Lagos: For genuine democracies, elections tend to be somewhat retributive. They use elections to punish bad governments, flog dodgy politicians and reward good parties. Through elections, the echelons of democratic society carry out complex periodic self cleansing operations. Parties revise their agenda and revalidate or repudiate their leadership. Individual politicians go back to the electorate to be hailed or have rotten eggs thrown in their faces. Generally,  society tends to relate to election seasons as a period of self-renewal. The electoral process becomes a rite of passage. The passage from a rotten now to, hopefully, a scented tomorrow.

The collective spirit experiences a lift. Expectations rise. Anxiety mounts. Hope ascends. Take hope away from an expectant society and we all die in stages. Even where the political space is dominated by a dominant party, a credible election is also an opportunity to renew the leadership of  the party itself. Bad leaders must go. Bad policies must be jettisoned and the parties that market bad leaders and vend useless programmes must yield the political space to those with better ideas. That is the ideal.  And ideals are what ought to drive political systems and societies. If we keep excusing ourselves from ideals because "this is Nigeria", we are likely to remain mired in this cesspool of futility and hopelessness.

The anticipation of a new government serves political stability in some ways.  The sins of past governments go into remission. New people are expected to mount the saddle of public expectation. Even known villains that manage to get re-elected will, hopefully, behave better. In the more established democracies, the electorate uses election season to renew the leadership of their nations but also indicate to politicians and political parties how they have fared.

The last general election in the UK that gave David Cameron the narrow window to form a coalition government was a message to the entire British political system. Labour especially in its later iteration under Gordon Brown had degenerated.  Under the added weight of the global economic meltdown. Brown himself remarkable bean counter became incoherent.  He was simply not connecting to the larger British society. So, in the face of an electoral quagmire, his last minute attempt to engineer a stalemate in the system was quickly terminated by a well choreographed royal intermission. Britian was saved the agony of looking like an African coco pop republic.

In this process, the Labour Party took home a lesson. It had to re-engineer. On their part, the hitherto luckless Liberal Democrats realized the value of having a young, articulate leader in Nick Klegg. The Conservatives also reaped a similar dividend for fielding the young talkative David Cameron. The challenge for the conservatives is to justify the lessons learnt in over 10 years outside 10 Downing as a bumbling opposition. These changes and challenges were dictated by the electorate and the imperatives of democracy.

In India's last general election, over 400 million registered voters, mostly illiterate and poor, turned out to re-elect the ruling Congress Party. They were rewarding the party for bold economic reforms under Prime Minister Singh. The result of the elections conformed with the wishes of the people. So they went home satisfied that their ballot had spoken for them.

The historic victory of the Democrats in the last US presidential elections that brought in the Obama presidency served a similar end. The Republican party under Bush had crippled America with two questionable wars and the virtual collapse of the world's most formidable economy. Bush was clueless, incoherent and a danger to both himself, his party and his nation. America was dragging the rest of the world down with it. Something had to be done. The presidential election was an opportunity to save America, rescue the global economic system and punish the Republicans for a disastrous leadership under Bush. Above all, the collective unconscious of the American people in its quest to stave off the decline of its civilization had to reach an unusual consensus. Obama was a breathe of fresh air. His colour stopped being important.

In Iran's last general election, the people trooped out in unprecedented numbers to vote out Ahmadinejad's fundamentalist Gestapo regime. The officially announced result vitiated the wishes of the people. Almost simultaneously, incendiary protests erupted in Teheran, defying the autocratic decrees of the Mullahs who have held Iran hostage for the greater part of the last 25 years. The protesters have only deserted the streets.  The protests continue in the hearts and minds of the majority who voted for change.  No one knows how Iran will end up. Even if the regime survives, the theocratic stranglehold  on the Iranian state and society has been dealt a disorienting blow by that election.

In the frenzied countdown to the upcoming general election in Nigeria, it is question time.  How come periodic elections, at least since the end of military rule in 1999, have tended to defy the retributive essence of elections? Since 2003, Nigerian voters, mostly illiterate and poor like their Indian counterparts, have trooped out periodically to vote in elections whose results have however mostly run counter to the wishes of majority of the voters. 

