By Tunde Olusunle
If anyone had prophesied the retention of Mahmood Yakubu, chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), in that office to which he was appointed in 2015 by Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s president, beyond 2019, he would have been pilloried as a false prophet. Yakubu, a Professor of Political History and International Relations, was on the staff of the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA), Kaduna before his appointment to that office.
We run a country which naively confers seriousness, integrity and respectability on people simply on the basis of their often padded and advertised curriculum vitae. Just being a professor and coming from the geo-religiously “correct” extreme of the country privilege certain people for consideration and appointment into specific offices and the accrual of benefits therein.
The 2019 general elections under review, spontaneously donned
the regalia of Nigeria’s most controversial and contested polls in all
ramifications, in recent political history. It was dogged by systemic
tardiness, orchestrated disjointedness and simulated discombobulations.
Electoral materials were wilfully conveyed to the wrong states and addresses,
as part of a grand script for the authentication of premeditated dubiousness.
Despite the mammoth mobilisation of Nigerians, many to their
countryside abodes at great individual risks and costs, Mahmood Yakubu and his
colleagues blatantly stage-managed the postponement of the polls by one full
week. This was a rarity, even in the days of Nigeria’s earlier politics. To be
sure, since I became an avid follower of Nigeria’s electoral politics back in
1979, the 2019 elections were the most treacherous and tragic I ever
witnessed.
The four-year stewardship of Nigeria’s outgoing president, who
ran on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC), had done more than
enough with its gross and aggregate performance to be determinedly denied a
second term. The hydra of insecurity; crass nepotism; reinvented religious
bigotry; widespread unemployment; rudderless governance; and prevailing hunger,
had collectively inflated and inflamed palpable anger on the borders of
gargantuan conflagration. It was this level of mass disaffection which
propelled Nigerians to the 2019 elections, with the belief that their permanent
voter’s cards (PVCs), would be deployed to convey their collegiate disaffection
and to effect the much-desired political change.
Nigerians seemed to have been sold on the assurances and
reassurances of Mahmood Yakubu and his team, which promised to deliver free,
fair, transparent and credible elections. Mike Iginni, one of the more
principled and forthcoming Resident Electoral Commissioners, serially
admonished Nigerians to keep faith with INEC.
Buhari was televised warning thugs and touts who made themselves
available to do the biddings of their political overlords by snatching ballot
boxes to write their epitaphs. As Commander-in-Chief of Nigeria’s armed forces,
the president had issued explicit orders to the troops to give effect to his
pronouncements. Nigerians genuinely thought Buhari, whose pre-election alias in
2015, was “Baba mai gaskiya,” meaning
“the honest old man,” could very truly be trusted. Buhari subsequently retired
to his country abode in Daura, Katsina State, to participate in the polls. In
response to a question en route Daura about what his reaction would be if he
lost the election, Buhari gruffly retorted “nobody can unseat me.” He promised
not to return to Abuja after the election if he was truly trounced.
As poll results began to trickle in, however, there were vivid
indications that Buhari was in for a hiding. Technology has availed us the
privilege of keeping up real-time with developments across the world, from our
handheld devices. Figures filtering in from across the country indicated that
the scales might have been tipped in favour of Buhari’s major challenger in
that election, Atiku Abubakar. Atiku, Nigeria’s Vice President in the Olusegun
Obasanjo regime between 1999 and 2007, flew the flag of the major opposition
party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), in that 2019 presidential election.
Democracy was being deepened, Nigerians assumed, if a sitting president, from
credible figures obtained from the server of the electoral referee, INEC, could
be ousted at the ballot for a second time in four years.
Buhari hitherto held the bragging rights to this feat, having
displaced his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, at the 2015 elections. There were
actually celebrations across the land as Nigerians absorbed the plausibility of
the incumbent president’s displacement after all. The PDP had hoped for truly
impartial declaration of results on the strength of its performance at the
polls. The party was, however, shocked by the turn of events. Ballot boxes had
seized in several places; many were stuffed with ballot papers which were
previously thumb-printed. Figures had been changed with correcting fluid in
several instances; electoral officers had abducted and transplanted in the
homes of noveau riche political dons to serve their ends.
There had been
shootings across the country culminating in casualties, the maimed and the
summarily despatched. At least in one instance, a helicopter was procured and
deployed to hover over the skies of Lokoja, the Kogi State capital and to fire
at voters from the skies! A new expression, “inconclusive elections,” was
launched into the nation’s political vocabulary. It was the APC’s terminology,
borrowing from the parable of the ram which takes a few steps back, to launch
out with greater ferocity. It was the party’s disingenuous formula for bidding
time, albeit for a few days, for the perfection of its manual for large-scale
electoral thievery. Suddenly, INEC’s acclaimed server for which billions of
naira was budgeted, which was procured and duly hoisted, magically vanished!
