![]() ![]() To pay real attention to Nigeria is to signal that Africa matters, as the United States has always maintained. Nigeria is Africa’s tottering giant, the continent’s most populous country, the most politically and culturally dominant. Nigerians want a functioning democracy, and they are starting on the path to it but might be derailed unless the international community pays attention now. I’ve always found it curious that African countries were expected to form functioning democracies right after independence, even though the colonial governments they had only just freed themselves from were dictatorships in everything but name. They are convinced of the complicity of those who should be caretakers of the democratic process. Some voters say that the official numbers trickling in do not match the numbers from their polling units, that the results tell a story different from what they witnessed on Saturday. Now, as results are being counted, there is growing disillusionment. Many were voting for the first time, inspired by one candidate, Peter Obi, who has brought to them that ineffable thing that we humans need to thrive: hope. I have never been so proud of my fellow Nigerians. And when it began to rain, they came together and sang beautiful songs. They refused to leave even though they had to wait so long that it was almost dawn when they could finally vote. They provided their own light from their phones as they stood in line in the dark, and according to one recorded case, a voter brought a small generator to a polling place when the voting machine stopped working. They went off and bought their own ink for finger-printing when election workers claimed to have run out of it. They braved the harassment and beatings of men paid to create chaos. They waited for election workers who arrived many hours late to polling stations. On Saturday, many went out to vote, enthusiastic but cautious, their phone cameras ready to record any irregularities. They are a bright, innovative and talented generation, a hungry generation, starved of good leadership, who do not merely sit back and complain but who act and push back and want to forge their own futures. A majority of Nigerians are below the age of 35. ![]() Nigerians, especially young Nigerians, are determined that this time, their votes will matter. I know the political culture, where the exchange of large amounts of money makes so many people conscience-deficient, where the mainstream media’s instinct is political deference and where the will of the people is often ignored. I know Nigeria, the country of my birth, intimately. How, Nigerians wonder, can a well-funded electoral body that had four years to prepare for an important presidential election make such a significant blunder? It is reasonable, then, that many voters have assumed purposeful intent, that election workers were instructed not to upload results so that they could later be secretly manipulated. Failing to upload the results in real time was the most egregious of the many irregularities of this election because it has destroyed the cautious trust with which many approached the process. Technology would be the savior: In each polling unit, votes would be counted in the presence of voters and then immediately uploaded to a secure central portal. This time, though, Nigerians were asked to place their faith in a new electronic voting system that would make tampering more difficult. Nigerian elections have a history of being rigged, of cooked-up numbers and stolen ballot boxes. Through it all, there was a chilling lack of transparency from the Independent National Electoral Commission, or I.N.E.C., which oversees elections. ![]() All these things happened during the Nigerian presidential elections on Saturday. Imagine a crowd of people chanting “We must vote! We must vote!” when polling workers failed to arrive as expected. Imagine being beaten to keep you from voting for a particular candidate. Imagine other ballot boxes being destroyed. Imagine men dashing into your polling unit, violently seizing ballot boxes and taking them away. Imagine standing patiently in line, waiting to vote, and suddenly men with guns arrive on motorcycles and start shooting. News Update: On Wednesday, Bola Tinubu was declared the winner of Nigeria’s presidential election. ![]()
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