The results of these elections have also often defied rational logic. Parties that have deepened the poverty and frustration of the people have in fact been rewarded with "resounding" victory by INEC. Our elections tend to reward bad leaders by electing or re-electing them. We applaud useless parties and generally re-validate the mandate of governments that have done us great harm. Some of the most despicable persons rise from these elections onto positions of immense power at local, state and federal levels.

Interestingly, our politicians hardly ever believe that they genuinely lose elections. They find it hard to believe that the electorate can actually reject them. It is a measure of the disdain in which they hold the very people they seek to rule that they instead see their electoral reversals as either the fault of INEC, the opponent or even evil spirits. If it becomes irreversible and inevitable, it must be the will of the divine, the work of the devil.

Except in a few cases where politicians have either not done their home work or have offended political "god fathers" and patrons, our presidents and governors especially tend to retain their seats for as long as they wish.  There is now a tacit assumption that the offices of governor and president are for two terms. Popular rejection of this assumption was only mildly expressed in the days of the failed national constitutional conference when most participants favoured single term tenures for both positions. That, for now, would seem to be the most effective way to chase away miscreants and crooks from the state houses.

As we shift our gaze to more mechanical matters of voter register, voting methods, the logistics of ballot management etc, our public discourse, ever so vulnerable to diversions orchestrated by politicians, needs to explore the reasons why our democracy defies the most elementary law of democratic change. Perhaps the revised electoral law provides some leeway. It is expected that strict adherence to time lines, strict enforcement of whatever system of voting we choose and the removal of the possibility of endless litigation will get us somewhere.  Let's wait and see what Prof. Attahiru Jega's field officers make of his credibility.

The picture that confronts us in the run up to the 2011 elections is made even more problematic by our political party configuration.  The ruling Peopes Demcratic Party (PDP) is virtually the only party, properly defined. Or at least, it is the dominant factor in our political space.  Yet it is easily one of the most worthless political parties in the world. Devoid of any governing idea, incoherent in structure, policy as in programmes, it is perennially encircled by a septuagenarian conclave of perennial political vampires.

In its hopelessness, the PDP also provides a testing ground for whatever results that we hope to achieve from electoral reforms. Forget the federal level at least for the last four years. Its record of performance, especially at the state level, offers the range of choices that should test the maturity of our electorate and the workability of the new system.  PDP governors provide a broad range of possibilities. A handful  have done exceptionally well. Others have scored averagely while the majority are show pieces in disastrous governance and decadent politics. It would be interesting to see how electoral outcomes in 2011 match the perceptions of these governors.

In the final analysis, I think there is a close relationship between national history and the fidelity of elections to popular wishes. India has a sophisticated civil society and relatively weak state but a long tradition of non violent democratic change. So, civil society and political tradition unite at election time to dictate who should run the state. The military stands on permanent sentry, guarding democracy. For Iran, a theocracy faced with an increasingly young  population that is fast embracing liberty and freedom, elections are becoming a nightmare,  periodic festivals of violent discontent.

In the UK and the US, mass enlightenment and an overwhelming middle class anchored on core values of freedom liberty across centuries dictate a tight relationship between electoral choice and outcome. 

In Nigeria, we are haunted by a defective history and the prevalence of politics of bad manners. Nearly four decades of dictatorship have yielded apathy and eroded the common will. The institutions that should make elections credible are vastly corroded. In the absence of credible political parties, the process of selection of leadership is compromised from the outset. Similarly, the pool from which to select leaders is circumscribed by the nature of these parties and their membership. Even the best electoral system can only deliver leaders from the pool of what the parties make available.

The retributive essence of elections in a democracy has a way of biting even the electorate.  If we as an electorate fail to punish bad parties and politicians or reject  a system that fails to deliver our genuine mandate, then we are doomed to another four-year cycle of grumbling.

*  Engagements  Column by Chidi Amuta, email: chidiamuta@thisdayonline.com