Unknown to the APC and to INEC, the PDP operated a discrete situation room (SR) from where it reportedly downloaded information from the very same disappearing server. The location of the SR was presumably tracked by state intelligence and severally breached by the gun-wielding operatives who repeatedly harassed and unsettled staff of the SR, impounding documents and equipment.
A particular minister from the south allegedly took over the APC’s
counterpoint to the PDP’s SR concept. Figures were reportedly tweaked in
barefaced re-enactment of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s lyrics in his “Unknown Soldier”
classic and with its unforgettable refrain about “government magic,” which
“turned red into blue, and the electric bulb into candlelight.” Buhari suddenly
felt comfortable enough to return from his hibernation in Daura where he
promised to confine himself if he lost the election. This was after
industrial-scale mischief and shenanigans had been perfected in his
favour.
Elsewhere, public officials who cherish their integrity and good
name, who find themselves in such quandary of overwhelming malfeasance, of such
sticky, messy situations, throw in the towel the morning after. By his calling
as an academic and professor who was reportedly the “first northerner to earn a
first class in History,” Yakubu is at liberty to choose whichever institution
he prefers to serve, either at home or abroad. But not in Nigeria, where public
office opens the water-tap of limitless access to filthy lucre.
It has been proposed that in Nigeria’s 62-year-trajectory, the
Buhari administration has most probably thrown up more “overnight
multibillionaires” than all previous regimes put together. A former service
chief has thrown his hat in the ring for the coming gubernatorial contest in
Bauchi State on the platform of the APC. A very senior principal officer in the
nation’s parliament is vying for the governorship of his state in the south
south zone. He reportedly whispered to some confidants that he has a private
vault in excess of a dozen billion naira to prosecute the coming contest. This,
regrettably, is the reality of the legacy Buhari is leaving behind.
If blundering public officers like Mahmood Yakubu are so bereft of shame and conscience as not to send in their letters of disengagement after such unpardonable betrayal of public trust, they get summarily fired by their employers. As has become his trademark, however, Buhari is unable to cast his search net broadly and widely to ferret and discover better qualified Nigerians to man several government ministries, departments and agencies, (MDAs).
So,
rather than launch deep to unearth our contemporary Ngozi Okonjo-Iwealas,
Arunma Otehs, Amina Mohammeds, Akinwumi Adesinas, Chukwuma Soludos, and so on,
Buhari simply gifts Yakubu a fresh five-year term! Reappointed in October, 2020
in overt, maybe obvious compensation for “a job well done the previous year,”
Yakubu should be in office until late 2025. Yakubu’s blighted profile, further
sullied by reports of international elections observers, was not enough to
restrain Buhari from further foisting his favourite son upon hapless
Nigerians.
Yakubu conned Nigerians momentarily to forget his wrongdoings
from the 2019 elections, as he embarked on reforms to bequeath on Nigeria, more
believable, more admissible and more acceptable polls. The off-season
gubernatorial elections conducted by INEC in Edo, Ekiti and more recently Osun
states, demonstrated that we could do things right with requisite commitment
and willpower.
The innovative Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS),
deployed in Ekiti and Osun, for instance, ensured that people’s votes truly
counted. Popular investment of emotion, physical exertion and invaluable time
expended by voters at the polls were not rubbished by electoral roaches, rats
and robbers. INEC had just proven that poll results from my unit in Omowa-Mopo,
Isanlu, would be uploaded instantly for the world to glimpse. This revved
public expectation and faith in the electoral process to unprecedented heights.
Buhari seemed resolved to play the “born again democrat” he
postured he was in those frantic days when he accepted every known ascription
to burnish his chances. As often as he could, he reiterated to Nigerians that
extant shortcomings of the electoral process had been rejigged. Nigerians could
go to sleep as he was resolved to bequeath a legacy of visibly honest electoral
transition.
Buhari enjoined Nigerians to vote for candidates of their choice
at the polls, warning hoodlums to steer clear of polling zones on the election
day. If Buhari set out to do that which was right and proper, he faced
treasonable opposition from within his party. Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State
repeated on several television interviews he granted that it was not Buhari’s
duty to reassure Nigerians about how the elections would pan out, but to
campaign for the candidate of his party. It was, therefore, a reluctant Buhari
who got dragged around the campaign grounds of Bola Tinubu, presidential
flagbearer of his candidate, presenting him to wary party supporters…
If there’s one Nigerian with irreparable integrity deficit
today, it has to be Mahmood Yakubu. But he would thereafter be allowed to
prosecute the most expensive, most corrupted, most opaque, most odious
presidential election, in the subsisting Fourth Republic, Saturday February 25,
this year. That exercise was a colossal shame and momentous tragedy to
democracy and popular governance.
