Welcoming ‘Next Level’ With Trepidation

Surprisingly the incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari and candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) was declared the official winner by wide margin of the presidential (and parliamentary) elections held penultimate Saturday nationwide. The result released comprehensively by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was indeed surprising because the APC almost won by a landslide — something hitherto thought impossible. The triumphant party polled 15,191,847 votes beating its closest rival, the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which poorly scored 11,262,978 votes. Again it was surprising, the result, in the sense that the Wazirin Adamawa, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, was widely expected to do better than what he garnered as popular electoral approval.

Blood flowed as usual from Port Harcourt to Maiduguri but the poll was adjudged to be generally peaceful compared to the African standards. The opposition PDP had cried foul even before the whole results were announced citing disenfranchisement of voters in PDP strongholds, voter intimidation and militarization of the entire process. The power of incumbency was deployed fully by Buhari and his handlers to force themselves on the unwilling Nigerian electorates!

Days after the official proclamation of results Atiku Abubakar had addressed a world press conference where he denounced the lapses and irregularities recorded during the polls rejecting the outcopme in its entirety. In refusing to recognise the ‘victor’ Atiku had sought to send a message across that he was not ready to trade off a mandate ‘stolen’. His refusal to play or replay Jonathan could, therefore, be understood in the sense that he must have felt cheated by a compromised system at the centre. By failing to put a call across to the presumed winner Atiku made a huge point by not giving undeserved credibility or legitimacy to a screwed electoral exercise.

Going by the definitive result as dictated by INEC (the problem of believability nothwithstanding) the ruling APC party remains or retains the premier position as the political force to be reckoned with in Nigeria. Going by those figures the APC trounced the PDP with more than four million votes!

Perhaps the most surprising element of the presidential poll was the third position taken by the relatively unknown Peoples Coalition Party (PCP) led by one nonentity called Felix Nicholas. He polled 110,196 to occupy a prestigious, even though far behind, third position behind the PDP and the APC. But it has been revealed lately online that Nicholas and his party took the majority of their votes off the PDP. And with the benefit of hindsight, it looks like it was a deliberately orchestrated plan. PCP is similar to PDP not only in name but also in logo!

So the party must have benefitted from the similarity in name and logo. Yes the confusion must have worked to the benefit of Nicholas and his sponsors. Nigeria boasts of millions of illiterate voters who could hardly differentiate between PDP and PCP. The large numbers of invalidated votes was a pointer to this fact in our miserable national life where education is never accorded its deserved place of importance.

Comrade Omoyele Sowore’s African Action Congress (AAC) came tenth with 33,953 votes nationally. For a newly-created party (less than a year old) the result is an achievement in itself. Sowore and his radical team ought to be proud of their political accomplishment. The great idea of change they brought to bear on the terrorised traumatised psyche of Nigerians hit home. The message was heard loud and clear from Daura to Yola! And the messenger was credible enough for his message to hit its mark on the federal level!

In the next four years efforts must be intensified at more mass mobilisation and sensibilisation so that when next the general elections come calling Nigerians would be more receptive of the message by collectively resolving to take our country back electorally from the gang of expired gerontocrats in Abuja. We whole-heartedly identify with Comrade Sowore and his movement.

For Atiku Abubakar he ‘lost’ because the ruling APC systematically manipulated the electoral process to heavily favour the re-elected retired Daura-born General and his team. Atiku hinted at voter intimidation and vote suppression in areas perceived as his strongholds describing the presidential poll as the ‘worst ever’ in our democratic history. He pointedly questioned why a Boko Haram-terrorized Borno State would register more voter turn-out than the peaceful Akwa Ibom State for example.

Indeed it beats every conventional electoral reasoning to imagine a war zone registering more voters or votes than places where there were no conflicts of any kind. Besides the final figures brandished by INEC failed to convince some discernible observers because they were grotesquely cooked-up one way or the other in order to show certain non-existent popularity of the President whose 4-year presidential score-card is nothing to write home about.

Of course, in the final analysis, it is within the PDP candidate’s constitutional right to seek redress in a court of competent jurisdiction. And in choosing to do so pressure must not be mounted on him to do the impossible — congratulating his opponent whom he thought rightly to have been wrongly elected. Let the election petition Tribunal decide. And let justice be done and seen generally to have been done!

Meanwhile we welcome the ‘Next Level’ with obvious trepidation! For one, the last level as it were failed woefully to transform economically the lives of majority of Nigerians. For another, the so-called ‘next level’ was obtained ostensibly by fraud if what the opposition were saying as grounds for rejecting the outcome is to be taken seriously. And for yet another, Buharism has proven in the last four yers to be bereft of sound ideas and programmes that could accompany the ‘change’ it promised thus making it a reality.

While we timidly welcome four more years of Buharism our genuine fears are predicated on the fact that the promised ‘next level’ would not end up amounting to 4 giddy years of sentencing Nigerians to more economic hardship, security challenges, unemployment and tepid anti-graft campaign.

By SOC Okenwa…

Join the conversation

Opinions

Support Ripples Nigeria, hold up solutions journalism

Balanced, fearless journalism driven by data comes at huge financial costs.

As a media platform, we hold leadership accountable and will not trade the right to press freedom and free speech for a piece of cake.

If you like what we do, and are ready to uphold solutions journalism, kindly donate to the Ripples Nigeria cause.

Your support would help to ensure that citizens and institutions continue to have free access to credible and reliable information for societal development.

Donate Now