The political parties that have so far held their presidential primaries have either descended into absurdity or dissolved into the usual bitterness. In high-stakes politics, elections at all levels will be highly contested, and there will be bitter feelings among those who lose. That is expected. The real shame here is that, at the rate we are going, we will soon be a country that has practised democracy for 32 years yet still grapples with self-organisation, especially during our election periods. Merely to conduct an election—an activity that requires mastery of something as basic to running a modern society as the ability to count ourselves—has become an insurmountable task. We are just too disorderly and corrupt to get things right.
By now, it is no longer news that the incumbent President, Bola Tinubu, won his party’s presidential primaries with a margin so wide it raised legitimate eyebrows. The question of how he could have possibly garnered a whopping 10.99 million votes does not interest me as much as the logic behind the announced figure. Those who counted, collated, and announced the figure might as well have announced more, but they stopped just short of 11 million. Why? Is 10.99 million the limit to which they could plausibly exaggerate their victory, or did they just pull the figure out of the air? Whether the figures are genuine or not, we cannot say for certain. In a social context where there is almost no transparency in our social processes and every aspect of our collective life is not always decipherable, nothing is impossible. Its ADC counterpart has not conducted itself any more impressively either. At the time of writing, a winner is emerging, his co-contestants are alleging fraud and pulling out of the process, and the whole business is already looking like the usual Nigerian charade. These are people who have been in politics longer than a chunk of the population they expect will vote for them has been alive, but they still conduct elections like it is the 1960s all over again. Are these the ones we really want to lead us?
We are a society that has never succeeded in properly counting its citizens; state planning at all levels has almost always relied on conjured numbers. We cannot really apportion the right values to anything simply because figures have become magical rather than an objective calibration of value. In the game of numbers, we play among ourselves; statistics do not exist to illuminate the path or help us rationalise a process. Instead, we use figures to bewilder, sensationalise, muddle up, and manipulate. How does a man who became president with less than nine million plus suddenly get 11 million votes from his own party members alone? Funnily enough, in 2021, they claimed a 40 million membership. By 2026, and even with the gale of defections to their party, the APC registered membership dwindled by 333 per cent. It is a most curious turn of events that the incumbent President and APC presidential candidate, who allegedly won the 2023 election with roughly 9 million votes despite a 40-million-member register, now has 11 million votes cast for him from their 12 million members! There is a reason they say that liars must have good memories. If the APC had sat down to think about these things, its figures would have been better aligned. It is bad that these people are crooked; it is worse that they are not even good at arithmetic.
Even if it were objectively true that 11 million out of 12 million party members voted for Tinubu, it would be a flaming red flag. What kind of internal democratic structure do they operate that makes almost everyone sleep and face the same direction? That figure does not look like a democratic consensus; it walks, talks, and smells like elite capture. They think 92 per cent of people in a political party voting for a single person is unanimity, but it tells a far more sobering story: individual wings structurally clipped, the number of people strictly forbidden to manifest character. It also reveals the insecurities of a “dear leader” whose neediness must be assuaged with a figure that defies reason.
Meanwhile, since the 2023 election, Nigeria has faced severe economic and social challenges that have pushed the country to the brink. The APC wants us to believe that despite the issues of multi-dimensional poverty and an ever-dwindling purchasing power, a severe breakdown of security rapidly encroaching into other previously safe regions, and an overall atmosphere of precarity, their members still turned out en masse to vote for their candidate? Even if Obatala had destined that the heads they brought to this world would do nothing but merely carry loads, there should still be some dissension among them.
The other parties still about to conduct their own primaries can take a cue from the APC and declare spurious figures for the same reason the APC is doing now. How can anyone purport to audit the voter’s register when the incumbent President’s party started the game of numbers? The exaggerated claims will not only lay the groundwork for the rigging that will ultimately occur but also be a precursor to the acrimony that will follow. The rancorous atmosphere they will create will further demoralise and divide the citizenry until 2031. How does a nation make progress when we cannot even be trusted with little things? Some people are rightly worried that the APC is leading the way in what will turn out to be a massively rigged election, but I am frankly worried about how this only takes us further backwards. If our leaders cannot organise themselves to conduct primary elections properly, then how do they propose to rule? What kind of leadership can emerge from the chaos of their self-organisation if not more disorganisation and confusion?
What we are dealing with is a more fundamental problem: our inability to properly count and account for ourselves. It is a problem that starts with Nigeria not even knowing its own population and being uninterested in finding out for sure. Census-taking is a task we have serially—and deliberately—failed at for many years, and we are still unable to achieve it because of elections. The fuzziness exists just so that politicians can wake up and declare any numbers they like without proper accountability. They need the confusion to make it impossible for us to pin them down. Data is not so much about having enough clarity to project and build the future, but about draining that future of its promises. If we do not know anything for a fact, on what basis can we ask rightful questions?
They keep reeling out figures of progress, but to the Nigerians who do not need statistics to know the cost of living has gone up dearly, the maths is not adding up. Nothing they ever tell us about the state of the economy in one context matches what they say in another, and neither one is consistent with our felt reality. We do not know many things about ourselves, not because our social reality is that inscrutable, but because we have a governing state that actively seeks not to know. To know is to enlighten their shady character. So, where does this take us? Further and further onto a darkling plain where our systems are governed with gross incompetence, an inability to evolve, and a fundamental commitment to fraud and mediocrity.
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