EVERY election sends a message. What were the messages behind the partially conclusive parliamentary rerun polls in Rivers State which took place last weekend? It is important to answer this question to know the juncture of Nigerian politics and democracy from that corner of the Nigerian commonwealth.
One bold, identifiable trait is that certain old myths are disappearing. Before now, political pundits held that because Nigerian Minority groups usually feel “unsafe” in the opposition, they gravitate to whichever party is in power at the Centre. The fact that states in the North dominated by indigenous Minority groups (such as Plateau, Benue and Adamawa States, which were once People’s Democratic Party (PDP) strongholds) went with their mainly Hausa/Fulani Majority neighbours during the 2015 general election tended to reinforce this belief. However, in the South, the reverse was the case. The South-South Zone, which is dominated by Minority groups, albeit with sizeable Igbo-speaking indigenes and residents in Rivers and Delta, remained in the PDP.
If the above notion was entirely correct, the legislative rerun election would have provided Rivers voters with the chance to dump the former ruling party (PDP) and go en masse for the new party with the “Federal might”, the All Progressives Congress (APC). Obviously, this did not happen. Instead, we saw (from the results so far released) a confirmation of Rivers State as a strong PDP enclave. Of the results declared at the collation centres, PDP won ten seats in the State House of Assembly election while APC had one. When added to the ten already in their kitty that were not nullified at the Election Tribunal, it means the umbrella party boasts of 20 out of the 32 seats in the House of Assembly; a safe majority for Governor Nyesom Ezenwo Wike, even before the rest of the polls are concluded. I call it a “safe majority” because if the APC had secured the “bandwagon” they were hoping for and upturned PDP’s commanding control of the Assembly, Wike would, by now, have been quietly packing his personal valuables from the Brick House.
To be sure, the moment the new House was convened, he and his Deputy would be summarily impeached to enable the new APC Speaker to hold the forte to usher in a new APC governor through yet another election. As it is now, Wike can only worry about his opponents’ alleged “Plan C” – the prospect of President Muhammadu Buhari declaring a state of emergency in the state to get through the use of force what the APC failed twice to secure through democratic elections.
The South-South appears to have found its own political footing, unlike in the past when they danced to the tunes of the North in what was deceptively termed a “traditional alliance”; a master-servant relationship that gave the North free ride into the zone – and open access to its oil wealth. The reason for this is simple. The South-South, which started agitating for the presidency about twenty years ago, has tasted power at the highest level. One of theirs – Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan – dwelt in Aso Villa for over five years as President, Commander-in-Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces. They were hoping he would complete an eight-year two-term run. But one of their sons, former Governor Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi took his quarrel with Jonathan to the point of helping to truncate Jonathan’s second term.
Some PDP supporters call it the “Judas effect”, though Amaechi’s supporters insist that he has the right to join any political party and pursue his own independent political ambition. The perception that Amaechi “sold out” to an alliance between the North and a section of the South West and thus “robbed” the South-South of the Presidency was a driving sentiment that governed the voting pattern of the Rivers and South-South electorate since 2015.
Another issue which notably hardened the resolve of majority of Rivers voters was the feeling that the APC Federal Government was hell-bent on recapturing the state and other oil-rich South-South states like Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa and Delta to ensure a free ride for Buhari or whoever it sponsors in 2019. The open lamentations of the National Chairman of the Party, Dr. Odigie Oyegun, that the party lost these “resource-rich states” at the Supreme Court reinforced this perception. The rerun was a clash of titans between the forces of incumbency led by Governor Wike and those of “Federal might” led by Minister Amaechi.
Usually, when incumbency clashes with the “Federal might”, the latter tends to flop, especially if the former enjoys greater popular support. It is always important to allow the people’s will to prevail peacefully or it will prevail any other way. The way the Federal government mobilised its coercive forces to harass, intimidate, arrest and hound Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) officials, state government officials, judicial officers and others during the Tribunal proceedings, added to the massive deployment of army, police and other security forces for the rerun created a siege atmosphere.
The rival political camps freely helped themselves to the use of hoodlums to kill and maim people before and during elections. This was totally unnecessary because the harassment of the electorate never makes people to change their minds and vote for anyone other than their preferred political parties and candidates. It is reassuring, however, that Professor Mahmood Yakubu’s INEC, despite its blundering inability to conclude any election, has generally conducted credible polls as we saw in Kogi, Bayelsa and now Rivers. I consider it a healthy development any time the opposition performs well in elections. That the PDP remains rather strong in their strongholds is good for our democracy. I would also want to the APC not to lose heart in Rivers and the South-South. Doing so will return the oil-rich zone to the days when ruling parties had no fear of the electorate and did as they liked.
Strong opposition is good for democracy and good governance, but it must be violence-free.
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