On the scale of what Nigerians witnessed at the presidential
poll, Mahmood has no business, absolutely none, remaining on his seat. More
appropriately, he should be cooling off in the very same luxury accommodation
where Nnamdi Kanu, the self-styled leader of the Independent Peoples’ of
Biafra, (IPOB), has been a VIP guest for nearly two years now. The very fact
that he will yet prosecute the gubernatorial and state assembly polls is
further evidence of our unseriousness as a people and as a nation.
INEC has been preparing for the 2023 electoral cycle since the
last polls in 2019. Yakubu’s INEC budgeted a dizzying N400 Billion for the
polls. That is the 2023 budgets of Osun, Ekiti and Yobe states, put together.
Trainings, further trainings, skills acquisition programmes were organised for
INEC personnel and election day operatives before the polls.
Simulations and test runs were carried out to bring Nigerians at
par with the so-called innovations, improvements and new technologies to be
deployed for the polls. It was an ecstatic polity which anticipated a new dawn
in the manner our elections would henceforth be conducted. The world was also
an interested party in the preparation for, participation by our people, and
prosecution of the polls per se.
Despite our diminished diplomatic capital especially in the last
decade, the world continues to view Nigeria seriously because of our age-old
global ratings. The quality and diversity of talent, scholarship, genius
emanating from Nigeria and illuminating the world’s skies is also reason the
world is not giving up on Nigeria as yet. And so, election observers in their
numbers, including highly regarded former presidents and prime ministers, were
detailed by notable international bodies to monitor the polls. Photographs of
luminaries like Thabo Mbeki, Uhuru Kenyatta, John Mahama, Bai Koroma, Boni
Yayi, former presidents of South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Benin
Republic respectively, among others, have featured prominently in Nigerian
dailies in recent days and weeks.
Yakubu, however, delivered a monumentally flawed election,
Saturday February 25. Ultimately, it will very surely be light years away from
the 2019 fraud, which the straight-thinking know was won by Atiku. For
starters, select information technology experts on the staff of the
organisation were reassigned days before the polls.
Election materials and polling officers reported late in several
instances at the polling zones. Despite the previously pronounced “restriction
of cash” by Buhari to mitigate vote-buying, the trend became even more
pronounced at the recent polls. Identifiable people like a local government
chairman in Kogi State seized a polling station aided by uniformed policemen,
chased away voters and electoral officers and destroyed ballot boxes.
Buhari himself was a major offender at the Saturday, February
25, polls, having contravened relevant sections of the electoral law. Upon
thumb-printing the ballot paper for his preferred candidate, the president
displayed the ballot paper, not only to other voters in his unit, but to
Nigerians in general. Buhari was captured real-time perpetrating such
irresponsible illegality, in contravention of Section 122 (1) of the Electoral
Act 2022.
The section says: “Every
person in attendance at a polling unit including every officer charged with the
conduct of an election and his or her assistants and every polling agent and
candidate in attendance at a polling station or at the collation centre, as the
case may be, shall maintain and help in maintaining the secrecy of the voting.”
Subsection (4) of this section prescribes committal to prison for three months
or a fine of N100,000, or both, to violators of this law. As though by previous
rehearsal, Abubakar Malami, Buhari’s justice minister, committed the very same
offence in his polling unit in Kebbi State. Malami is reputed a Senior Advocate
of Nigeria, (SAN), and the nation’s chief law officer.
As military president, Ibrahim Babangida nullified MKO Abiola’s
victory in the historic June 12 1993 presidential poll. Among the contentious
grounds for the annulment of that election was that as candidate of the Social
Democratic Party, (SDP) in that election, Abiola donned a national dress
bearing the logo of his party to his polling unit. This was in contravention of
electoral provisions, even at that time.
Thirty years later, Buhari is remorselessly trailblazing “top to
bottom” disdain and disrespect for the rule of law, in a government he
supposedly heads. By the day, it gets clearer that Buhari actually coveted the presidency
not to leave a glorious imprimatur of altruistic service, specifically. Rather,
the office is to him a personal trophy to assuage his erstwhile sense of loss
arising from his 1985 ouster by Babangida and company.
