insisted that given the insular nature of his politics and his inability to build bridges and forge a pan-Nigerian coalition, Awolowo had no credible path to the presidency beyond mythmaking and a mystical belief in the inevitability of his destiny to rule the nation.
Four years later in the presidential elections of 1983, the gains of electoral credibility and believability had been dissipated. The old demons of fraud and electoral chicanery had returned in full force. Chief Obafemi Awolowo contested once again and was subjected to an even more resounding defeat leading the old man to vow never to contest for any election in Nigeria again in his lifetime. If the nation needed his services, he added in an ominous Parthian, it knew where to get him. It was a vote of no confidence in the democratic process and in the electoral prospects of the nation. It was also a barely disguised delegitimation of the extant order. With the levers of power firmly in its hand, the NPN ruling consortium wasted no time in exercising its anti-democratic franchise.
The federal elections of 1983 were so badly rigged that many questioned the electoral sanity of the ruling party. How did they ever think they were going to get away with the nonsense, people wondered. Chief Adeniran Ogunsanya, a prominent member of the opposition and chieftain of the NPP, dismissed the whole farce as the National Riggers’ Theatre. What riled and rankled was the barely disguised and brazen take-over of opposition stronghold. It was as if the political class had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. As usual, the old west, bristling with a sense of injustice and political persecution, picked up the gauntlet, with violence and widespread unrest forcing the apex courts to overturn the unpopular takeover of Ondo State with Akin Omoboriowo, the putative winner of the gubernatorial election, seeking refuge in the federal capital after escaping his irate pursuers. The military authorities who had never really left were waiting in the wings looking for the best opportunity to shake down the house of cards.
General Theophilus Danjuma, the usually taciturn but influential military powerbroker, later noted with acidic contempt that he knew that the purported landslide of the NPN would be followed by “a gunslide”. On the last day of 1983, the soldiers struck again sending the nation on an anti-democratic spiral which was to last sixteen years.
The December 31, 1983 coup received widespread applause and jubilation from the larger Nigerian populace who were completely fed up with the shenanigans of the politicians. Nigerians were aggrieved by the political and economic despoliation of the nation by politicians who showed no remorse whatsoever for their grievous infractions. A popular London-based magazine called it in banner headline: The End of a Lootocracy. Influential members of the political class were hounded everywhere and anywhere they could be found, they were summarily impounded and subsequently sentenced to long term imprisonment by hurriedly constituted military tribunals with the people not caring a hoot.
People wildly applauded as the gargantuan and even preposterous sentences were handed down with military promptitude. The sanitizing military crusaders had at their apex leadership two men who perfectly fitted the messianic template, its leader Muhammadu Buhari, was an asparagus-lean, astringent and ascetic officer who hated politicians as much as he hated formal politics, while his deputy and minatory enforcer was Tunde Idiagbon, a sullen and taciturn disciplinarian famous for single-minded severity. Together, they held the nation in authoritarian and autocratic thralldom for thirty months.
Such was the hatred and hostility in which politicians were held that for the entire period of his rule, General Buhari did not even bother to unfold before the nation a programme for a return to civil rule. And the people did not seem to mind. Yet it was also the case that a subtle change of consciousness was being insinuated into the Nigerian political consciousness. It was not just politicians who were being reviled and ridiculed, the very idea of formal politics was being criminalized. It was the anathemization of politics which fitted perfectly well with the secret agenda of a core section of the original coupists of 1983 to rule Nigeria in perpetuity in the absence of visionary politicians and in the presence of a fumbling political class. It was even alleged that a rogue section of the security forces was involved in acts of covert sabotage that appeared to make the Buhari junta even more repressive than it actually was. The “apolitical duo” could not see through the ruse and sat through it all as their military base fractured and civilian support significantly eroded.
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