2019: How Will Gov Ganduje ‘Manufacture’ 5 Million Votes Promised President Buhari?
By
Ikechukwu Amaechi
If recent political
developments in KanoState point
to the direction Nigeria is
headed when the election bell tolls again in 2019, then the country is in clear
and imminent danger. The augury is stark. The prognostication is as portentous
as it is scary.
*President Buhari
Every
election circle brings out the beast in us as the legendary Afrobeat maestro,
late Fela Anikulapo Kuti, sang. That is true. Our democracy is a jungle where the will of the powerful but
vicious minority, who takes no prisoners, will always prevail.
But there
is something particularly telling about the Kano electoral
stench.
On
Saturday, February 11, 2018, the Kano State Independent Electoral Commission
(KANSIEC) conducted local government poll. A day after, the chairman of the
commission, Prof. Garba Sheka, announced that the ruling All Progressives
Congress (APC) won all the 44 chairmanship and 484 councillorship seats, in an
election where 25 political parties participated.
In the
context of the democracy variant maladroitly foisted on Nigeria by
former President Olusegun Obasanjo, which he impishly labelled home-grown democracy,
that is the new norm.
Today, the
rule is that every party in power, through the state independent electoral
commission whose members are handpicked by the governor organises local
government poll where it usually wins all the chairmanship and councillorship
seats. Some “magnanimous” governors may concede one or two per cent of the
seats to the opposition political parties but others who neither give a damn
nor revel in the nicety of taking prisoners go for the kill. That was what
happened in Kano.
It was a zero-sum game. The winner simply took all.
But reports
of underage voting sharply contradicted the claims of the KANSIEC chairman that
the poll was peaceful, free and fair. Children barely ten years old were
captured in videos casting their ballot in the so-called free and fair election.
The instant
national outrage led to some startling confessions.
First, the
impetuous KanoState governor,
Abdullahi Ganduje, dismissed the trending photos and videos of children voting
in the election, describing the issue as “propaganda” by his political
opponents.
He
particularly blamed his predecessor with whom he is now locked in a bitter
political struggle, Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, for the scandal.
“Ask the
international observers who went there, they held a press conference after they
went round. All those pictures of children are pictures of assembled children
they took, so it’s not true, it is part of the propaganda,” he claimed.
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