She was asleep when an armed gang of political thugs set her home ablaze. They knew she was at home. To be sure she was burnt to ashes, the gang fired their weapons to scare away neighbours and helpers. When they were sure she had died, they burnt down a few more neighbouring houses for good measure and melted into the darkness and the comfort of knowing that they were beyond the reach of the law. To date, their confidence that nothing will happen appears to be well founded.
Madam Achejuh Abuh, Woman Leader of the PDP in a vast network of campaign structures locked in a bitter struggle for the soul of Kogi State achieved fame in death. Many may have died during the elections in Kogi and Bayelsa State, but we are certain of the murder of the woman that was deliberately burnt in her home in Lokoja.
Now the nation knows of Madam Abuh. Wife, mother, politician, martyr of the falsehood that choice, resistance and organization against impunity and a broken political process can work.
Should the nation be shocked? Not really. We are way past shock in this nation that fights elections more viciously and comprehensively than it fights insurgents, bandits and kidnappers. There have been many Madam Abuhs, victims of an electoral system increasingly defined by violence. Her own party, the PDP, re-invented strong-arm politics, a systemic character of Nigerian democracy that provided a backdrop to constitutional crises, coups and a full-blown civil war in the decade, 1960 to 1970.
Foot soldiers like Madam Abuh and the thugs who murdered her drove an expensive and destructive elite enterprise over each other, crushing or perverting all processes, in answer to the demands of leaders that opposition must be intimidated and success secured at all cost. How can anyone forget President Obasanjo’s rallying call to the faithful that his re-election was a do-or-die affair, or President Buhari’s threat that the dog and the baboon will be drenched in blood if PDP attempted to rig him out? The 2011 post-election violence democratized violence as a trigger or a response for thousands who killed, maimed or displaced thousands more.
The world would be forgiven if it thought that 2011 had been registered as a watershed in the search for a violence-free electoral process in Nigeria, and up to a point it did. The fear of even bloodier uprising in 2015 was a major incentive for the spirited and successful efforts to get President Jonathan to concede defeat and break ranks with a history of rejection of defeat by Nigerian politicians. The fear factor made it easier for President Buhari to come to power, but it also became a more intimate companion of all those who sought power, particularly, this time, by people from his party who had more to lose than elections.
The murder of Madam Abuh will stay in the public domain for a while and then disappear. President Buhari immediately congratulated the governor whose supporters posed in videos with sophisticated weapons and danced to music which included threats that the opposition will be shot into submission, for winning an electoral race well. A few days later, he said her killers must be fished out. The head of the police, the institution responsible for keeping Madam Abuh well and safe, had distanced the official police from the thousands he said had dressed like policemen, but were fake. His policemen did not arrest one out of the hundreds or thousands of fake police. They were also powerless in the face of multiple, videoed attacks on polling stations and collation centres and voters who were brave enough to think they were safe. They could not stop the murder of a woman in her bed, by thugs who had threatened her earlier. This is the police the President wants to send after the murderers of Madam Abuh.
If history is a guide, all those guns that aided the victory in Kogi State will be safely hidden by now, until the next election. A few poorly-connected thugs may be dragged before the public as suspects, but no one should hold their breath in anticipation for a trial and justice.
The people of Kogi State will remember how violence influenced the elections of their governor, and will prepare better to erase his legacy or entrench it with more violence in November 2023.
Those who cared enough to understand the intimate relationship between violence and the Nigerian electoral process would have stumbled on the growth and development of Muhammad Yusuf, Boko Haram and the fortunes and misfortunes of many powerful people in Borno and Yobe States and the rest of Nigeria. The governments of the ANPP and later APC built their formidable foundations in that region on the skeletons of cynical manipulation, horrific miscalculations and damaging pandering to groups that today fight the nation as insurgents. No one will understand Niger Delta politics without reference to massive violence deployed by crime and impunity which have given the region its basic character. Nothing has changed: the guns and the terror still make significant differences to elite disposition and the acquiescence of the population, and they will always be there for the right occasions.
There is hardly a State governor that has not recruited and armed gangs under one guise or the other for patently political goals. The political vigilante of the last few years have now turned their weapons over to bandits and kidnappers for tidy sums, or are now the vanguard of paid or self-seeking gangs involved in extra-judicial killings of suspected rustlers and kidnappers and bandits, who fight back with greater intensity. They are available to politicians when mandates need to be stolen, and then serve themselves as criminals negotiating with the people they helped to power for some breathing space.
Every politician worth his salt has paid for thugs armed to the teeth to fight off the opposition’s thugs and forcefully advance the possibility of victory. Politicians follow judicial decisions on elections very closely, and they know that it is rare for victories to be set aside on the evidence of the existence of widespread violence. Nor has INEC ever refused to conduct elections even where there is overwhelming evidence that violence is being deployed to substantially stifle free choice.
The Nigerian state’s capacity for conflict resolution is virtually non-existent, one consequence of which is that all over the nation, communities now stockpile weapons to fight the enemy next door; for those days when help is not forthcoming from the state, and for those moments when politicians demand more than votes.
It is difficult to see how violence can be isolated from elections in Nigeria. Certainly leaders who emerge through extensive use of violence will be the least inclined to disarm. Opposition which was out-gunned to power will only improve its arsenal. Voters and citizens know that electoral mandates are stolen, in many instances with the barrel of the gun, the connivance of election officials or the disposition of a judiciary with little respect. The most telling threat to credible elections is a gunshot at a polling unit or collation centre.
Citizens like Madam Abuh burnt alive by thugs of the opposition serve the purpose of reinforcing the reality that our democratic system gets worse with every election. This is the time to worry over the certainty of the loss of a lot more lives and limbs at the next elections.
– Jamila Abubakar
jm1bukar@gmail.com
