Nigeria on the edge as it heads to polls

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, goes to the polls in less than five months, in what is shaping up to be Abuja’s biggest unity and stability test yet since the end of military coups and dictatorship two decades ago.

The road to the February 2023 presidential and local elections appears bumpy in every sense of the word, with a toxic mix of lawlessness, ethnic politics, regionalism, a struggling economy and growing mistrust in systems threatening to tear the West African nation apart.

The country’s security apparatus, electoral commission, judiciary and religious fabric are on trial as the dark forces threaten to plunge it into turmoil.

The continental economic powerhouse finds itself in a precarious security situation that government and security analysts say only compares to the lead-up to the civil war of 1967 to 1970.

There are growing armies of insurgents in the North East, bandits in the North West and North Central, militants in the South, separatists in the South East, and ritual killers in the South West.

Organised, sporadic and systemic violence continues to spread across its vast territory, uprooting would-be voters from their homes and hitting election plans by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) – including torching of offices, killings of election officials and burning of poll materials.

Read: Boko Haram fighters raid prison, free 600 inmates

In the North East, more than 60,000 people have been killed and more than 2.2 million displaced since 2009 in an insurgency perpetuated by Boko Haram and the Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP).

In North Central and North West, faceless bandits continue to kill and main at will as violent secessionist groups take charge of the East and the troubled Niger Delta, vowing to stop elections in its nine states – Abia, Akwa-Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Edo, Imo, Ondo and Rivers.

Among the groups advancing a bloody secession campaign is Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), whose leader, 54-year-old Nnamdi Kanu, is on trial for acts of terrorism and treasonable felony following his arrest and deportation from Nairobi in July 2021.

His militia group, Eastern Security Network (ESN), continues to unleash terror on security operatives and citizens considered as “saboteurs” in the five eastern states of Anambra, Imo, Enugu, Ebonyi and Abia.  

According to a report by SB Morgen, Nigeria's leading geopolitical intelligence platform, the country lost no fewer than 964 security agents, including 322 police officers and 642 soldiers, in attacks by insurgents, bandits and secessionists in 2021.

Information Minister Lai Mohammed recently revealed that by August this year, ESN had murdered more than 115 security operatives.

The violence is fuelled by a potpourri of factors, including historical injustices, marginalisation, self-determination bids, runaway unemployment and rising inflation that has left more than 100 million poor Nigerians struggling.

The national annual inflation rate shot up to 19.64 percent in July, the highest since September 2005, with rising prices of bread, cereals and yam hitting the poor the hardest.

INEC has sounded the alarm that the rising violence, especially the torching of its offices and the destruction of poll materials, are likely to scuttle poll preparations, including voter registration.

INEC chairman Mahmood Yakubu says attacks on the commission’s facilities may undermine their capacity to organise elections and disrupt the nation’s electoral processes.

According to official reports, at least 41 INEC offices have been either torched or vandalised across Nigeria by armed non-state actors in the last two years.

“These are attacks as a result of election-related violence, protests unrelated to elections and activities of thugs and unknown gunmen,” says Prof Yakubu.

More than 95 million registered voters in the country of 218 million people are set to choose a new head of state in the sixth presidential election since Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999.

Besides president, voters will also elect new governors, senators, House of Representative members and state lawmakers in 176,846 polling units between February 25 and mid-March 2023.

At least 14 candidates want to take over from 78-year-old President Muhammadu Buhari, a retired army general who will bow out after a tumultuous two tenures of eight years in the hot seat.

Bola Ahmed Tinubu, 75, a former governor of Lagos State and leader of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC); 75-year-old, two-time vice-president Atiku Abubakar of the former ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP); and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) are the major contenders. 

Others are Osita Nnadi (Action Peoples Party), Kolawole Abiola (Peoples Redemption Party), Yabagi Sani (Action Democratic Party) and Ado-Ibrahim Abdulmalik of the Young Progressives Party.

Front-runners in the race come from Nigeria’s old regional and ethnic structure, effectively setting the tone for ethnic politicking and voting, a recipe for chaos and a threat to national peace and unity.

Tinubu is a Yoruba from the South West and Abubakar a Fulani from the North, while Obi is an Igbo from the South East, with each region, some already wracked by violence, seeking to have their son occupy the Aso Rock presidential villa in Abuja.

