OPINION: Election charade taken too far

Nollywood is a serious business. And a
multibillion Naira one at that. Were it not so we would have been tempted to find an equivalence between what happens in Nollywood and what transpired in Yola,Adamawa state on Sunday. The video evidence was as pathetic and dissembling
as the story was surreal. In truth what
happened in that state last weekend was
typical of the 2023 general elections in
Nigeria, Shambolic, Shameful,Disgraceful and shocking.

The day before, on Saturday, April 15th
, the inept and corrupt Independent
National Electoral Commission [INEC] had
conducted a supplementary election for
the governorship position. INEC had
declared the March 18th election
inconclusive. The race was essentially between the incumbent, Umaru Ahmadu
Fintiri of the Peoples Democratic Party
[PDP] and the candidate of the All Progressives Congress [APC] political party which holds power at the centre, Aisha ‘Binani’ Dahiru. To political observers, it was a defining and indeed consequential election mainly for two reasons. One, Adamawa is the home state of the presidential candidate of the PDP who is presently in the tribunal contesting the result of the presidential election. Two, the state, which is regarded as being conservative, was also bidding to be the first state in Nigeria to elect a governor with a female at the top of the ticket. Dame Virgy Etiaba had actually been governor of Anambra state. She was elected deputy governor with Peter Obi as the governor. After Obi had fought through the courts for three years to retrieve his mandate which was stolen by Dr. Chris Ngige and the PDP, the PDP majority state house of assembly members elected to impeach Obi for being frugal with the state’s resources. Of course, Obi approached the court which declared his impeachment as illegal and that it never happened.

It’s important to note that the governorship election in Adamawa state
had been dogged by controversies from
the onset. Sections of the mass media,
especially the online genre had declared
‘Binani’ the winner of the election days
before the INEC pronounced it inconclusive. In addition to other
resources, some among the political elite including Nigeria’s First Lady, Aisha Buhari, made enormous emotional and sentimental investment in the ‘Binani’ run. On his part, the incumbent, Fintiri made the ‘Binani’ backers to realize that he was in office and in power. And that the election would not be a walk over no matter what they invested in the woman
who is a dogged fighter in her own right.That was the setting of the Adamawa governorship election which came to a disgraceful climax on Sunday.

The story was that the INEC could not conclude the collation of the results from the supplementary election on Saturday. And so it shifted continuation of the collation and declaration of the winner to the following day, Sunday. But INEC’s Resident Electoral Commissioner [REC], Hudu Yunusa-Ari, had a different but crooked game plan. He had a coup in
mind. When he woke up on Sunday
morning, and we are assuming that he
slept during the night, he assembled a
strange gang of persons and went to a
venue, probably the collation centre, and declared ‘Binani’ the winner of the
election. He had no result sheets with
him. He had no breakdown of the scores
of the candidates. The usual rituals preceding the declaration of a winner in
any election in Nigeria were missing. He
has no power to declare the result of
elections.

He was heckled by some persons who were present at that show of shame. Indeed someone attempted to snatch a sheet of paper he was clutching while he was beating a hasty retreat from the venue. He jumped and escaped. It was comic but this ‘comedy’ will not make you laugh; it will make you sad and to weep for Nigeria. It was instructive that an uniformed police man was part of the gang. It was alleged that the REC claimed that he got a firm order from Abuja-read the presidency-to declare ‘Binani’ as the winner. Nothing is beyond this Presidency given the experiences of Nigerians in the last eight years, but this one appears far-
fetched. Can the Presidency be this brazen and reckless? This is a very difficult question to answer in light of the fact that Bola Tinubu, presidential candidate of the ruling party, had once said that a cabal in the Presidency in cahoots with other ranking party members worked against his presidential ambition.
Though INEC had declared him the winner of the February 25th election but he is not convinced that the war is over.

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Here is still palpable mutual suspicions within the ranks of the APC. We wager that Tinubu is more fearful of the scheming of a section of his APC than the dogged efforts of the opposition parties especially the Peter Obi-led Labour Party [LP] to use all legal means through the courts to abort his presidency before it materializes. Tinubu’s baggage is gargantuan.
On its own, it is capable of breaking his back and derailing his ‘lifelong ambition’. And it might ultimately.

Back to the Adamawa theatre of the
absurd. INEC has since disowned its
highest ranking officer in that state and described him as being nothing but delusional. “The action of the REC is a
usurpation of the power of the Returning
Officer. It is null, void and of no effect”,the Commission said in a statement signed by its National Commissioner for Information and Voter Education, Festus Okoye. It then gave the reckless REC who set out to wreck the Adamawa election a slap on the wrist by inviting him to Abuja“immediately” at tax payers’ expense.

The appropriate step would have been his
summary suspension from office without
pay and then his investigation. He is
already guilty of at least one electoral
offence and so should have his day in
court. His collaborators should also be
unmasked and charged to court. But this
could amount to wishful thinking because
we would be asking the rest of the INEC
leadership to go to equity with soiled and unclean hands. The INEC leadership from the chairman to the least person who played any role in the 2023 general elections stand condemned as ‘corrupt,
compromised and contaminated’. The
action of Yunusa-Ari is in sync with the
odious activities of INEC.

The irony is that these so-called leaders who are dealing mortal blows on elections and our democracy profess either Christianity or Islam. Interestingly, there has been an overlap of the fasting seasonsthis year for the adherents of the twomajor religions in our country. Indeed, one of the persons who heckled REC Yunusa-Ari was overheard on Sunday in a video clip screaming ‘Fear Allah, Fear Allah, Fear Allah’. Yunusa-Ari did not care.

And if we no longer fear the God that we
claim to worship, how can we fear or
respect fellow man. But if the video clips trending since Sunday turn out to be true, then the day of reckoning for election bandits is almost here. One clip showed the image of a brutalized and half naked man said to be that of shameless REC mumbling inaudible words while the other was said to be that of a thoroughly beaten INEC staff who was allegedly confessing to receiving bribe to swing the election.
Is an organized and orchestrated resort to self help by angry Nigerians against election bandits loading? Nigerians are being pinned to the wall.

AUTHOR: Ugo Onuoha

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Articles published in our Graffiti section are strictly the opinion of the writers and do not represent the views of Ripples Nigeria or its editorial stand.

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