‘Every registered voter has a voting card. On the day of the election, they go to their polling stations to be accredited. During the accreditation process, an official uses a card reader to check their biometric data. If this is fine, the voter goes to another official who checks for their name on the voters’ register sent to the polling station and he ticks it off. The voter’s hand is then imprinted with indelible ink and they can return later to cast their vote.
‘At each polling station there will be INEC officials, opposition agents, international observers in some cases, ad-hoc staff working for INEC, and supporters of each party, not to mention soldiers and police. The opposition agents will be watching you closely, and they know what to look out for because they are doing it too. The days of snatching ballot boxes are over. We have to be more creative.
‘Rigging starts long before the election. It all starts with the polling stations. There are some remote, unknown polling stations. Some of them are in people’s bedrooms. You can do whatever you want there. We have some; the opposition also has their own.
‘One of the first things to do is to reduce the votes of your opponent. You do this by buying voter cards from the opposition’s registered voters.’
‘How will you know they are opposition voters?’
‘Simple. You go to their strong base.’
Amaka sat in the middle of a shallow, narrow, carved-out canoe. Behind her, the single oar in the hands of a young boy in tattered brown shorts, dipped into the inky black water of Makoko. Dirty plastic waste bubbled around them in hilly masses that stretched for metres. Sitting inches away from the water, the stench of the lagoon - excrement, decay, and death – was suffocating. Behind, another canoe ferried a party official; a thirty-something-year-old man with both his hands resting upon a twelve-gauge shotgun on his lap. Ahead, standing on the edges of wooden shacks on stilts, dozens of men and women, children and adults, held up their voting cards waiting to exchange them for a portion of the money in the bag in Amaka’s lap.
‘Next is the ad-hoc staff. INEC recruits them from the ordinary citizenry. Anyone can apply. On Election Day, it is the ad-hoc staff that will cause commotion, do abracadabra, and dabaru everything if need be.
‘When illiterate voters ask for help identifying their choice, the ad-hoc staff will show them who to thumbprint. You want to buy as many ad-hoc staff as possible from as many polling stations as possible. The opposition will also be buying them, and they will collect money from both of you; you just have to figure out a way to pay more than them without paying too much.’
‘How do we do this?’ Amaka asked.
In a hot room with unpainted walls and closed wooden shutters, three men in Ankara sat on a low, narrow bench. They fanned their faces with folded newspapers wet with sweat and disintegrating where they held them.
In the sweltering, dusty room, Moses stood in front of the men. He was fixated on the shotguns on the laps of the ones who flanked the one in the middle. An Ankara curtain over the door behind Moses blocked out the rest of the queue waiting their turn in the sun. Moses presented his papers to the man in the middle of the bench - the one with a beer carton of cash in front of him.
The man took the paper, glanced at it, turned it round, and returned it. Moses folded his document along its existing lines and returned it into the breast pocket of his chequered yellow short-sleeved shirt. The man dipped his hand into the box, counted off some notes from a wad of thousands and held the money out to Moses. Moses in turn looked at what was offered, then gazed at the wall to his left.
The man kept his hand and the money up for a moment, then he put his hand back into the box and counted out more thousand naira notes and held the thicker offering up to Moses.
Moses looked down at the man’s hand. The men with the gun looked at him.
‘Fifty K,’ Moses said.
The man in the middle rested the money on his leg. ‘We are paying twenty-five,’ he said.
‘The other party are paying forty,’ Moses shot back.
‘Go and join them,’ the man said, and threw the cash onto the pile in the box.
‘Forty-five,’ Moses said.
‘Are you still here?’
The ones with guns straightened their backs.
Moses swallowed. A bead of sweat ran down the side of his face by his ear, curved under his chin, trickled down his neck, and straight down the middle of his chest. ‘Forty or nothing,’ he said.
The man in the middle and his armed guards all stared at Moses. Moses did not move.
‘Thirty, or leave,’ the man said.
Moses turned.
‘Wait.’
Moses stopped. He listened to money being counted.
‘Take.’
Moses turned around to even more money being held up to him.
‘Forty. But don’t tell anyone how much I gave you,’ the man said.
Moses took the money and tucked it down the front of his trousers. He turned and left, letting blinding sunshine into the hut as he parted the curtain.
He walked past the row of men mopping their faces and necks with handkerchiefs that had become transparent with sweat. The line was kept straight and orderly by men holding shotguns and pacing about. When he had passed the last of the ad-hoc staff waiting to sell their loyalty, Moses sent a message on his phone.
Amaka pulled back the dusty curtain that had once been white. The mosquito net beneath it was thick with dust. Her nostrils twitched. Outside, under the brilliance of the midday sun, a long silent row of people had formed, stretching from around the corner of a similar bungalow whose yellow walls had chipped and faded, across the narrow once-upon-a-time tarred road, to the door to the house.
She let go of the curtain to read the message that had just made her mobile buzz. ‘40K.’ She tucked the mobile into the edge of her skirt and went to the middle of the room where there was a carved wooden stool, about a foot high, between two men standing with AK-47 assault rifles. A large, black Nike travel bag lay in front of the stool. She sat down, unzipped the bag, and spread it open to reveal the cash.
‘Let them in,’ she said.
‘Now, this is more risky. We will also get the voting forms in advance. We thumbprint thousands overnight and stuff them into ballot boxes. Now, listen carefully; this is very important. Every polling station only has five hundred registered voters. When we are filling our ballot boxes, we cannot fill them with more than five hundred votes. And even then, we cannot give ourselves all the votes. Remember this. The difficulty is how to switch the boxes with the original ones from the polling booths. There are ways, but at the end of the day it boils down to money. You have to bribe everyone at the ward, from INEC officials to soldiers, to opposition agents.
‘Lastly, and we only do this as a last resort, if all else has failed and our permutations indicate that we are losing…’
‘Permutations?’
‘Yes. We do our own exit poll. We will keep a tally of all the centres where we’ve been successful at manipulating the vote. If we see that we are losing a ward that we should be winning, maybe the opposition have gained advantage over us, we just dabaru everything. Stabbing, shooting, burning, bombing. We stop voting at that centre and make sure they do not take any voting materials away. We burn everything there.’