Toxic influence of money on Nigerian elections

NIGERIA faces tremendous pressure to scale down the toxic influence of money on her electoral system, after it emerged the 2015 elections that ushered in the current President, Muhammadu Buhari, and effectively ended 16 years of the Peoples Democratic Party’s dominance of the country’s politics were the most expensive in the country’s history. The exercise, according to the Independent National Electoral Commission, gulped between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, a huge sum which tends to project the notion of the preeminent role of money, above anything else, in the electoral process. It should not be so.

Most Nigerians will probably flinch at the sheer quantum of money that goes into electing political office holders in the country, as revealed recently by Bolanle Eyinla, the INEC’s Chairman Technical Adviser. Presenting a breakdown of the cost of the last elections at a two-day conference on Regional Cost of Politics, Eyinla said, while INEC spent $547 million on what he described as “the most expensive elections that we have ever seen,” the political parties and their candidates brought the overall expenditure to “between $1.5 billion and $2 billion.”

This is quite a fortune to invest in a process that has so far failed to deliver the required dividends to the Nigerian citizenry. Eighteen years after the enthronement of civil rule, good governance remains a mirage. As a matter of fact, it has always been the habit here to make the contest of elections as prohibitive as possible, which explains why politics has become the preoccupation, primarily, of moneybags and their hirelings.

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