by AYISHA OSORI
Buying votes is a problem — but only because of a deeper rot in Nigeria’s democracy that it must address.
When veteran politician Ayo Fayose contested — and won — the June 2014 gubernatorial elections in the southwestern Nigeria state of Ekiti, he mocked Kayode Fayemi, the incumbent who had lost. “People don’t want road infrastructure; they want stomach infrastructure,” Fayose said.
Overnight, he introduced a new lexicon for a decades-old practice and triggered an outsized focus on the sale of votes, or vote trading, as a critical challenge to election integrity in Nigeria.
Indeed, elections in the country have repeatedly been marred by allegations of votes being bought and sold. If the rate was allegedly between $8 and $13 a vote when Fayemi came back to power in 2018 in Ekiti, the stakes are even higher nationally.
As Nigerians prepare for one of the country’s most decisive and divisive elections since 1999 to pick their president, vice president and members of parliament on February 25, many believe that vote trading will play a determining role.
After all, the primaries of the two main parties, the governing All Progressives Congress and the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party, were particularly contentious in 2022, with allegations of delegates receiving as much as $25,000 each to vote in favour of those paying them.
Yet the focus on vote trading obfuscates far deeper problems with Nigeria’s electoral democracy, and risks covering up for those flaws.
To be sure, vote buying is a major threat to Nigeria, one that is not new. In fact, it is part of Nigeria’s history of transactional politics and elections, where votes are exchanged for food, favour and cash. Before “stomach infrastructure” there was “democracy of the stomach” coined by Ozumba Mbadiwe, a federal minister in the years just before and after independence from the United Kingdom.
The problem is also not unique to Nigeria: At least 165 countries have laws against vote trading. Like Nigeria, votes are influenced by payments or allurements in many other developing world democracies.
Tackling this menace isn’t easy. When the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) announced in October 2022 a move towards a cashless economy and declared that current notes would be no longer valid in the days leading up to the presidential election, many concluded that the move, in part, was targeted at politicians and their cash stockpiles used for vote-buying. Yet days later, the central bank governor Godwin Efemiele found himself in the crosshairs of allegations from the government that he was involved in financing terrorism, charges that many independent analysts do not buy.
Whatever the merits of the allegations against Efemiele, the large question remains: Are Nigeria’s electoral problems fundamentally about vote buying?
Today there are 133 million Nigerians in multidimensional poverty; living on or below the national poverty line of 376.50 naira ($0.51) in earnings a day.
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