Politicians smile as economic slump makes Nigerians grab cash for votes
Afam Emmanuel stood his ground against vote- buying politicians who offered him N20,000 ($100) at the last general elections in 2015. He had a job then and so did his wife.
This year, the scenario is different. He lost his job with clothing retailer, Truworth, which closed shop in 2016 after an acute dollar shortage meant the South Africanbased firm didn’t have enough dollars to replenish its inventory.
His wife’s job was one of the millions cut by commercial banks in the same year as lenders buckled under the pressure of spiralling non-performing loans and a contracting economy.
Jobless for three years and with a family of four to feed, Emmanuel has struggled since then. After
disposing a chunk of his modest assets to survive, he will dislodge his ideologies of old and sell his vote to get by. “A middle- aged lady in my Shomolu, Lagos neighbourhood approached me and offered me cash for my Permanent Voter Card (PVC) number and I accepted out of my need for it,” Emmanuel said. It was N10,000 (less than $30). “I can’t tell you that,” Emmanuel said when asked to give details on who this woman was and who she worked for. “But I can tell you my family and I found good use for the money.” Emmanuel had sold his vote at a 100 percent discount compared to 2015. Large swaths of Nigerians, like Emmanuel, have been hit by similar predicaments in an economy that has haemorrhaged jobs and investments in the last three years and has overtaken India to become the poverty capital of the world, according to a 2018 Brookings Institution report. The rising misery of Nigerians means less is needed by powerseeking politicians today to buy votes in a country where six people slide into extreme poverty every minute. Vote buying was widespread in the Ekiti State elections of 2018 and conducted with “impunity” in many cases, according to the Nigerian Civil Society Situation Room group, which monitored the election, with some reports putting the price of a ballot between N3,000 ($8.30) and N5,000 ($13.8). For many of Nigeria’s 87 million people living below $2, any offer in exchange for their vote may be one too hard to resist at this time as their economic hardship deepens, even if it is much less than past offers, as Emmanuel found. Vote buying is not new and has dogged Nigerian elections for decades and has evolved from enticing impoverished voters with stockfish and bags of rice in the First Republic to the now widely used cash handouts anywhere between $10 (N3,060) and $50 (N15,300). With rising job losses, a falling naira, and lower purchasing power, the cheaper cost of vote buying increases Nigeria’s risk of selecting a leader lacking in the qualities required to set the country on the path of inclusive economic growth and better living standards for the people. “The politicians are licking their lips, knowing that Nigerians have gotten poorer,” a political commentator said. “It means it is easier to entice them to sell their votes, but the risk that electorates will be worsening their plight in the long run by selling their votes to undeserving politicians is very high,” he added. Nigerians head to the poll next month to elect a leader for the next four years, in what many say will be a tight contest between incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress and main opposition candidate, Atiku Abuba- kar of the People’s Democratic Party. To reduce poverty and create sufficient jobs for a teeming youth population, President Buhari plans to ramp up infrastructure spending and expand his socialist intervention schemes, while Atiku has vowed to privatise government assets and open up the economy to more foreign direct investment. The signs are there to show that Nigerians are growing poorer for the first time since the return to democracy in 1999 as an economic slowdown combines with still high population growth rates to curb income per capita. Average incomes in Nigeria will probably fall the fifth successive time in 2019, according to IMF forecasts. Since peaking at $3,000 in 2014, average incomes in Nigeria last contracted in 1999 but have now plunged to below $2,500 as a slowing economy takes its toll. Growth in Africa’s largest economy has remained fragile at best after exiting a recession in 2017. Growth averaged 1.7 percent in the first three quarters of 2018, lower than the country’s population growth rate of 3 percent. The country’s misery index, an economic indicator which gauges the economic well-being of the average citizen, rose every year between 2014 and 2017. The index draws from annual inflation and unemployment rate. While inflation has since cooled from an average of 16.5 percent in 2017 to 12.4 percent in 2018, unemployment has not looked back since 2011. Some 20.9 million Nigerians were unemployed as at the third quarter of 2018, as the rate of unemployment quickened to a seven-year high of 23 percent, according to the government-funded data agency, National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). This excludes the number of underemployed Nigerians which stood at 20.1 percent. Of the total unemployed people, the NBS reported that 8.77 million of them were first-time job seekers, 0.93 million people were unemployed because they lost their jobs and 11.1 million people were working for less than 20 hours a week. “To ensure we don’t expand poverty, Nigeria must attract private capital on a large scale and do away with policies that stifle investment,” said Ogho Okiti, an economist and CEO of consulting firm, Time Economics. “If we don’t do that, everyone will soon be needing the N10,000 Tradermoni hand-outs from government to survive,” Okiti said.