2023: True democrats don’t throw spanner in the works

WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER

info@medaner.com, justme4justice@yahoo.com

It was about the same time in 2015 that we had the Orubebe outburst; an outright attempt at the soul of the national electoral process, an attempt to scuttle everything the moment the then ruling party knew it had lost the presidential election to the candidate of the APC. The same scenario is playing itself out, just like it was eight years ago. It is obvious that the PDP situation room had done all the permutations and re-permutation and has come to the conclusion that there is no realistic pathway to victory any longer for its presidential candidate except a disruption of the entire process.
I am also not surprised at the choice of Dino for the august assignment; his personality has been a blend of a street thug, desperate politician and a melodrama, a Nollywood-wannabe without both the capacity for and virtue of shame. This tells us why he is unaware of the shameful implication of the act he puts up at the nationally and internationally observed election collation center.
Except we want to play hide and seek with the truth, it is only an unserious political party that would not run an election situation room; and the situation room would be ahead of everyone or group, have access to all results across the entire polling units in the country in the most professional manner. Every party, serious ones, must have done its tabulation and know where it stands. We are all at the National Collation Center to confirm the data already at our disposal – as a serious political party. Every party is at liberty to object to any final result that departs from information already at their disposal. PDP can do that, and that is exactly what it would have done if the results were going its way. But as a loser, it would choose the path we are all witnessing.
Why then is PDP so desperate to have the INEC server open and operational? I can guess. In 2019, PDP breached the sanctity of the INEC server and even went ahead to swear an affidavit to the extent of having access to information from the server at the tribunal. If we all remember, we had a parallel election result circulating in the country immediately after the postponement of the 2019 election and before the rescheduled date of the same. The explanation is simple; PDP and its presidential candidate perfected a plan to hack the server and upload a prepared result which backfired, though the party went ahead in the attempt to defend the fake result.
The only reason PDP would be so desperate to have the INEC server opened up and operational now would be because the party is up to its game again; to upload another prepared result and create an integrity issue for both the electoral process, the results, and the election umpire. This is despite the publicly accessible report of INEC chairman in 2022 that collation of election results will be manually conducted as provided for in the 2022 Electoral Act.
It is so unfortunate that we would lose our rationality as a people. At the expense of national peace, we choose religion, ethnicity and hatred against individuals and groups as the index of our responses to public issues including the ongoing electoral process. It baffles me and would continue to do so how on earth we would be talking of APC rigging an election where the party lost embarrassingly in critical strongholds: the presidential candidate lost his own state, the president and the leader of the party lost his own state, the party chairman lost his state, Ganduje, a sitting governor lost his state, El-Rufai a sitting governor lost his state, and even the campaign coordinator lost both his state and his senatorial bid; yet, APC rigged the same election; how does that add up? The party could not rig in Lagos but is rigging in Benue, a core PDP state. Can’t we just stop these?
It appears to these elements who are becoming bent on discrediting the process that wherever APC lost, the election was free and fair; but compromised where it won.
I have listened to clerics, who should be on their knees interceding for the peace of the country, instigating the people to an uprising, perhaps, because the candidate they supported is losing the election. I have read the letter by former President Olusegun Obasanjo; these are all people who openly cast their support for the candidate of the Labour Party, and now would not care if the country boils because their preferred candidate is losing. Let it be known that there are more rational Nigerians than those attempting to foment crisis and we would hold them responsible, regardless of their status or station if their unguarded utterance results in any form of crisis now or in the immediate future.
These are the same people who championed the non-existing islamisation stories in the past and created a crisis for the nation till today; it is the same people who weaponised religion for as long as they could in an attempt to win the 2023 elections; pitching religions against one another. And with that, they still failed as discerning Nigerians saw through it and never fell for their antics.
The same Obasanjo who coordinated all the worst elections we have had in this country; the same Obasanjo who blatantly declared, and is on public record that the 2003 election is ‘a do or die affair’ and forced INEC to announce a winner even when compilations of results were still underway; the same Obasanjo, under whose watch election results were writing in sitting rooms as per instructions; under whose watch bloated election figures were the order of the day; that same hypocritical Obasanjo that is now suddenly claiming to understand the way of election integrity.
It is obvious the only result of the 2023 election that would be pleasing to Obasanjo and the team of clergies who sold their souls on the altars of mammon, religious sentiment and tribal affinity, would be the emergence of Peter Obi as president-elect who is more likely to come a distant third position.
Well, they can stir up the polity as much as they like; but the crisis they so much thirst for to express solidarity for their politically handicapped candidate will not happen. Too many Nigerians know the truth and will oppose them and rightly so. They seem to have forgotten that the millions that give the votes that are making them to cry now are also Nigerians; and are they not in the majority as the latest election figures already show?
Obviously, their days are numbered. Recall, they played the same game in 2015, 2019 and now again in 2023; they are abusing their positions as leaders of thought, and Nigerians would place them henceforth where they rightly belong. Thankfully, former president Abdusalami Abubakar has lent his stately voice to Nigerians by suing for peace in these uncertain times without mincing words; unlike others whose utterances, expressions and contexts apparently thirst for political crises for the nation.
We are calling on more well-meaning Nigerians to lend their voices like the Inter-party Advisory Committee, the umbrella body of registered political parties in Nigeria that recently issued a press release to affirm its confidence and satisfaction over the conduct of the 25th February 2023 elections and an appeal to peace. While dispute is not unexpected in a democracy, particularly election dispute, there are laid down procedures for addressing them including the claim of election rigging which is easy to debunk if really there are substantial incidence of such.
If you see APC losing in stream in its strongholds and your blackened sentimental minds refuse to accept reality; if your utmost concern is not to be leaders who turn their followers from wrong conducts, perceptions and emotional conclusion based on parochial conclusions, then you have no right to be respected any longer as one with the interest of Nigeria. And I think it is high time we started exhuming and paying keen attention to the conduct, utterances and expressions of those who enjoy the privileges of democracy and to determine whether they are true democrats who play by the universal rules of democracy.
GOD BLESS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA!