From “do-or-die” to “AK-47 fire”, our politicians keep reaching for the vocabulary of war.
INEC must make them pay for it.
By Osamhanze Idahosa
Every election season, Nigeria braces for ballot snatching, thuggery, and the midnight alteration of result sheets. But the violence that mars our elections rarely begins at the polling unit. It begins at the podium, in the mouths of men and women who have learned that the fastest route to a crowd’s heart runs through its fears.
Our political vocabulary is a vocabulary of war. Elections are “battles”.
Opponents are “enemies”. States are to be “captured” and “delivered”. We have used this language for so long that we no longer hear it. But the unemployed young man at the rally hears it, and he takes it literally.In 2007, sitting President Olusegun Obasanjo described the coming general election as a “do-or-die affair” for his party. The poll that followed was so discredited that its own beneficiary, Umaru Yar’Adua, admitted it was flawed.In 2012, Muhammadu Buhari, then an opposition leader, warned that if the 2015 election went the way of 2011, “the dog and the baboon” would be soaked in blood. He spoke barely a year after post-election violence had killed about 800 people across northern states, by Human Rights Watch’s count.In 2015, the Oba of Lagos was widely reported to have told Igbo leaders that those who voted against his preferred governorship candidate would end up in the lagoon. In 2019, Governor Nasir El-Rufai said on national television that foreigners who intervened in our elections would go home in “body bags”. Ahead of 2023, the eventual winner of the presidency was filmed telling supporters in London that political power is something you fight for, snatch, and run with. Weeks later, a Lagos transport union leader was recorded warning Igbo residents to stay at home if they would not vote for his party. Voters in parts of Lagos were then attacked and turned back on the basis of how they looked and what language they spoke.One might hope the lesson had been learned. It has not.In February this year, on the very day INEC released its timetable for the 2027 elections, Peter Obi told supporters in Akwa Ibom that anybody who refused to count their votes would be counted too. “We will count him,” he said. He did not explain what it means to “count” an electoral officer, and that is the difficulty. Mr Obi has said elsewhere that he will resist rigging only by lawful and legitimate means, and millions share his anger at the conduct of 2023. But a vague threat is still a threat. The youth corps member posted as a presiding officer to a remote polling unit cannot be expected to parse the metaphor. More recently, in Port Harcourt, Mr Obi declared himself ready to die protecting his votes.
A candidate who speaks of dying for votes invites his followers to consider what else they might do for him.Then, only days ago, the chairman of the All Progressives Congress in Edo State, Jarret Tenebe, spoke. Addressing a rally on the party’s plan to deliver 2.5 million votes to President Bola Tinubu, he offered what he called a prayer against anyone standing in the way: “AK-47 fire.” The video went viral. The opposition African Democratic Congress in the state called it incitement and said it would forward the footage to the authorities. At the time of writing, no public report shows that the police have even invited him for questioning.Note what these statements have in common. One comes from the opposition, the other from the ruling party. One was aimed at election officials, the other at political opponents. Both were framed so that the speaker could later claim he meant no harm.The talk of war has a quieter companion: the language of contempt. Our campaigns now run on mockery and name-calling. Supporters of one candidate are “zombies”, those of another “Obidiots”, and critics of the government are “wailers”.
Opponents are ridiculed for their age, their health, their accent, their tribe, and their faith. Rallies that should set out plans for power supply, jobs, and security have become contests in who can coin the more wounding insult.This is not harmless banter. Abuse is where incitement begins. A crowd taught to laugh at a rival as a fool, a thief, or an animal is already halfway to believing he deserves whatever comes to him. The insult strips the opponent of his dignity; the threat then strips him of his safety. Political contestation should be a contest of ideas, won by the candidate with the better argument and not by the one with the sharper tongue.Scholars of mass violence have shown how atrocity is preceded by language that dehumanises. In Rwanda, neighbours were first called “cockroaches”. Nigeria knows this pattern from its own history, from the propaganda that preceded the pogroms of 1966.Metaphor gives the speaker deniability, but it gives the listener direction. The politician returns to his convoy; the foot soldier is left holding the machete.
Democracy rests on the assumption that the loser will live to contest again. War rhetoric destroys that assumption. Once it is gone, every election becomes a matter of survival, and survival justifies anything.The cost is measurable. Turnout in the 2023 presidential election fell to about 27 percent, the lowest since 1999. Many Nigerians have concluded that voting is not worth the risk.Nigeria is not short of rules. The Electoral Act prohibits campaign language that is abusive, intemperate, or likely to provoke violence, and bars appeals to ethnic and religious sentiment. Parties sign peace accords before every election, with cameras rolling.Yet who has been punished? The fines are trivial to politicians who spend billions on campaigns. Prosecutions are rare. The peace accords are ceremonial.
The lesson every politician has drawn is that inflammatory speech carries rewards and no costs.INEC must treat abusive and dangerous speech as an electoral offense with real consequences. Four measures deserve urgent attention.A monitoring unit. INEC should work with the National Broadcasting Commission, civil society, and media houses to track campaign speech and publish its findings.A ladder of sanctions. Begin with public censure and substantial fines, move to suspension of campaign activities, and end with disqualification for the gravest or repeated offenses.Party liability. A party that fields a serial inciter, or fails to discipline one, should share the penalty.A stronger law. The National Assembly should give INEC, or the long-proposed Electoral Offenses Commission, clear power to debar offenders, subject to swift judicial review.Debarment is not a novel idea. We already disqualify candidates for forged certificates. If lying about a school certificate can end a candidacy, calling down gunfire on opponents should too. And the rule must apply to all, to the opposition candidate and the ruling party chairman alike. A sanction applied to only one side would be worse than none.None of this is about silencing criticism.
A candidate may call his opponent incompetent, corrupt, or unfit, and must be free to do so, provided he argues it from the record. What he may not do is heap abuse on fellow citizens or mark them for harm, whether in plain words or dressed up as a joke, a proverb, or a prayer.Those of us in the media have a duty too: to stop amplifying inflammatory soundbites without challenge, and to ask every speaker what he meant and whether he will withdraw it.Civility is a precondition of democracy. With the 2027 campaigns upon us, INEC must find the will, and the National Assembly must supply the power, to make politicians pay for words that get people killed.
