Some pundits have posited that the 2019 Presidential election was badly rigged in favour of President Muhammadu Buhari. To this position, I have continually disagreed.
My disagreement stems from my earlier position that the contraption called Nigeria is a fraud and so anything done in the country is nothing but the advancement and perpetuation of a grand fraudulent plan to advance the wickedness of those who have power. So one cannot conduct an election in a fraudulent organisation and claim it was rigged. Once the premise is wrong, the conclusion will no doubt be wrong too.
On so many occasions, I have argued that elections, despite all its trappings and elevation of our hope cannot in any way solve our problems. Many Nigerians seem not to think towards that line. Nigeria spends billions of dollars electing people who will ensure that the citizens continue to complain. This is my personal opinion anyway.
On that premise, I argued that what Nigeria needs and urgently too, is to negotiate its unity and write a people-oriented constitution.
What the just concluded gubernatorial election showed was that the people have resigned to helplessness in the face of a mounting assault on their will, and decided that the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, is better off filling up their ballot papers without the input of Nigerians. It also shows that the people have passed a vote of no confidence on the Mahmood Yakubu led INEC. What is remaining is for the people to stand up and pass a vote of no confidence in the political class.
The apathy that was recorded was a protest against the manipulation of the presidential election by forces within the commission and the presidency. The manipulation was done with reckless abandon with those who raised objections taunted with words like “Go to court”.
But no other person but the beneficiary of that election rigging, changed the goalposts of the courts by unconstitutionally suspending the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Walter Onnoghen to pave way for their smooth sailing.
How history will remember Professor Mahmood Yakubu is something that we wait for the future to decide. Will he be remembered as a professor who planned for an exam for years but produced an awful result? The INEC chair should in his quiet times, reflect and ask himself this question.
The All Progressives Congress, APC, lost Imo, Kano, Adamawa, Sokoto and Oyo states. So how did Buhari’s 15 million votes come about? Did INEC allocate votes to the APC without recourse to vote cast?
Betraying the trust of millions of Nigerians is a burden too heavy to carry and the gubernatorial elections made it glaring to even the blind.
The nation spending hundreds of billions of naira on such jamboree where the votes of the people did not count is a huge bumbling joke.
In Rivers State, the election was nothing but a charade. The army and SARS took their brutality to another level, killing and maiming innocent Nigerians whose only crimes were that they came out to vote. Where they were not killing Nigerians, they were found aiding thugs to snatch ballot boxes.
The Nigerian Army further degraded any atom of credibility they amassed over the years by their criminal denial of the activities of its personnel in subverting voting process. The EU during a press conference in Abuja accused the army of barring its observers from monitoring the election. What was the army’s response? They issued threats to the EU. This is how deep we have sunk as a nation. The army should be bold next time a pin lapels of the ruling party on its personnel. With that, it will be easier to distinguish them from the garb of neutrality with which they are using to confuse the masses.
Save for the police officers who protested the order of soldiers drafted to the office of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, in Port Harcourt, the collation of results for the gubernatorial election in Rivers State would have been done under the full supervision of the army. One would ask what soldiers were doing inside the INEC office. Are Buratai, the chief of army staff and Jamil, the GOC 6 div Port Harcourt running for office?
Nigeria is fully back under military rule and the next line of action is the suspension of the constitution to make total and then the justification of same by supposedly educated Nigerians who have been rationalising the encroach of the army on the democracy that they claim to be practising.