The prospects of a violent contest loom, observes Nkasi Wodu, a New Voices senior fellow at the Aspen Institute, especially in the face of a battle for survival between the two major political parties that face different tests.

“Analysts have declared that without power, the ruling APC, formed in 2014 to wrest political power from the PDP, could disintegrate, while losing a third presidential election in 2023 could have deleterious effects on the PDP. Against this backdrop, the stage is set for a fierce contest,” the lawyer and peacebuilding expert in Africa writes in Fragile States Index.

While Tinubu is riding on the horse of the ruling political party, Abubakar, who has contested the presidential election more than four times, is banking on his past glory as a former vice-president, while Obi, who lost his vice-presidential bid in 2019, is angling for the spoils, capitalising on the youth and Christian vote – groups that felt cheated in APC and PDP nominations.

Nigeria has a long history of electoral and sectarian violence. In the post-independence period, elections have been marked by violence and contentious politics.

“In the country’s early days, the western region (now South West) was engulfed by riots in the lead-up to the 1965 regional elections. More recently, 800 people died in a span of three days in post-election violence, following the 2011 general elections,” says Wodu, a scholar of global governance and human security at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Violence in Nigeria’s elections does not occur in a vacuum; instead, it is exacerbated by the existence of particular security pressures that increase the vulnerability to electoral violence, he adds.

“For example, the 2011 post-election violence, which occurred mainly in Kaduna State, Northern Nigeria, was worsened by a history of sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims and a culture of impunity for religious violence in that State.

“Similarly, the violence experienced in the 2015 and 2019 elections in Rivers State, Southern Nigeria, was fed by a complex mix of organised violence, the increasing activities of armed groups, and their association with political factions in the State during that period”.

There are fears that rising insecurity may lead to a low turnout or entirely paralyse elections in some regions, especially in parts of the North East and South East.

Terrorists have time and again sought to demonstrate their resolve and ability to destabilise Nigeria, with recent attacks targeting the administrative capital Abuja and neighbouring towns.

The nation is still reeling from the shock of the July 5 daring bomb attack and the freeing up of over 800 terrorists and criminals from the Kuje prison in Abuja by Boko Haram. The prison siege forced the government to close all secondary schools in the capital.

Emboldened by their surprise wins, the terrorists have threatened to abduct President Buhari and Kaduna State Governor Nasiru El-Rufai, with ISWAP ambushing and killing eight elite soldiers from the Presidential Brigade of Guards of 7 Battalion in July.

The attack on the brigade came weeks after terrorists launched a similar attack on a presidential convoy in Dutsinma, North West Katsina State, narrowly missing Buhari.

Despite the spike in insecurity, the president has downplayed the threat, assuring citizens and candidates of a free, fair, hitch-free and transparent election. 

“I know many of us are concerned with the rise in insecurity due to terrorist activities in parts of the country. As a government, we are working hard to contain and address these challenges and ensure that the 2023 general elections are safe and secure for all Nigerians,” Buhari said.

Similar assurances from the electoral commission and police have done little to win the confidence of many Nigerians who remain skeptical and unsure of what tomorrow holds.

“The government cannot give what it does not have. Its inability to crush insecurity in the past seven years is a clear indication that it lacked the will to restore Nigeria to its path of glory,” says Zana Goni, the national coordinator of the Coalition of North East Elders for Peace and Development (CNEEPD).

The coalition raised the alarm over the ballooning numbers of insurgents in the North East and bandits in parts of the North West and North Central.

Experts say the government has not done what is required to address the multipronged security challenges.

Kabiru Adamu, CEO of Beacon Consulting, a security risk management and intelligence firm, says the drivers of insecurity – historical injustices, unemployment and marginalization – largely remain unaddressed and cannot be tackled in five months.

The pessimism among voters seems to fuel their growing mistrust in the polls, with a recent survey by Anvarie Tech and ResearcherNG and Bincika Insights showing that 40 percent of Nigerians do not believe the elections will be free and fair.

According to the research funded by the Washington, DC-based National Endowment for Democracy, 71 percent of Nigerians also lack trust in the judiciary, the last port of call for electoral disputes.  The dent on the courts was attributed to corruption and the snail’s pace of delivering justice.