ABUJA, Nigeria — Speaking on prime-time television on Friday, April 1, the day before Nigeria was set to vote for a new parliament, Attahiru Jega, chairman of the Nigerian electoral commission, warned his fellow citizens that the country had yet to secure a "stable democratic system in which peaceful, free, fair, and credible elections are routine and taken for granted." This year, he pledged, was Africa's most populous country's time "to get it right." He implored Nigerians to turn out and vote en masse, saying, "We must not fail."
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Less than 24 hours later, Jega was before the nation again, announcing that the election would have to be postponed -- even as the voting process was already under way. Crucial ballot materials were missing from stations across the country, the chairman said, and the vote would have to wait until Monday. But come Sunday evening, the electoral body issued another statement pushing the entire timeline for the parliamentary, presidential, and state governor polls back by a week. The election that was too big to fail was off to an inauspicious start.
The weekend's events are a serious blow to the high hopes that this year's election could be something of a new dawn for Nigeria. The so-called democratic transition that began in 1999, when nearly two decades of military dictatorship ended and a civilian president was "elected," has been a farce in the eyes of most Nigerians and international observers, who have seen a series of elections -- in 1999, 2003, and 2007 -- go from pretty bad to shockingly fraudulent and violent. The worst of those elections was in 2007, which EU observers described as the worst they had ever witnessed anywhere in the world, ever, characterized by stolen vote boxes, ballots marked before the polls opened, and a totally opaque counting process.
The Nigerian political order is more akin to "godfatherism" than parliamentary democracy. "Big men," as the wealthy and powerful are called here, run the show, bankrolled by millions of dollars siphoned off from oil revenues and government projects. Everyone else is just grasping for patronage. Champagne-sipping Nigerian elites and cigar-smoking international oil execs stand in stark contrast with the impoverished masses. Oil money is used over and over again to buy temporary peace across the vast and fractured country; elections are no exception.
This time, however, was supposed to be different. President Goodluck Jonathan, who took over after President Umaru Yar'Adua died while in office in 2010, staked his credibility both at home and abroad on his ability to reform the electoral process. He promised to clean up the much-hated Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), which had largely been seen as a government vehicle for institutionalized vote stuffing. Jonathan sacked officials, installed new processes, and promised a credible vote.
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