NOW that the dust has settled on most of the party primaries, let us have an honest conversation about what we actually witnessed. The losers are still smarting. The winners are gloating. And the rest of us are sitting here asking the same uncomfortable question we always ask after every election cycle in this country did any of this have to be this ugly?
Cast your mind back. The National Assembly, in what looked like a genuine reform moment, removed the delegate system from the Electoral Act and handed us the direct primary and consensus options as cleaner alternatives. The thinking was straightforward enough. The delegate system had become a bazaar. I have heard stories and they are not even whispered anymore, people say them out loud of how men and women bribed their way into becoming delegates at the state and local government levels precisely because delegate status was a known money-spinner.
Some of the sharper ones collected from every single aspirant in the race, pocketed the cash from all sides, and then voted for whoever paid last or paid most. At the presidential level, it was not naira changing hands it was dollars. Straight dollars. And when the primaries ended, you would see delegates suddenly acquiring landed property, putting up buildings, and in some cases, taking new wives. Election season genuinely changed lives. Just not the lives it was supposed to change.
So many of us breathed a cautious sigh of relief when the delegate system was retired. Good riddance, most people said. Now we can have something cleaner.God forbid it was that simple.
The consensus option, which looked elegant on paper, was turned into a personal instrument by governors and party power brokers almost immediately. In state after state, the “consensus” that emerged was not the product of any genuine consultation. It was the product of one man usually the governor deciding who would fly the party’s flag, and every other aspirant being pressured, cajoled, or simply ignored until they got the message.
Many of the aggrieved aspirants did not even bother hiding their frustration. Some have already decamped. Others have stayed put inside their parties with the specific intention of working against those same parties come the general election. You can hardly blame them. When a process is designed to produce agreement but actually produces coercion, it breeds exactly this kind of bitterness.
Then there was the direct primary. You would think this was the safest option open voting, members participating directly, hard to manipulate. You would be wrong. During the All Progressive Congress(APC) direct primaries, videos went viral showing vote counts that defied basic arithmetic. Figures jumping from 10 to 50. From 100 to 1,000. In one clip, a figure announced bore no relationship whatsoever to the tally on the sheet in the official’s own hand. The social media was awash with these videos.
And before anyone from the APC starts feeling indignant, the ADC primaries served up the same spectacle almost identical scenes of arithmetic creativity. Which only confirmed what many of us already knew: all these parties are fundamentally the same animal wearing different colours. I find it nauseating, genuinely nauseating, to watch politicians spend their energy disparaging rival parties when the rot runs equally deep on every side. They have also, most of them, cycled through multiple parties themselves. The moral high ground simply does not exist here.
So here is where we are. The indirect delegate system was corrupt. The consensus option has been weaponised by governors. The direct primary has been rigged in broad daylight on camera. Every mode of primary we have tried has been abused. This is the pattern. And the pattern tells us something important that we keep refusing to accept the problem is not the system. The problem is the people operating the system. A different primary method is not going to produce different politicians. It will just produce a new set of methods for the same politicians to game.
Mind you, this does not mean we should stop trying to improve the process. Far from it. But let us be clear-eyed about what reform can and cannot do.
Here is what I think is worth trying. For the direct primary, ditch the Option A4 open voting system entirely. It is too easy to manipulate in a crowd. Move to a proper ballot system where members cast secret votes, and mandate INEC to supervise the process. Yes, INEC has its own credibility problems, but an independent observer presence however imperfect is still harder to subvert than counting in a room full of party loyalists. Beyond that, most major parties now maintain digital membership registers. Why are we not using them? Electronic voting for party primaries, tied to verified membership records, would at least create an auditable trail. It would not eliminate manipulation ,nothing will, not with this political class but it would make large-scale fraud considerably more difficult to hide.
The Independent National Electoral Commission needs to stop being a passive bystander in all of this. INEC has statutory oversight responsibilities. If parties are conducting primaries that violate the Electoral Act, INEC should be at the table, not watching from outside the gate. There should be consequences for parties that submit results that bear no connection to any credible process. Currently, there are no real consequences. And in Nigeria, as we well know, behaviour without consequences never changes.
The real tragedy of every electoral reform conversation in this country is that we spend enormous energy designing better cages for birds that have already learned to fly through bars. The primaries we just witnessed were not failed by the Electoral Act. They were failed by politicians who have no interest in internal democracy, governors who believe party structures exist to serve their personal ambitions, and a political culture that still treats votes whether at primary or general election level as commodities to be purchased rather than choices to be earned.
None of that changes with a new primary format. It changes when the electorate starts attaching real costs to this behaviour. It changes when delegates who sell their votes find that the representatives they helped install cannot secure a road or a school or a functioning primary health centre in their communities. It changes when Nigerians decide that the man who bought his way to a ticket is precisely the man who will steal his way through office. We know the connection. We just keep pretending we don’t.
The lessons from these primaries are not complicated. Every method is only as honest as the people using it. Fix the people or replace them and any method will work. Leave the people unchanged, and no method will.
- Nda-Isaiah is a political analyst based in Abuja and can be reached on jonesdryx@gmail.com. His syndicated column appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Saturday.