And so, Nigerians were taken through that
wholesale charade at the presidential poll. The BVAS equipment could upload the
results of the National Assembly polls, but could not do same for the
presidential poll, held same time with the parliamentary polls! Mahmood Yakubu
was at it again, apparently. The server had been intentionally and deliberately
recalibrated not to receive the results of the presidential election. Initial
results were not looking good for the candidate of the ruling party, thus the
panic to disable the server. For the second time in four years, INEC and its
notorious server had been deployed for the wilful and criminal subversion of
the popular will.
Local and global disclaimers and condemnation have come from
observers at the levels of the Economic Community of West African States,
(ECOWAS); the African Union, (AU); the Commonwealth and the European Union,
(EU). This is not excluding various non-governmental organisations, (NGOs) and
world powers including the United States of America, (USA) which has loudly
described the election as below par. The cooked-up results of Nigeria’s
presidential election has been announced Wednesday, March 1 and a winner, Bola
Tinubu of the APC, pronounced. INEC has since presented to him the Certificate
of Return. Disaffected candidates and parties have been enjoined to “go to
court.” This new expression has gained currency in recent weeks, irrespective
of the serially demonstrated toothlessness of the judiciary within the context
of our own governance system. On the social media lately, a sticker purportedly
emanating from East Africa has been trending. It says: “When a thief tells you
to go to court, just know that his brother is the judge.” “Go to court,”
Nigerian-style therefore is like telling the aggrieved to go to hell or to
Golgotha as the case may be. His fate is most probably, previously
sealed.
Curiously, very worryingly, since the declaration of the poll
outcome, there has been no celebration, no jubilation anywhere. The streets are
mute, the national space in mournful, graveyard quietude. Our people in the
South West are famous for ever raising the bar when it comes to partying,
revelry and ceremonies. There’s typically ‘no dulling’ to appropriate from the
vocabulary of the street, for our compatriots from the Yoruba country. Not many
reports of dignitaries, home-based and foreign, queuing up to congratulate the
“president-in-waiting” and have photo opportunities with him, are trending.
What is going on? The president-elect, from what we’ve seen thus far, is the
one who has been going about, gleefully showing off his certificate to Buhari,
to the Oba of Lagos, Oba Rilwan Akinolu, and similar dignitaries.
I’ve just seen this skit on the social media, where Tinubu was
described as “INEC-elect!” There is also this joke also on the social media
about the fact that Tinubu seems to love the ownership of a certificate so
much, despite his inability to produce just one credible and identifiable
sample, as prerequisite for eligibility at the polls. Back to back now,
Nigerians have elected two presidents who could not present the
constitutionally prescribed certificate of most basic academic qualification,
the West African School Certificate Examination, (WASCE) ordinary level
certificate. This is one of the precedents the inglorious Buhari regime has set
for Nigeria.
I’ve heard in certain quarters that the chicanery and evil
machinations which attended the presidential election were a coordinated plot
to deny Atiku Abubakar of outright victory. Evidence from raw scores from over
160,000 polling units across the country points to the unassailable lead of the
former vice president. Atiku has fought many legal battles all the way to the
Supreme Court of Nigeria, excelling in almost all his judicial interrogations
of the Constitution and other laws. The world must not forget Atiku’s
lion-hearted opposition to the third term ambition of his former principal,
Olusegun Obasanjo, which remains at the subsisting beef between both men, till
this day. The gentle and genteel Atiku believes the rule of law should be
enabled to develop the needed tap roots to guide the evolution of our
democratic system. Many of those running for elective offices unencumbered
today are beneficiaries of Atiku’s selflessness in years past.
Atiku may yet be president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Olukayode Ariwoola, the Chief Justice of Nigeria, (CJN), and his colleagues
have a responsibility to prosecute a totally unbiased adjudication of matters
arising from the election. Atiku’s ultimate ambition and desire has always been
to witness in his time a country that works for everyone. In his quiet corner
as a private citizen, Atiku by the day, addresses issues and problems which are
otherwise commonplace and should have been dispensed within the structures of a
functioning, functional polity. Talk about “the individual as mini-government.”
The issues emanating from the polls will surely go all the way to the apex
court in the land for in anticipation of dispassionate arbitration. The
blatant, daylight rape of democracy on Saturday, February 25, 2023, must not be
allowed to stand. We must get to the core of the most recent electoral
brigandage, aided and abetted by INEC, if we must be taken seriously as a
country, and if our country deserves utmost loyalty from its people. Justice in
this conundrum must be very well served and be seen to be so served.
*Dr
Olusunle, poet and journalist, is a member of the Nigerian Guild of
Editors
No comments:
Post a Comment