DEMOCRACY AND THE GRASSROOTS

In October 2016, the ruling APC won the chairmanship positions in all the 20 local governments and 37 LCDAs in Ogun State. The party also won 346 out of the 349 councillorship seats. In January 2018, the ruling APC cleared all the 389 councillorship positions in Osun State. In the May 2018 poll in Oyo State, the then ruling APC won all the chairmanship seats in the 33 local government councils and the 35 local council development areas.

In October 2018 in Plateau State, LG poll held in 13 of the 17 LGs, APC was declared winner in 11 (no figures were announced) with the remaining two stalemated, leading to a violent protest. In June 2018 in Rivers State, the ruling PDP won all the 23 chairmanship and 302 councillorship positions. In Sokoto, the then ruling APC (now PDP) won all the 22 chairmanship and 234 councillorship seats at the March 2016 local government elections. In June this year, after the Taraba State Independent Electoral Commission (TSIEC) chairman, Dr Phillip Duwe declared PDP candidates the winners for both chairmanship and councillorship positions in all 16 local government councils, he urged the defeated candidates and parties to understand that ‘leadership comes only from God.’ But after the February 2017 LG poll in Yobe, the state electoral commission chairman did not beat about the bush: “Having received and compiled the election results, all the 17 candidates of the APC in the chairmanship category are declared winners.” And in the LG poll conducted in April last year by the then outgoing Governor Yari of Zamfara State, his APC cleared all the 14 chairmanship and 147 councillorship seats.

What the foregoing clearly shows is that our governors lack democratic temperament. In the name of elections, they simply compile a list of cronies and hand it to those who preside over their state’s electoral commission for them to announce after hollow rituals. The essence of voting is for citizens to decide how they are governed. But in a situation in which Nigerians have been conditioned to believe that exercising their franchise in local government elections is simply a waste of time, then something is wrong with our system. There is therefore an urgent need to reform the institutions and practices that have placed structural roadblocks in the path of our democracy at the grassroots level. The only way to do that is to disempower the few who lord themselves over the many.

In order to change the trajectory of our country, there must be institutional reforms, beginning with the charade we now call local government elections. Aside wasting enormous resources on these meaningless elections, the governors do not even pretend that they consider them serious. In Gombe some years ago, the state government engaged a contractor to supply ballot boxes for the LG election. He went to China for the procurement but the election was conducted and winners declared before the ballot boxes were eventually delivered. In Bauchi State, a former Deputy Speaker of the State Assembly was once appointed chairman of the commission!

In their book, ‘How Democracies Die’, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that while there is a general tendency to believe that a democracy is imperilled only by military adventurers, it is now the elected leaders who most often subvert the very process that brought them to power. These are men who have no qualms “rewriting the rules of politics to permanently disadvantage their rivals”, the authors wrote before adding, “The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s enemies use the very institutions of democracy— gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”

It is in the enlightened self-interest of the governors to change the current narrative on local government elections in the country.