Juju and elections

As we walked up to the Inec office in Okene, I saw a small pile of gari in the middle of the road. I didn’t think much of it. Maybe someone spilled it by accident.
But driving around town, I noticed more little piles of bright white flour at intersections. At one place the flour was poured around the little traffic director’s hut in the middle. It looked like a necklace.
It wasn’t until the second time we passed the junction by Inec that I noticed corn and other seeds had been spread on the floor too. Next to them were leaves folded into packets and tied up with string.
The juju was obviously down.
I have no idea who set the spell, or what the spell was. I wasn’t about to ask anyone either. I’ve tried to unpick what was happening before my eyes that afternoon.
We trekked all around the water tank at the heart of town looking for a polling station that had any ballot papers, ballot boxes, voting booths, a queue of voters, anything that might indicate voting may happen. There was nothing, and this was only yards away from the main Inec office in town.
An hour earlier a crowd of men surrounded the office, and had to be pushed back by soldiers so staff could bring boxes of ballots out to waiting busses. But as we walked around there was a complete silence, and an almost complete absence of men. Women and children sat on the porches of their homes, resting their chins on hands, regarding us as we passed. The people we stopped to talk to all said the same thing. They weren’t worried about the delay in distributing the ballots, and they were confident that in this area, the Action Congress would win.
When we came back to the main road we saw where all the guys in town were. A crowd had formed around a primary school next to the Okene police station. We began walking down to them but had second thoughts when we saw the crowd swathe and bulge in that dangerous way. It was probably best to come back later, someone suggested.
An hour or so went by. We came back to the spot and found to our surprise “everyone” had voted and people were streaming away from the polling stations, happy, laughing, cheering victory.
“See? Na peaceful-o, tell your people naija dey vote peaceful!” someone shouted at me, giggling.
I walked up to the wooden table of a polling unit. An AC party agent had a book of ballots in his hand. Every one had a thumb-print for the Action Congress. He was stamping the backs of the ballots, tearing them off the book and passing them to an Inec official to sign and place in the ballot box.
At another polling unit where voting had all but finished, the Inec presiding officer told us she had abandoned the lawful procedure because she feared the crowd would get violent. She said they had checked everyone off against the register before allowing them to vote. They only tore off the ballots from the book as they stamped them later, after the voters had left, she said.
We asked what time she’s received the ballots, and what time voting had finished. As she told us, her eyes dipped down away from mine and a little secret smile inched across her face. 312 voters had come, done their duty and left within an hour and a quarter.
Later, I asked my friend who was observing the election in another state how long it was taking for people to vote there. He told me that because the register wasn’t listed sequentially, it was taking between five to six minutes to find people in the register, give them the ballot, put their thumb print on it, mark their finger, stamp the ballot, sign it an drop it in the box. A voter’s register of 312 people would take 26 hours for everyone to vote.
I thought that somehow the vote had been hijacked. I asked the Chairman of the Action Congress in the state about what we’d seen. He said: “I don’t believe it, because the police stationed at the polling unit, or the Inec officials, wouldn’t allow it to happen that way.”
The police DPO just shrugged his shoulders when we asked him about what we’d seen.
Money and the threat of violence will persuade people with positions of responsibility to abandon the principles they were employed to uphold, but the officials we spoke to did not seem scared, or ashamed of what was happening.
Could it be that their choice to disregard the rules was made easier because they knew they were participating in a communal effort? Communal efforts need signs and signals, what better than a bright white pile of gari?