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While being
interviewed for admission into the Nigerian Military School, Zaria, in
the 80s, my brother, Uwasinachi, was asked why he wanted to join the
army.

“Because I want to someday become the president of Nigeria,” the nine-year-old replied.

The interview panel
of military officers burst out laughing. All, except one. According to
Uwasinachi, the chair of the panel remained stern-faced while his
colleagues fell over themselves laughing, causing my brother to fear
that he had goofed big time.

Uwasinachi need not
have worried. The school’s quota system allowed only one student from
each of the eastern Nigeria states, and my brother ended up as the
chosen candidate from what was then Imo, before Abia State was carved
from it. Months later, the humourless chair was dead – executed by
Ibrahim Babangida’s regime, following accusations of the man’s
involvement in an abortive coup. Back during the NMS interview, the
officer must have known that my brother’s answer was nothing to laugh
about. Being in the military was indeed the route to political power in
Nigeria.

Within a few years
of that interview, the Giant of Africa had moved on. We were voting to
elect public officers under a two-party system masterminded by the
General Babangida administration. My father, then one of the top dogs
of the defunct National Republican Convention in my hometown, Umuahia,
nominated me as a polling clerk to represent his party in the election.
The pay was N80 per day – a bonanza for a girl who had just finished
secondary school. And so, at age 16, I stood at a polling booth in a
village in my community, and, along with other electoral officials
representing both the NRC and the Social Democratic Party, counted the
votes for each party’s gubernatorial candidates.

The incumbent state
governor won. Some villagers rejoiced, others moaned, everyone
eventually dispersed. Then one of the community leaders came into the
village hall where the electoral officials were tidying up, and shut
the door.

“You’re all from this community?” he whispered in Igbo.

We concurred. The electoral commission preferred to assign officials to their areas of origin.

“You need to
realise that the current governor is coming back to rule this state,”
the man continued, “whether anyone likes it or not.”

He had a point. An incumbent losing in Nigerian elections was as rare as a snowstorm in hell.

The community
leader went on to explain that, when the governor eventually inspected
the voting records from all over Abia, he would see that, even though
he won in our community, it was only by a narrow margin, signifying
that our people were not fully behind him.

“That will affect
how much help he renders to us – whether he repairs our roads and
provides us with other social amenities,” the community leader
explained.

With his little
point made, the man watched while the senior officials of our team –
from both the NRC and SDP – looked through the records to determine how
many registered voters had not turned out to vote. One by one, each
absentee voter was accredited. Then the result sheets were amended to
show that those absentees had cast their votes for the incumbent
governor. Satisfied, the community leader dipped into his pocket and
extracted some cash. My teammates – three middle-aged men who spoke
Igbo amongst themselves but switched to English whenever they had
something to say to me – must have imagined me as too young and
innocent and civilised to notice that they didn’t share the booty with
me.

That experience was
proof of what many Nigerians had always suspected: the outcome of
elections had little to do with whether or not we turned out to vote.
However, April 16, 2011, saw me standing under the blazing sun for
about six hours, waiting to vote for the first time in my life.

I stood on one
queue to get accredited, waited for hours before I could join another
queue to ascertain that I had indeed been accredited, before joining
yet another queue to cast my ballot for the presidential candidate of
my choice. Some of my friends reported spending about eight hours at
their polling booths, enduring a process that the head of the African
Union observer mission and former Ghanaian president, John Kufuor,
described as “cumbersome”. Nevertheless, none of us had any doubts that
it was worth it. This time, our votes would count.

Despite
post-election violence and allegations of voting irregularities in some
states, my Nigeria has definitely come a long way from when all you
required to exercise power was a uniform and a gun. The story should
have a better ending come 2015..

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, an editor at NEXT, is the author of the novel “I Do Not Come to You by Chance”.