If there is one thing elections that take place off the normal election cycle have become in Nigeria, it is menace. Menace in the sense that whenever these elections are being prepared for, it is always a battle. Battle between the ruling party and the opposition; battle between a sitting governor and those who want to get him out office; battle between a governor completing his constitutional two terms and those who want to ensure he does not succeed in installing a successor. It is always a battle fought in different fronts for different reasons depending on the political combatants.
How did we get here? It all started after the 2007 general elections. Since the return of democracy in 1999, it was the most controversial and questionable election we have had. Even the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua admitted that the election, which brought him to power, was flawed. Of course, and as expected, those who felt aggrieved went to court. The states which elections were disputed included Ekiti, Ondo and Osun. Late, Edo, Kogi, Bayelsa and Anambra were to join the least. Rivers would have been part of the list too. But when Celestine Omehia was removed late 2007 due to the fact that he never contested the primary election on which ticket he contested the election, Rotimi Amaechi, who benefitted from the Supreme Court ruling decided that he would prefer to be part of the normal election cycle.
Beyond this, however, the ‘disruption’ all actually started with when the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, decided to conduct governorship election for Anambra State in 2007. This was despite the fact that the then governor, Peter Obi, who was the presidential candidate of the Labour Party during the 2023 presidential election, had just been sworn-in a less than a year before. Obi had been declared the rightful winner of the 2003 governorship election in the state but which INEC declared Dr. Chris Ngige as the winner. Obi was sworn-in in 2006 but INEC decided to conduct governorship election in the state during the 2007 general election. Obi had gone to court and the Supreme Court ruled that his four-year mandate started running from the day he was sworn-in and not the day the usurper Ngige was sworn-in.
The Supreme Court judgment that restored Obi back to office after the swearing-in of Virgie Etiaba in 2007 proved to be watershed in the election cycles in Nigeria. After a battle that went all the way to the Court of Appeal, Kayode Fayemi, the candidate of the now defunct Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN, was sworn-in as governor Ekiti State on October 25, 2010. The court had ruled that he was the authentic winner of the 2007 governorship election in the state and the re-run election of 2009. Three weeks after Fayemi was sworn-in, Rauf Aregbesola also of the ACN was also being sworn-in as the governor of Osun State after the court also ruled that he was the authentic winner of the 2007 governorship election in the state and not Olagunsoye Oyinlola, a retired brigadier-general and candidate of the People’s Democratic Party.
It was later to be Ondo State. Dr. Olusegun Mimiko was declared the rightful winner of the 2007 election in the state in 2008. INEC had declared Dr. Olusegun Kokumo Agagu of the PDP. But the courts said he did not win the election. It was same 2008, 11th November to be precise, that the courts declared former Labour leader, Adams Oshiomhole, of the ACN as the authentic winner of the 2007 governorship election in the state despite INEC declared Professor Oserheimen Osunbor of the PDP as the winner.
As for Kogi, Idris Wada defeated Ibrahim Idris in early 2012 and was sworn-in on January 27, 2012 and was in office till January 27, 2016.
On paper, there is nothing wrong with having off-cycle elections. But it is always a big issue in a country like Nigeria where politics and winning elections is surest and shortest route to unfettered access to the public till. For the ruling party, it is usually a do-or-die affair as they need victory in such elections to prove that they are popular and that their victory at the preceding general elections was not a fluke. And that is why massive state resources are usually deployed to win these elections. These include obviously but shamelessly partisan security agencies, compromised electoral umpire and stifling the democratic space to give an unfair advantage to the candidate of the ruling party. In fact, and in most cases, governors elected on the platform of the ruling party are ‘mandated’ to contribute to a financial war chest to prosecute the election.
If the state is being governed by the opposition party, the ruling party at the centre could decide to stifle the state of statutory resources which it is entitled as it is believed such resources would be useful for the election. As earlier mentioned, security agencies can also be used to give the candidate of the ruling party. A case in point was Osun State in 2018 when the whole of Ile-Ife was practically under lockdown for a rerun election in the town. In fact, the rerun election was to take place in just four wards. But the security deployment was out of this world. Journalists were not only barred from covering the rerun election, those who dared to make attempt to cover the election were molested and brutalised. Those suspected to be supporters of the opposition party, the PDP, were prevented from voting. They were physically prevented by thugs of the ruling APC from getting accredited not to talk of voting.
The candidate of the PDP then, Senator Ademola Adeleke, who is the current governor of the state said what took place was no election. Then President Mohammadu Buhari, when he visited the state early 2019 to drum support for his own re-election, admitted that they won the state via “remote control” in 2018. His words:
“I know how much trouble we had in the last election here. I know by remote control through so many sources how we managed to maintain the party (APC) in power in the state.”
It was the biggest admittance of high-handedness in the way the ruling party won the state in 2018. Though, it was an open secret what happened in Ile-Ife that day but it was also a glaring indication that off-cycle elections are not really a lesson in democratic practice and test of popularity but a test and show of power by the ruling party.
A professor of political science, Oladele Adekunle, said for the brigandage and violence the usually accompany off-cycle election to end, then the nation’s election calendar has to be harmonised. He added that this could only be done by an Act of the National Assembly who will empower the President to appoint administrators for states whose gubernatorial elections do not fall within the normal election cycle.
“This won’t be easy. Not at all,” Adekunle said. “But we have to find a way round it. Even the distraction it creates for governors of the state involved is something else. Within two years of their election, even if they were elected on the platform of the ruling party, they are already thinking of the coming election. We must sit down to find a solution to this. And I think the only way is to get the National Assembly to something like the Doctrine of Necessity that brought former President Goodluck Jonathan to power then to find a way round this.”
It remains to be seen how this would be done. But until then, the tension and acrimony usually that accentuate off-cycle elections will continue.