The 2011 elections. By Bola Tinubu, Chatham House, London.

Against this backdrop, the 2011 elections must be weighed. The elections improved on the 2007 edition. The PDP still emerged the dominant party, with its majority in the National Assembly slightly reduced. Its losses were the opposition gains.

However, the 2011 elections were not of the high quality the government and many international observers proclaimed. In a way, international observers have done Nigeria a disservice that will become apparent in the future. The 2007 elections were the bitter dregs from a bad cup. Those who conducted it employed the full handbook of electoral malpractice. Coming into this year's polls, foreign observers and many domestic observers thought the worst. These observers were possessed of the preconceived notion that they would see open and coarse misconduct in broad daylight and at every polling station.

Thus, observers were pleasantly surprised when they travelled about Nigeria's urban centers only to find our citizens standing in orderly lines waiting to cast votes. Expecting the worst, they unduly applauded the modest improvement that took place. If this were all that constituted the electoral process, I would agree with the clean verdict pronounced by the observers. However, the observers did not see what took place before Election Day or what happened in rural Nigeria. More importantly, most observers ended their day as the sun set and the polling stations closed. They ended their watch just as the agents of malpractice would begin their craft. Observers made a broad final conclusion based on a thin filament of information. They judged a complicated play solely by viewing one of its several acts.

Had they looked more thoroughly, they would have noticed that ACN supporters and candidates were intimidated and beaten in many places. In Benue and Kwara states, 'the gubernatorial elections were snatched from our party. In Taraba and Akwa Thom we suffered electoral brigandage. But the medallion for gravest misconduct goes to the PDP governor of Akwa Ibom State. Seeing his reelection in danger, this man, armed with billions of petro Naira, stopped at nothing to thwart our candidate. He threatened, maimed and destroyed. Hundreds of our members were injured. Many were killed. The security forces did nothing to protect our members. Our candidate would not be deterred. The PDP then deployed the police powers to influence the election. Although we were the party being attacked, our candidate was arrested and whisked to Abuja to be charged with treason. In parts of Nigeria, deigning to contest against the PDP incumbent became a treasonable offense. This is not the mark of democracy. It bears the stamp of crude repression. It is reminiscent of the military state.

There was more in the PDP state of Akwa Ibom. The Governor was not satisfied with the abuse of the law.

When our candidate returned to Akwa Ibom, the governor steamrolled through a pliant State Assembly a measure granting him the unilateral power to detain an individual without judicial recourse. The law was to straitjacket our candidate. It was backdated and gazetted in a hurry and retroactively used against our candidate. Again, this was the fruit of an elected anti¬democrat at work. The governor used the color of the democratic legislative process to accomplish a result that would make even the most flint-hard autocrat blush in giddy embarrassment. Akwa Thom was just the most blatant manifestation of a bushel of condemnable electoral practices during the 20 II elections. The frequency of these practices at the state and local levels were such that they cannot reasonably be discounted as exceptions. This misconduct was a common, decisive feature of the elections.

This is a truer picture of the quality of the 2011 elections than the tidy fable widely disseminated. I can understand how observers came to their conclusion given the constraints under which they operated. I can also understand that many friendly governments wanted to see the elections in Nigeria as successful. Given the world as it is, no one seeks another foreign policy challenge. Yet, the negative consequence of this inflated measure is that the bar has been set too low for the conduct Df subsequent elections. Those in power now believe they will not have to improve the process. This would be a gross miscalculation of the public mood. Should subsequent elections be of the same uneven quality, I fear a backlash that cannot simply be contained by resort to the judiciary for resolution.

The Presidential election

This brings us to the presidential election. I believe Jonathan won the election but that the returns attributed to him in some parts of the country obviously appeared exaggerated. The inflated tally subtracted some plaudits from what would have been a well deserved victory. Thus, celebrating the election as free and fair might lead to INEe beating its chest and might short circuit the process of fundamental electoral reform. We must not relent in our struggle for fundamental reforms.

