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Last week, I wrote about the day after the
parliamentary elections, expecting that the elections would have been
concluded and expressing the necessity for the people to benefit from
the new elections procedure to defend their mandate. Immediately after
the cancelled elections, I travelled to India for an international
conference on the future of the urban poor. It was a conference that
was catching up with reality.

The majority of people in the contemporary world,
including in Africa, have moved from the rural to the urban areas.
These people live precarious lives trying to make a living from the
informal economy. The proletariat Karl Marx assured us would make the
revolution are nowhere to be found. What we have in the rapidly
expanding mega cities are the precariat whose livelihood and indeed
lives are at risk from irregular and insufficient income. Their lives
are traumatic as they suffer from the toxicity of the water, air and
soil around them.

Of course, for a conference in Mumbai on the urban
poor, the centre of activity and analysis could only be Dharavi, the
biggest slum in Asia made famous by the film “Slumdog Millionaire.”
Yes, indeed, the people of Dharavi live under terrible conditions, in
tiny shacks, defecating in and wading through the toxic mud around
them. The 600,000 inhabitants of the area are yet to act in their own
glamorous film. They toil and sweat as they pursue their precarious
profession of processing and living on the income they make from
recycling the enormous waste produced by the 25 million people that
live in central Mumbai.

In a sense, they are a five-star ghetto because
they are able to participate in the economy of the city as subalterns
but nonetheless as active economic agents. As Jockin Arputham, the
leader of the Dharavi Slum Dweller’s Federation told us, they
contribute $1 billion to the national economy each year. Their future
is however uncertain today.

Their 525 hectares of land is the only undeveloped
land left in central Mumbai. The value of their land is today $1,200 a
square foot and the state and developers are determined to throw them
out and take over the land. The precariat is defined by its precariat.

What is impressive about India however is the
power of its civil society. The Slum Dwellers Federation and the NGOs
that support them have stopped the government from chasing out the
people and taking over the place. They have used the power of popular
mobilisation to stop the takeover bid.

Indians are very critical of their democracy and
do not hesitate to point out its numerous limitations and the
persistence of the culture of corruption among its political elite. At
the same time, their democracy has endured and works at certain levels.
The integrity of their elections is high and civil society is an
effective counter weight to government.

This week, Anna Hazare, a veteran 72-year-old
Gandhian civil society activist, engaged on a fast-to-the-death to
force government to enact an effective ombudsman to lead the fight
against corruption. On day three of the fast, 400 other activists
joined and Prime Minister Mammaham Singh was appealing to him to stop
the fast so that they could negotiate. As I left India on day four of
the fast, people were congregating in squares in many major cities
denouncing corruption in government. It is the type of mass movement
against corruption that we have been unable to generate in Nigeria.

To be able to have a political class that will be
worried about and respond to civil society demands in Nigeria, we must
improve the integrity of our elections. The electoral procedure
developed by INEC in which accreditation takes place in the morning and
voting in the afternoon is designed to protect the electoral mandate of
the people. That is why voters are allowed to stay at the polling
centres to observe the counting and posting of results. Civil society
has encouraged voters to stay, observe the counting, photograph the
results with their cell phones and share the results with their
neighbours, to create widespread awareness of polling centre results.

The section of the political class that has planned to rig the
elections is frightened about the implications of the new procedure.
This is why they have launched a campaign of calumny against Attahiru
Jega, the chairman of INEC. Nigerians must not get distracted. As I
argued last week, it has been clear since 2003 that the integrity of
Nigeria’s elections will only improve if more and more citizens express
their determination to protect their mandate. When the political class
knows that they owe their positions to the people and not godfathers,
they will be forced to show more respect to the people.