Former governor of Delta State and vice presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in the 2023 elections, Dr. Ifeanyi Okowa, has been in the news in recent times following his defection from the political party that made him a commissioner, secretary to state government, senator and governor, to the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC.

His defection didn’t surprise many. In a clime where politicians stand for nothing because they lack firm moral compass, falling for anything is a natural consequence. It is even more so where political parties are ideologically bankrupt.

But in an effort to ingratiate himself with President Bola Tinubu, Okowa has been making many awkward, if not spurious anti-democracy claims. For instance, on April 29, he patronisingly said Tinubu must complete a phantom “eight-year tenure.”

He said: “I do believe that, yes, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was elected president in 2023, and for the stability of Nigeria, it is best for us to have him complete his eight-year tenure. Then the presidency can move back to the North.”

It is preposterous for Okowa to talk about Tinubu completing a non-existent eight-year tenure” when he knows full well that we only have a four-year electoral mandate in Nigeria, the reason why elections are held every four years. Even when the Constitution guarantees two terms, that does not translate to an automatic eight-year tenure.

Granted, it is no longer news that Nigerians have a penchant for bastardising even the most pristine of concepts and, therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we are doing what we know how best: making a mess of democracy even when we are not reinventing its wheels.

But our collective tomfoolery does not detract from idea the idea of democracy which originated from the Greek words “demos”, meaning people, and “kratos” meaning power. So, democracy, simply put, means “power of the people.” It is a governance model that depends solely on the will of the people and in which laws, policies, leadership, and major undertakings of a state are decided by the people directly or indirectly.

Democracy has evolved over the centuries with different models emerging across the world. But that notwithstanding, genuine democracies strive to uphold the core principles of rule by the people, equality and freedom, accountability and transparency, rule of law, periodic fair and free elections where eligible citizens can choose their representatives without let or hindrance.

Election is the oxygen of every democracy because it is a referendum writ large. That is when those in elective political offices and their political parties go back to the electorate with their score cards for them to make the consequential decision of either revalidating the mandate or repudiating same. In which case, a second term becomes a vote of confidence whereas rejection at the polls is a no confidence vote.

But in the last 26 years, Nigerians have watched helplessly as these values are wantonly abused and all democratic guardrails systematically dismantled by those charged with the responsibility of safeguarding them.

The very idea of a democracy is that the people have the ultimate say. In doing that, the basic freedoms of speech, assembly, press, as well as the right to vote must remain sacrosanct. The reverse is the case here and the dismantling of these democracy guardrails is intentional.

To be sure, this anomaly didn’t start with the Tinubu presidency. Olusegun Obasanjo messed up the Fourth Republic democracy particularly with his ill-fated third-term gambit, and ever since, it has been a slippery slope. But Tinubu has worsened the situation in the last two years.

That is why Okowa’s “eight-year tenure” proposition which suggests that the conduct of elections every four years should be of no moment, henceforth, is scary. Why should Tinubu complete “his” eight years when he was elected for a four-year tenure?

Make no mistake, Okowa and his co-travellers on this pseudo-democratic boulevard are not pleading with the electorate to renew Tinubu’s mandate come 2027 because to do so, he must convince the people with his performance in the first four years. Mid-way into his first term, he has failed and there is nothing to show that the remaining two years will be any different.

So, we have moved from Obasanjo’s do-or-die elections. Nigerians are now being blackmailed that unless Tinubu serves out his phantom “eight-year tenure” willy-nilly, national security will no longer be guaranteed. This is a dangerous proposition because the principle of holding periodic elections is an essential element of democracy globally recognised. Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, states that “the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections…”

Besides, if Tinubu must serve his “eight-year tenure,” why must we hold elections in 2027? We may well have a single tenure of eight years because every election digs a very deep hole into the national coffers.

For instance, the National Assembly approved a budget of N355 billion for the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, for the conduct of the 2023 general election, out of which the sum of N313.4 billion was released as at September 2023 according to INEC’s report of February 24, 2024.

Based on the key activities in the approved Election Project Plan for the 2023 general election, INEC initially proposed a budget of N305 billion – N159.7 billion for electoral operations; N117. 3 billion for electoral technology; N20.4 billion for electoral administrative costs; and N7.4 billion set aside for unforeseen electoral expenses – for the conduct of the elections.

But after the National Assembly appropriated the sum of N303.1 billion, INEC, claiming that the approved amount will no longer be enough due to “the inflation rate and consumer price index as well as the widening differentials in the foreign exchange rate” requested for a N52 billion supplementary appropriation in early 2023.

The electoral umpire said the breakdown of the appropriated amount on the basis of the Average Cost per Registered Voter, ACRV, for the 93,469,008 registered voters in Nigeria was N3,801 (US$6.72) per voter, which it claimed was well within the internationally acceptable Average ACRV of $4 to $8 deemed adequate for the conduct of elections in transitional democracies.

Never mind that at the end, the 2023 general election recorded only 24.9 million (about 26.72 per cent) voter turnout, the lowest since the country’s return to democracy in 1999. So, since the budget was based on ACRV for 93.5 million registered voters and only 24.9 million turned out, what happened to the budget? Shouldn’t the commission return some unspent funds back to state coffers or better still carry over the budget to the next election cycle?

No, that won’t be typical.

Needless to say that the approved budget is aside support from development partners, which even when it does not come in cash, is nevertheless used in defraying costs for services that INEC would have otherwise paid for.

Since then, more funds have been appropriated for INEC by the National Assembly. N40 billion was approved for its 2024 operations. But the INEC Chairman, Prof Mahmoud Yakubu, expressing concern that it was too paltry for shouldering the financial burden of organising 21 bye-elections has proposed a budget of N126 billion for its 2025 operations. In essence, Nigeria continues to pour more money into elections that have increasingly become opaque and fraudulent leading to unprecedented voter apathy.

The 2023 INEC budget was a 62 per cent increase over the N189.2 billion spent for the 2019 elections, which in itself is higher than the N108.8 billion spent in conducting the 2015 elections. So, the more the country spends on elections, the worse the outcomes as was grievously manifest on February 25, 2023, when, despite the colossal sums handed to Yakubu, and despite his very loud assurances, he rewarded Nigerians with the worst elections ever; an uncanny manifestation of a country whose institutions have no commitment to excellence and a people too comfortable with mediocrity.

Only God knows how much INEC will budget for the 2027 elections. It will definitely surpass the half a trillion naira threshold. All that for elections where we have been told beforehand that there are no vacancies, that an incumbent who should be sweating to revalidate his mandate must be allowed to complete his “eight-year tenure” as of right. So, why spend our scarce resources going for elections where “Their Excellences” are already assured of victory no matter what the electorate say? Surely, such monies could be put to better use. Let us have one term of eight years or even 20 years, and save all of us the needless stress and fortune.