To be honest, the opposition did not run a strong enough and sufficiently coordinated campaign with a unifying message. The opposition believed that public disenchantment with the ruling party, PDP was enough to get rid of them at the polls. In retrospect, we made an important strategic mistake that continued to play out and weaken us throughout the campaign. The major opposition parties began their serious work too late. We got distracted by the electoral reform gimmick employed by the PDP led National Assembly. Already faced with a short election season, we waited too long to make important decisions and to get our campaigns off the ground.

In the end, the opposition parties danced with each other but did not embrace. Our constant dancing however confused the public and partially doused some of the public's enthusiasm. It was a learning experience that will not be repeated in the next election.

A unified ticket would have made for a more competitive race and the final outcome would have been different. Due to the unique circumstances of his rise, much of the public saw Jonathan as a distinctive figure. They saw him as an outsider of the much detested PDP establishment. Because he faced a few powerful figures in the PDP primary, many people assumed he was the man of the future because he had squared off against men of the past. Thus we heard the popular refrain "I voted for Jonathan not the PDP."

Security and the Economy: The Pillars of our Future

The election has come and gone. President Jonathan is there now in his own right. The first challenge he faced was the post-electoral violence in parts of the north. The violence was caused by perceived inequities much deeper than what occurred during the election. The eruption was both about the quality of the election and the dwindling quality of life.

The electoral violence comes from the same wellspring that has produced the urgent security threat called Boko Haram, which has launched a violent campaign against government authority. Boko Haram signposts the deficiency of the ruling party in governing the country.

The nation's stability and the President's mettle are being tested. Should he stumble on this, unrest may follow in other areas. Different groups may race to mimic Boko Haram's apparent success in challenging government. This is a serious matter not to be under-estimated.

On this issue, the President has my full sympathy and support in finding ways to quickly resolve Boko Haram. He must succeed, for his failure will damage Nigeria. However, he must do much better at communicating with the public, to build widespread support for a durable resolution to this dilemma. Without enduring peace, government will not be able to achieve the transformational agenda already promised Nigerians. While the opposition has a duty to lend support on existential issues of security, we likewise have a duty to draw a distinction between us and the PDP on key matters affecting the political economy.

This is the area where the opposition must make material improvement in talking to the public and in highlighting the vast difference between us and the ruling party. The average Nigerian sees little space separating the PDP's political and economic policies from ours. This means we have not been proficient in explaining who we are and what we stand for. We must alter the landscape of Nigerian politics. We have to remove the obstacles of region, ethnicity, religion and personality so that people can see the substantive issues more clearly. We must turn politics from the practice of "who do you know" to a critical inquiry into "what do you know and in what do you believe." This is the opposition's next great agenda.

Should we do this, the public will begin to see the profound difference between the progressive Nigeria we want and the static Nigeria of the PDP. Should we do this well, the outcome of the next election will be vastly different notwithstanding any attempts to color the outcome in a hue different from that chosen by the people. At that point, we will be able to say that the scales of Nigeria's future have shifted in favor of democracy and away from the mere semblance of democracy. In a nutshell, our objective will be to grow the economy for the benefit of the many and not the few. We shall do this by recalibrating the strategic balance between the real and financial sectors. We will put the financial sector in its rightful place as facilitator of investment to the real sector. Our emphasis will be on the agricultural, manufacturing and industrial sectors to expand Nigeria's wealth. No country of our size can be great without a robust manufacturing base. Our elected officials shall be responsive to the people. That is why our party's governors issued a public statement, agreeing to pay the minimum wage, while others were dithering.

The bad management of the economy

PDP management of the economy in the last 12 years has been ineffective and here I am being charitable in my use of adjectives. They claim real GDP growth at a robust pace of nearly seven per cent per annum. How can that be? Inflation runs at over 12 percent. Are they really claiming the economy is growing at nearly 20 percent in nominal terms?

High unemployment rates remain unchanged. Official statIstIcs from the ational Bureau of Statistics puts unemployment rate in Nigeria at 19.7 per cent, with about 10 million Nigerians unemployed as at March 2009. But we know the figures are much higher. The amount of people living below the poverty line has not decreased. The middle class - the backbone of any democracy - is an endangered species. Manufacturing and industrial firms are closing faster than others are opening. Electricity supply remains a serious challenge. In the last 10 years, over $15 billion has been spent to improve power generation. Yet, it remains at an abysmal level of less than 4,000 megawatts per day. Cities such as London and New York enjoy four to five times more electricity than the entire Nigeria. Fuel supply is also a major challenge. We have a government unable to provide millions of Nigerians with refined petroleum products. While in the past, oil majors were able to meet demand, the reverse is the case now.

