Shortly after the United States presidential election that saw Barack Obama win a fresh term in office, Nigerians on Twitter began discussing what they learnt. Many were particularly impressed with the promptness with which Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger to Obama, conceded defeat to the president. I read several people’s attempts to compare Romney’s concession with what obtains in Nigeria where election losers go to court to contest election results instead of conceding immediately. In fact, in trying to mock certain candidates, my twitter friends reminded me that Romney did not threaten to make America ‘ungovernable’. If this was coming from supposedly non-partisan Nigerians, then one could imagine what PDP would be thinking by now.
I saw that as an attempt to compare quite unfairly two different scenarios. Interestingly, our self-styled Africa’s biggest political party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), would buy that hook line and sinker. In PDP’s world of politics, irrespective of how a winner achieves electoral victory, the loser must concede. I’m sure they would be discussing this at Wadata Plaza Abuja, and they’d be telling themselves how Nigerians in the opposition lack the basic knowledge of how a functional democracy operates; which makes them bad losers always unwilling to accept electoral defeat.
But this is not exactly true.
First, Romney was not prompt in his concession speech. Actually, it took more than 90 minutes after every available data pointed to Obama’s victory before Romney made a call to him. He was not going to do that. The Republican campaign team, including their lawyers, told insiders that they were not going to concede. They cited the neck-to-neck tie between Obama and Romney in Florida as good reason to challenge the outcome of the election. In the hotel where they lodged, luggages had been packed already to move, to go and file a case.
But a last minute acceptance by Romney himself to his close aides saved the day. He had realized that the election was still lost even if he would eventually win Florida. Then he placed a call to the president and conceded defeat.
Where in doubt, even if one state, reluctance to concede simply sets in.
The lesson instead should be that the election was credible, free and fair. Nobody would want to make a fool of himself by contesting the result of an election that recorded such level of credibility. There was no incidence of ballot-snatching, multiple thumb-printing, voting with bitter kola as we saw in AkwaIbom state in the last election, voting with palm kernel as we equally saw in AkwaIbom in the last election, swapping of votes at the INEC ‘collation centres’, and so many other unimaginable acts of electoral fraud. I saw a 15-year old girl who had been with the campaign of Obama since before the 2008 election. She didn’t vote out of anxiety, or fear, that Obama might lose. She did all her ground work, but refused to vote. She was a minor. And minors don’t vote. In Nigeria, that girl would have voted, and probably 10 times, to ensure ‘His Excellency’ wins a re-election.
Agreed, we have a rare case of what we saw on youtube – where a voting machine changed Obama’s votes to Romney’s. But that was so insignificant. Generally, the election was free and fair. There was no real threat of that incident obliterating the credibility of the result. PDP will not take this side of that election seriously. Ask them why they rig, and they’ll be quick to dismiss you with this lame talk; “There’s no perfect election anywhere!”. And then they would go ahead to give you instances, chief of which is the election results in Florida in the year 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore. They will not remember that Florida is just one state out of the 50 states in the US, and that the rest 49 states never had a controversial election in 2000.
They would also not bother to remember that the United States had since moved on from the year 2000 election. They’ve since held three more elections after that and none had any ugly case of Florida in 2000.
The next thing the PDP, and their present product in Aso Rock, learnt from the US election was that Obama was re-elected. It doesn’t matter to them that Obama deserves the re-election. It doesn’t matter to them that Obama has suddenly grown grey hair because of the challenges of presiding over the United States affairs for four years. It doesn’t matter to them that Obama is sincere, and that at every point in the course of his administration, he has always told Americans the truth.
By 2015, the PDP will insist that Nigerians re-elect President Goodluck Jonathan. They will not care that their candidate has presided over a government with the worst record of financial scams within such a short time in Nigeria’s history. They will not remember that there was a N2.6trn stolen by government functionaries and their cronies in the ‘business’ world. They will not remember that all this government does is to set up probe committees that end up being dumped in the trash.
All PDP sees is Obama’s re-election. All they can remember from the campaigns will be that four years is not enough. They will not understand that four years extra was added to a man who truly worked but whose work was not yet fully made manifest. While Romney promised 12 million jobs in the campaign, economists found out that the economy was already picking up, and that, in any case, up to 12 million new jobs would be created by the private sector in the next four years irrespective of who won the election. This showed that Barack Obama’s genuine efforts to revive the economy were already beginning to yield tangible, and verifiable, results.
PDP also did not observe that Obama did not win the election because of the ‘power of incumbency’. Actually, in all the polls that followed the election, there was no place the power of incumbency was a factor. It never was important. Obama worked himself into exhaustion, and campaigned even in tiny counties in the swing states, irrespective of his position as the sitting president. Obama was simply a candidate in the election, and he campaigned like one. The United States military and police were not unleashed on the streets with an order from the military chiefs to ‘ensure Mr President was returned!’.
This is particularly important for the military and police chiefs in Nigeria. If they have any sense of decency and patriotism, that election should teach them how to be loyal to country, and not individuals.
Obama entered the race for re-election without any special advantage whatsoever. He ran his campaigns strictly on his personal qualification for a re-election.
The third thing PDP must have learnt from the election was not how Obama raised funds for his campaign. No, that is too tedious for the PDP establishment. Seeking money from ordinary citizens to fund an election of the sitting president effectively waters down the ‘volume of stake’ the PDP ‘stakeholders’ hold in the looting project. What PDP learned was how Karl Roves went into huge funds raising from America’s top 1% for the Republicans, the ones whose traditional tax-breaks Obama is fighting. Unlike America that has a president who is fighting the uber-greed of capitalism for them, our own president is the promoter of super-greedy capitalism. Every known economic saboteur in Nigeria is his closest friend. He sides with the one percent and consciously punishes the 99%.
So we will be seeing heavy campaign funds donations by 2015 from PDP members. We will also be seeing a PDP that will not be courageous enough to point to their achievements in four years that should qualify them for re-election. Instead, we will see a PDP that will want to quote Bill Clinton extensively when he said, in favour of Obama, that no president could have cleared all the mess in four years.
But for those who can still reason, if PDP dares tell us that no president can fix the Nigerian malady in four years, then they would have exposed themselves to more ridicule. They would be forced to explain to us why both 4 years and 13 years aren’t enough. For a party that has been in power for that long without anything meaningful to show forth as achievement, whatever PDP says in 2015 will be used substantially against them in the court of public opinion. Interestingly, this is also the same court that gives electoral verdict.
Head or tail, 2015 isn’t looking too good for PDP, the amazing corruption-machine that we all are impatient to park up; the party of Alamieyesiegha, Bode George and James Ibori; the habitat of Nigeria’s most dangerous rogues.
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