Unleashed power of zero

Events arising from the March 9 governorship elections have left school pupils all over this country confused and have also rendered their teachers speechless Arithmetic teachers have taught since the time of the old Egyptians that the number “0” means nothing; it is less than any positive number, that if you add something to it you still get the same thing, that if you subtract something from it you still get that thing, and that if you multiply it by anything you arrive at nothing.

That was before March 9. When INEC declared governorship elections to be inconclusive in six states, it was mostly because many zeros were piled up behind some digits in the number of cancelled votes, thus exceeding the difference in votes between the first and second placed candidates in the elections. Events this weekend has made us to re-examine all those zeros. INEC’s full commission, which met at midnight on Friday, cancelled the position earlier taken by its Returning Officer in Bauchi after a fact-finding team submitted its report. It ruled that the votes of Tafawa Balewa Local Government should be collated and added to the total. More curiously, it reduced the number of cancelled votes in Ningi Local Government from 25,000 to 2,500. The collation officer added a zero behind the real figure, INEC sources said, most probably advertently.

A bright primary school pupil will say, “So what if he added zero to 2,500? It is still 2,500.” Well, not when he added it behind the first two zeros. He instantly transformed the figure ten-fold to 25,000 and has added not zero, but 22,500 to the original figure. This is very important in electoral terms because the overall number of cancelled votes in the state is a big factor in the inconclusiveness of six governorship elections. The removal of that zero might have completely changed the electoral calculus in Bauchi State. INEC said the collation of Tafawa Balewa Local Government results will resume tomorrow; when those figures are added to the total while the number of cancelled votes in other areas has been reduced, a return will most likely be made.

Now that the unlocked power of zero has been revealed in our elections, expect fireworks on Saturday, when supplementary elections will hold in at least five states. Bauchi may or may not be among them. In all six states, the battle is between the two top parties, APC and PDP. In five of the six states, PDP candidates finished slightly ahead while the APC candidate is ahead in one of them, Plateau. This curious happenstance enabled PDP leaders to claim that they were deliberately denied outright victory in all those states.

Now, the supplementary polls in Plateau, Benue and Adamawa states are largely academic, in my calculation. They are very much like the Kogi State situation in 2015, when PDP had no realistic chance of closing Alhaji Abubakar Audu’s gap in supplementary polls. This time too in Plateau State, APC candidate Governor Simon Lalong leads with 583,255 votes while PDP’s candidate, former FCT Minister Lt General Jerry Useni, has 538,326. The number of cancelled votes is 49,377 which means Useni must close a gap of 44,929 within that number of registered voters. This, when only 46% of the state’s registered voters voted on March 9.

The Benue situation is academic for the same reason. PDP’s candidate Governor Samuel Ortom led with 410,576 while APC’s Emmanuel Jime got 329,022. That means Jime must close a gap of 81,554 votes within 121,019 registered votes in the supplementary poll. Considering that only 33% of Benue’s voters went to the polls on March 9, this gap will be very difficult to close.

In Adamawa State too, the situation is dire for APC’s candidate Governor Mohammed Jibrilla Bindow. PDP’s candidate, the former Speaker and Acting Governor Ahmad Umaru Fintiri led with 367,471. Bindow got 334,995, a margin of 32,476. There were only 40,988 cancelled votes in Adamawa, and only 45% of Adamawa’s voters voted on March 9. No wonder that Bindow’s allies went to court in Yola last Friday to try to stop supplementary polls. They contend that the logo of one small party was missing from the ballot paper, a very costly mistake if indeed it happened. A similar mistake in 2011 almost cost Governor Abdulazeez Yari of Zamfara State his election. He had to find a way to convince the small party to drop their court case.

Inevitably, all eyes are on Kano State this Saturday, by far the biggest and richest state in the inconclusive basket. PDP’s candidate Abba Kabir Yusuf finished ahead with 1,014,474 while APC’s candidate, Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, got 987,819. For Ganduje to win a second term, he must close this gap of 26,655 within 128,572 registered voters. On the face of it, it looks doable but remember that not all those people have PVCs. In fact, only 40% of Kano’s 5.6million registered voters voted on March 9 so if the same proportion holds in the supplementary election, only 51,000 people will vote. To close a gap of 26,000 among 50,000 will entail winning 41,000 of those votes. I apologise for the number of zeros in this article, but we should blame the old Egyptians for saying the number zero has no value.

Of all the inconclusive states therefore, Sokoto State’s PDP candidate Governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal has the slimmest lead in relation to the cancelled vote. The former House of Representatives Speaker had 489,558 votes while his former deputy governor, the APC candidate Aliyu Ahmed, had 486,145. This left a margin of 3,413 while the number of cancelled votes is 75,403. Arithmetically therefore, this gap could be bridged but it now boils down to which parts of the state are voting. Many of the missing votes are from Kebbe Local Government. Videos circulating on WhatsApp showed what are apparently APC thugs intercepting and destroying a truckload of ballot papers. According to them, the ballots were pre-stamped for PDP but PDP leaders say they were the genuine ballot papers from the area. If so, I thought the result had already been collated in the Local Government and destruction of the trucks should have no effect.

The dicey nature of the Sokoto supplementary poll made Tambuwal, a lawyer by profession, to question INEC’s power to declare an election inconclusive when the Constitution did not provide for it. Of course the Electoral Act did, so the courts may have to pronounce on this matter. In Bauchi State too, APC has rejected INEC’s climbdown from inconclusiveness and I expect them to try to obtain a court order saying once the Returning Officer declared the election inconclusive, only a tribunal could change that. Again, the courts might have to settle that matter.

More than anything, supplementary elections bring out the worst in Nigerian politicians. Many allegations were made after Osun’s supplementary election last year that the winner and his party used do-or-die methods. The tribunal is yet to rule on that. Meanwhile, vote buying, intimidation, PVC stealing, violence, vote suppression, tripping of card readers and computer manipulation are some of the illegal tricks that could be on full display this Saturday.

Schoolchildren are taught that in arithmetic, “1” is the smallest natural number but in 1983, we discovered its real value when FEDECO’s Returning Officer in old Ondo State added “1” in front of NPN candidate Akin Omoboriowo’s score of 500,000. This small addition instantly transformed the figure to 1.5 million and it overtook UPN Governor Adekunle Ajasin’s score of 1.2million. This year we have seen how “0”, strategically added behind a raft of other zeros, could render a governorship election inconclusive. We could be in for more arithmetical discoveries this Saturday.