Food prices are climbing so much so that hunger has entered households where it was once a stranger. After earning about 200 billion dollars from oil revenue in 10 years, based on NNPC documents, Nigeria is still a pauper nation. The PDP big guns must be the only ones benefitting from this illusory economic growth.

This brings me to the issue of corruption which remains the bane of our development. Corruption continues unabated and examples abound. There are allegations bordering on the extortion of illicit payments from operators in the upstream and downstream sectors of the oil economy. The outright wastage of financial resources on illegal subsidies that never percolate to the people need to be boldly addressed by President Jonathan. Mis-management of scarce resources as exemplified in the delegation of the Petroleum Subsidy Funds (about $8billion per year) to the Ministry of Petroleum instead of the Ministry of Finance leaves the door wide open for corruption.

Nigeria suffers one of the world's worst rates of income inequality. The economy is not an open one and we do not yet practice sufficient economic justice to change the skewed regime. The PDP strategy is a corporatist/financier model whereby it seeks to place a greater and greater concentration of economic wealth and power in the hands of a select few. The party exploits the levers of government to lay claim to vast tracts of economic power to the exclusion of everyone else. This is dangerous. This policy began with President Obasanjo, who tried to establish a new economic elite in his own image. He pushed the formation of the holding company called Transcorp. The plan was to use Transcorp to lay claim to an obscene amount of the nation's resources with the support of self-acclaimed technocrats in Obasanjo's cabinet. Transcorp was to resemble one of the vast royal corporations of two or three centuries past. This entity began purchasing everything it could grab, from national telephone company to the best hotel in Abuja. Had Obasanjo and his platoon of merry men succeeded with extending to a third presidential term, this vision for the domination of the Nigerian economy would have been realized.

One of the unspoken achievements of the late President Umaru Yar' Adua was that he dismantled this scam. Nigeria owes him a debt of gratitude for this single act of justice and common decency. Unfortunately, many of those who plotted this course with Obasanjo are back and have angled close to President Jonathan. They want to finish what was interrupted, albeit in a more discreet, subtler manner. I sincerely doubt if President Jonathan is cognizant of this history or of the ulterior motives of these new found companions. He may think their advice will help move the economy toward broader prosperity and openness. The extent to which he takes their advice is the measure in which he will' travel in the opposite direction.

Despite the Supreme Court verdicts, the PDP government continues to practice a skewed form of fiscal federalism. Under the excess crude account and now its progeny, the sovereign wealth fund, the federal government has improperly siphoned funds constitutionally meant for the states. This represents a massive slush fund that the federal government can use as it wishes with little public knowledge or oversight. At best, the monies will be used to fund rentier practices that enrich government cronies but pauperize the larger economy. At worst, the money will be squandered. I cannot speak for other states, but I wager that the people of the ACN states would rather see theirs states' proper share of these funds in the hands of their governors than in the custody of the unnamed bureaucrats servile to PDP chieftains.

The ACN will do better than the PDP in managing the economy by pursuing a true fiscal federalism.

CONCLUSION

The Nigeria that now exists is neither the Nigeria I have worked for all my life nor the one I would have loved to bequeath to my children. Thus, I shall keep working. Nigeria stands in the middle of the road between democracy and disillusionment, between a strong, progressive economy and a mean, feeble one. It is time that we pulled Nigeria to the right side of the road. The PDP is a corrosive organization beyond the hope of reform and redemption. It has long passed whatever utility it might have had. Although imperfect and in need of improvement in how we conduct ourselves, Nigeria's opposition parties are her best chance for a virile democracy. We can only do this, if we continue to demand for fundamental electoral and financial reforms. Thus we must strive until we place Nigeria on the road to her better destiny. This we can achieve in partnership with the civil society, the media and progressive elements, by forging a critical mass that is capable of enthroning change.

I thank you all for listening