We, the people, solemnly agreed to rig — by Bamidele Johnson

We are back to that season when Nigerians rediscover their profound hatred for election rigging and the mortal danger it poses to democracy. We denounce and condemn it as well as splenetic Facebook posts about it. We demand free, fair and credible elections while speaking as though electoral malpractice is a peculiar tropical disease imported from elsewhere.

Among those wailing the loudest are people who bought expo for their children, registered them in special centres or paid a “machine” (someone else) to sit examinations on their behalf. Quite a few have served as machines themselves at one time or another. For a fee, naturally. Others routinely bribe law enforcement officers, sort lecturers, jump queues, falsify documents or bend the rules whenever the rules have the bad manners to inconvenience them.
But we do not think of any of this as rigging.

It is, however, rigging. The only difference is scale. So, it keeps reappearing in our politics, including the ongoing party primaries where vote totals have acquired a delightful elasticity and party leaders have been torturing the process until it confesses that their preferred candidates are, indeed, the people’s choice.

Still, we like to imagine that all this began with politicians. I doubt it. Take the parent who buys examination questions for a child. What exactly is being taught there? Certainly not intelligence or diligence.
The lesson is simply that when the rules stand between you and success, defeat the rules. The child learns that outcomes matter more than process, that victory matters more than integrity and that getting caught is far worse than doing wrong.

Years later, we are astonished when that same child becomes a public official who manipulates procurement procedures, inflates figures at a collation centre or discovers several thousand voters in his bedroom.

Why would he not?
We trained him. Crooked people did not descend from heaven or some medieval cage. They are products of our homes, schools, churches, mosques and communities. They simply graduated.

The man who bends an electoral process and the parent who buys expo belong to the same moral family. One is merely operating a larger franchise.

We like to think corruption begins at the top. More often, it begins much lower. It begins with the countless little dishonesties that society tolerates, rewards and frequently applauds.
The student who cheats and passes is celebrated.
The businessman who evades regulations is called smart.
The official who bends procedures for friends is a gee, an alaye, a man who understands how the world works.

The fellow who obeys the rules is treated with a mixture of pity and scorn.
Then election season arrives and we expect all these people, whom we spent years admiring for their ability to manipulate systems, to transform overnight into Scandinavian democrats devoted to transparency, accountability and due process. It is quite a leap. It is not sustainable.

A society cannot spend decades teaching that rules are obstacles and then expect elections to become the one sacred institution where rules must suddenly be obeyed. Politics does not exist separately from society. It is society. If enough people believe every system exists to be manipulated, politics will eventually become the grand national championship of system manipulation. That, unfortunately, is where we are.

None of this excuses electoral malpractice. Rigging is wrong whether it happens in a polling unit, a party primary or a presidential election. But if we are serious about ending it, we must stop pretending it is exclusively a political problem. It is a cultural problem.

The politician who rigs an election and the parent who buys expo for a child are singing from the same hymnal. Both believe the rules are for other people.
Until we confront that, we will continue performing our favourite national ritual of condemning in public what we enthusiastically practise in private.

We, the people,
having firmly resolved to rig in unity and harmony as one indivisible and indissoluble fraud-permitting nation under Satan… We solemnly agreed to rig. The politicians merely took us at our word.