An idiot’s guide to stealing or rigging an African election – revised edition

A few hours before polls were due to open, Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission said it was postponing the presidential and parliamentary elections for a week. A few days earlier, its offices in two federal states had “burned themselves” to the ground, with voting materials inside.

This postponement wouldn’t have been considered entirely unreasonable had it not come so close to voting time. And when President Muhammadu Buhari, who is facing a tough race for re-election, said anyone interfering with the election would do so “at the expense of his life” many saw not a sword-wielding knight standing protectively over a vulnerable Miss Democracy, but a rattled, sabre-rattling incumbent.

Africa is more peaceful today than it has ever been in the post-colonial period, following the dying-out of civil wars all the way from Ivory Coast to Mozambique. Yet the absence of war has not always meant the presence of peace; democracy, promised as a means of choosing leaders and managing affairs of society, is looking shaky in some key countries.
The problem is not that democracy isn’t taking root in many African countries; it is that many leaders have learnt how to unpick it, primarily by turning elections – only one ingredient of the package – into selections. Here are a few multidisciplinary approaches to stealing or rigging African elections:

One can be mathematical by sponsoring as many Opposition candidates as possible from different small interest groups – women, youth, and small ethnic groups – to divide the Opposition vote and ensure your rivals do not build a coalition against you. Choose the names wisely and you can have candidates keep you on top or bottom of a crowded ballot paper and lose your main rival in the muddled middle.

The West and South Africans have, over the years, mastered Anthropological Rigging 101: It revolves around questioning where your main rival was born, or to whom, and thus ‘othering’ and excluding them from the vote and voters. Variants include presenting their (forged) academic results or finding and parading jilted ex-lovers to spill dirty secrets or present abandoned offspring.
There are bonus points for evidence, however circumstantial, of against-the-grain sexual preferences or inadequate horsepower in the hood. Once you get your main rival going around campaign rallies swearing that he doesn’t need to be jumpstarted to get the job done, you are home and dry.

The law is, of course, a good discipline to master. It can help you knock out rivals or eliminate any obstacles to your own candidature such as age or term limits. It is said that the law is an ass and god knows how stubborn donkeys can be at watering holes. It is thus generally considered prudent politics to control the water and the whip should their lordships become adventurous in interpreting the law once your stolen victory is brought to their attention and adjudication. Substantive rewards or punishments should clarify substantive effects of ‘mere mistakes’ on final poll outcomes.
The financial approach, wherein you outspend all your rivals and buy the vote, has been around for decades but there is a new variant: By claiming not to have money to organise them, you can postpone elections long beyond the end of your term, or until you have the political momentum and have ‘sorted’ key rivals.

In the DR Congo, President Joseph Kabila was able to enjoy another two years on the job by pulling this simple trick: since donors really love elections, he seemed to say, he would wait for their call once they had raised all the cash to pay for them.
In fact, ‘Dr’ Kabila should be consulted widely due to his groundbreaking work in this area. First, his research shows that rigging for your anointed successor is so cliché; rig, instead, for an Opposition chap you can do business with. Opposition supporters won’t know whether to laugh or cry about this “peaceful transfer of power from one elected leader to another”.

‘Dr’ Kabila also introduced a new method of weaponising disease by postponing voting in provinces that had reported a few Ebola cases, until long after the elections. That these provinces also happened to be heavily populated Opposition strongholds was down to the discipline of geography, statistics, and perhaps luck. It ought not to matter if those who miss voting as a result are more than the winning margin – as long as you remember to feed your donkeys.
If you find all of this too much work and too confusing and you are the quiet, unassuming no-nonsense leader of a small country consider applying the Isaias Afwerki Theory. It states: Elections? What elections? What are elections?

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and a poor man’s
freedom fighter. [email protected]
Twitter: @Kalinaki.