Brazil, Nigeria and our ‘Nine Fingers’, By Lasisi Olagunju

I was in Brazil in 2009. We landed at Brasília–Presidente Juscelino Kubitschek International Airport, and its surroundings looked so much like Abuja’s, and I said so. An official of the Nigerian embassy told me that the planners of Abuja specifically copied much of Brasília as the model for Nigeria’s new capital, conceived in 1976. I nodded.

I read a bit of Brazillian history. Brazil had its “coffee with milk” alliance (aliança do café com leite), an informal political arrangement generally dated to 1894–1930. Through that alliance, the landed oligarchies of São Paulo, the coffee powerhouse, and Minas Gerais, associated with dairy farming and cattle, dominated federal power. With their wealth and large electorate, they alternated the presidency between them.

Does that mixture remind us of the handshake between sections of the South-West and North-West political establishments which brought Muhammadu Buhari to power in 2015 and subsequently produced Bola Tinubu in 2023? Before those two, there was South-West’s Olusegun Obasanjo and Umaru YarAdua of the North-West. History says the Brazillian arrangement entrenched privilege, but it rested on productive wealth and helped finance industrial growth. Our own turn-by-turn has produced billionaires without shops.

I remembered all this as Brazil held and concluded its presidential election in record time last week. We copied the capital, and unconsciously the “coffee with milk” alliance, but how much of that country’s democratic culture have we copied?

“Brazil voted yesterday. I could follow the election results live from my bedroom. It’s all done already. There is a winner. You can see it for yourself,” Nigerian lawyer and human rights activist, Professor Chidi Odinkalu, said in a social media post. We cannot have it here. Those who have it worked for it.

Read Brazil’s democratic history. In 1986, the country undertook electronic re-registration of its electorate, building a national register to tackle duplicate registrations and other abuses. In 1996, it introduced electronic voting in 57 cities; by 2000, the system covered the entire electorate. What Odinkalu watched from his bedroom was the harvest of decades of deliberate work.

We have a reluctant umpire here, running permanently on low fuel. We have just been told that long-dead Muhammadu Buhari, Rotimi Akeredolu, Ifeanyi Ubah and Raymond Dokpesi are alive and well on INEC’s voter verification portal. INEC says the published register is preliminary and cleaning continues. If you spend seven years planning how to run mad, how many years will it take you to reach the marketplace?

Some analysts are online estimating that some millions of our 103.4 million registered voters may be dead persons who registered from the grave. Those ones will be summoned from heaven to vote in January next year. In the 2023 presidential election, 24,965,218 votes were cast, producing today’s lords of the manor. Woe betide the living in 2027 if more voters come from the cemeteries than from homes.

There is a proverb here: You do not count the fingers of a nine-fingered person in their presence. Those who do risk losing face and standing. In Brazil, a “posh guy” did just that. Days later, he lost his bid for the presidency.

During the final debate before Brazil’s presidential run-off, Flávio Bolsonaro, candidate of the Liberal Party (PL), mocked his opponent, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party (PT), over the finger he lost at 17 in a factory accident. He accused Lula of giving with one hand and taking with “nine fingers”.

Millions who heard that gasped. Bolsonaro, the son of a former president, wore the air of a posh, pampered heir; Lula, the son of poor subsistence farmers, bore the scars of survival, a worker’s calloused palms and a missing finger. The lost finger became a sore point of political mockery.

Lula turned the insult into a defence of the dignity of millions of workers. His response deserves to be read. UOL – Universo Online (Online Universe), a major Brazilian internet portal and news organisation based in São Paulo, published the Portuguese transcript of the Lula–Bolsonaro exchange. I have here a close English translation of the published transcript:

Enraged Lula said:

“He said something very stupid, and I am not going to take that home. He called me nine fingers. I want him to know one thing. If there is anyone here in this audience who knows what the world of work is, it is me. If there is anyone who lost a finger at 17, it was me. Working at night when I was not allowed to work. I will not allow a militiaman to call me nine fingers. I will not allow it. I will not allow it.

“I will not allow it. He has never worked in his life. He does not know what a work card is. The first job he had was a fake job through his father. He worked with his father, but stayed in Brasília. And he comes here to call me nine fingers? In other words, you will have to apologise. You will have to apologise. Because working people are watching. Millions of workers suffer accidents because of employers’ irresponsibility which forces us to work the hours we have to work.

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“I was a minor and worked at night, because either I worked or I did not eat. And I cannot accept a posh man, a posh man with a very questionable political practice, calling me nine fingers.”

Flustered Bolsonaro apologised: “Lula, if I offended you because I called you nine fingers, I truly apologise. I did not want to offend you. I truly apologise.”

