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The ancients in
Judea had no concept of zero. That is why a period of what seems to be
at most 40 hours comes out as ‘the third day’, with Good Friday being
the first day and today, Easter Sunday, the third day on the morning of
which the tomb of Jesus Christ was found empty.

Conversely, by
counting the non-event of April 2 as a zero, it is not out of place to
look forward to Tuesday April 26 as ‘the third day’ of our general
elections cycle in Nigeria.

Until last week,
one could have said that it is state elections that excite the most
passion and strife in Nigeria, and that the third day of elections
might present even greater challenges than those of the second. But
now, some politicians whose candidates lost the presidential election
are complaining. Even the Action Congress of Nigeria, whose
presidential candidate had earlier conceded defeat, is ‘analysing
voting patterns’ instead of consulting its own agents and doing its own
mathematics.

It is not
reasonable to complain that 90-something per cent of the voters who
turned out for the presidential election in the south-south and south
east chose to vote for the winning Peoples Democratic Party candidate:
there are people all over the federation who can attest that at their
own individual polling stations, the votes all went one way. Indeed,
the grim joke in the two zones where Muhammad Buhari hardly campaigned
at all is that there must have been some rigging for him to secure even
the few votes that were recorded in his favour, so meagre was his
support there.

It is more
reasonable to suspect results where there was an unusually high
turn-out of registered voters last Saturday. But did that high turn-out
produce Goodluck Jonathan’s victory? There are grounds for suspecting
that those figures have less to do with election-rigging in President
Jonathan’s favour (since he might still have had both the necessary
plurality and the percentages of the vote for victory even with a lower
turnout) and more to do with practising for next Tuesday’s state
elections. Nigerians are certainly fed up with being told that “he
would have won anyway”, but it is precisely to show what would have
been the margin of that winning (if at all) that the parties must
gather the results from their own agents. It will be interesting to see
whether the states with the most hotly contested gubernatorial races:
where the incumbent knows that he has not performed well, or is
unpopular, or facing a strong challenge, are among those with the
magically high turn-out numbers for the presidential poll.

After all, while
the so-called ‘Modified Open Ballot System’ of accreditation and
simultaneous voting across the country remains the best way of
conducting a credible election where the voters’ register remains
suspect, it would have been naïve to imagine that desperate people
would not be working overtime to see how they can defeat the system,
and perhaps to use the presidential election as a ‘dry run’.

At this stage, it
is impossible to tell whether the coming third day is going to herald
any kind of glorious resurrection for the Nigerian nation. We’ve
certainly had the death part of the Easter story, and it is
particularly poignant to think that youth corps members – on whose
shoulders much of the credit for the successful conduct of the
elections rests – have been killed by other young people protesting the
outcome of the elections. Much work needs to be done among those
disaffected young people who could not accept or understand that the
fact that they themselves all voted for one candidate does not mean
that the candidate must necessarily win an election in which all parts
of Nigeria are voting.

Attahiru Jega, the
INEC Chair, can probably say a few things about being on the receiving
end of shouts that veer so wildly from ‘Crucify him!’ to ‘Hosanna!’ and
back again. But he was given a Herculean task with far too little time
to accomplish it. So with the imperfect architecture that the outgoing
National Assembly cobbled together out of the Mohammed Uwais-led
Committee on Electoral Reform’s recommendations, the best we should
have expected was – not a ‘free and fair’ election (which would have
required an effective way of monitoring campaign spending, media
access, and the use and/or abuse of government resources) – but a
credible poll which accurately reflected the votes cast by the
electorate on polling day.

With even those
modest hopes seeming rather dead and buried, it would probably take a
miracle for the coming polls to be better than the two that went
before. But then, aren’t those just the kind of hopes that, at
Eastertide, are realised on the third day?