The apology could not recall the insult.

Legislator and influencer André Janones, whose pro-Lula WhatsApp channel had attracted nearly 11 million subscribers, helped amplify Lula’s response. The hashtag #SomosTodos9Dedos (We Are All Nine Fingers) spread online. Some supporters aggravated the outrage by posting photographs of their own amputated fingers in solidarity.

The fire became a conflagration, the insult a shared grievance. Election day came; people voted; Lula polled 64,256,232 votes, or 51.79 percent, against Bolsonaro’s 59,826,041 votes, or 48.21 percent. Bolsonaro lost by 4,430,191 votes.

What Brazil teaches us is more than verbal decorum. It teaches us lessons in election management. The run-off voting stopped at 7pm; the winner’s victory speech was delivered around 10.42pm. It took less than four hours to count 100 percent of the votes from over 499,000 polling stations nationwide and formally announce the winner.

The man who gloated at the disability of his opponent has since escaped abroad.

Portuguese-speaking Brazilians have a saying that mirrors our nine fingers: In the house of a hanged man, one does not speak of rope (Em casa de enforcado, não se fala de corda). It is the same as the Yoruba warning against counting the fingers of the nine-fingered in their presence. Whether as imagery or metaphor, they say the same counsel: do not make another person’s wound the subject of your wit. Bolsonaro ignored it.

But, did counting the fingers and the huge online backlash influence how people voted?

Andre Pagliarini is an assistant professor of history and international studies at Louisiana State University and the author of ‘Lula: A People’s President and the Fight for Brazil’s Future’, published by Polity Press in 2025. Al Jazeera put the question of the digital campaign’s impact to him. Pagliarini was not sure and refrained from drawing a direct line between Janones’s digital army and the election result. “I am not sure there is a way to empirically connect the group to the outcome,” he said. Still, he believed Janones helped turn around the campaign of a sitting president who had finished behind his challenger in the first round.

An insult can provoke sympathy without changing a vote. But Lula gave his audience something larger than a personal grievance. A worker’s injury became a question of the dignity of labour.

If that ‘hot’ exchange had happened in Nigeria, would it have made a difference? Would we have seen the injured worker in the missing finger or first asked his name, his party, his tribe and his religion? Would workers have recognised their own scars in his wound? Or would some have joined the comfortable man in laughing at an injury they, too, could have suffered?

The hanged in Nigeria are the 130 million people living in multidimensional poverty. Every day, they hear the hangman, their government, speak of rope. The factory owner whose machine ate the worker’s finger turns round to make the missing finger a campaign point.

At his reelection campaign flag-off in Kaduna, our president counted the nine-fingers: “I have heard the opposition talking about hunger and poverty. Who caused them? They did! They caused hunger and poverty. We are trying to eliminate them.” Eliminate what or whom and with what? With another loan of $21 billion?

In the eyes and hands and mind of this government, “we are all nine fingers.”

It has more for us. A day after the Kaduna rally, more came for Nigerians. A young man identified as the APC’s national youth leader announced: “Today, I presented brand new 2026 Prado to my committed selected youth leaders to aid their election mobilisation activities.”

How much is involved here? A check online says: a brand-new 2026 Toyota Land Cruiser Prado costs between ₦105 million and ₦165 million in Nigeria, depending on the trim, customs clearance status and dealer. How many did the man buy and where did the money come from? We do not know, but the man thanked the First Lady for her “continuous support to the party structure”. With impunity they insult; with expired baby formula they silence the malnourished. N70,000 for the worker who toils; brand new SUV for the party boy who loafs.

They keep counting the fingers in the very presence of the nine-fingered.

We borrowed the vision of Brazil’s capital, drew our plans and began to build. But did we follow what we planned? No. Green reserves became building plots; boundaries shifted because money and power said they must shift. We have treated democracy and election management much the same way: draw up an orderly system, then permit powerful interests to distort its execution.

Brazil’s electronic voting system offers the parallel: entirely paperless elections via biometric voting machines since 1996; a vast electorate votes, and results emerge within four hours. Nigeria, too, has designed instruments of electoral transparency. We have BVAS for accreditation and IReV for public scrutiny of polling-unit results. Yet the promise of technology repeatedly meets the uncertainties of execution. We grapple with failed uploads, disputed figures, prolonged collation and litigation. A city’s master plan means little if its custodians permit encroachment; an electoral framework means little if its safeguards crack under the weight of political pressure. We know how to plan the city and the election. Our problem is making power obey the plan.

This election season, Nigeria’s 130 million nine-fingers would need the solidarity of the deprived, and muster it across the boundaries that so often undermine their welfare. They have the next 75 days to do that.