By Ikechukwu Amaechi
On Tuesday, April 4, Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information and Culture, did in the U.S. what he knows how best to do – fib. Mohammed, in Washington DC on official engagements with some international media organisations, including the Washington Post, Voice of America, Associated Press and Foreign Policy Magazine, accused the Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, and his running-mate, Datti Baba-Ahmed, of inciting people to violence over the February 25 presidential election.
The News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, quoted the minister as saying: “Obi and his Vice, Datti Ahmed, cannot be threatening Nigerians that if the president-elect, Bola Tinubu, of the All Progressives Congress, APC, is sworn in on May 29, it will be the end of democracy in Nigeria. This is treason… Obi’s statement is that of a desperate person, he is not the democrat that he claimed to be. A democrat should not believe in democracy only when he wins the election.”
Of course, Obi never said so but it is
convenient for Lai Mohammed and the APC to lie against him. But let us stretch
Mohammed’s logic a little bit. Democracy is “government of the people, by the
people, for the people”, as espoused by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in one
of his best known speeches, “The Gettysburg Address”, on November 19, 1863. So,
for any government to wear the label of democracy, it must be a product of the
choice of a majority of the people in a free and fair election. The February 25
poll did not meet that threshold. So, any government therefrom can be anything
but democratic. That was what Datti Baba-Ahmed said. I dare say his position is
neither treasonous nor fascistic.
Lai
Mohammed was also quoted as saying: “We have come here to balance that skewed
narrative and to tell the world unambiguously that the just concluded general
elections in Nigeria is the fairest, most transparent and authentic in the
history of Nigeria.” That is a white lie, a tall tale. There is almost a
unanimity of opinion that the just concluded elections in Nigeria are the worst
ever in the country’s chequered political odyssey. It is so bad that even those
declared winners by the Professor Mahmoud Yakubu-led Independent National
Electoral Commission, INEC, are so ashamed of their “victory” that they dare
not celebrate.
Even if those who “won”, for whatever reason
refused to roll out the drums, which I must say is not in their character,
Nigerians who purportedly voted for them ought to celebrate. Such celebrations
are spontaneous like what happened in Abia State when INEC declared Dr Alex
Otti of the Labour Party winner of the governorship election. The entire state
erupted in wild jubilation. The same thing happened in Kano when the New
Nigeria Peoples Party, NNPP, candidate, Abba Kabir Yusuf, was declared
governor-elect. Despite the strange Lieutenant Colonel Buka Suka Dimka-type
dawn to dusk curfew after the February 13, 1976 abortive military coup, earlier
imposed by the Kano State government, millions of NNPP supporters flooded the
streets, in defiance, to celebrate their victory.
But at the presidential level, we have a president-elect who, rather than sitting in his royal court as the president-in-waiting receiving local and international statesmen, is in hiding, literally, with no one knowing his exact whereabouts. Other than for the reason of fat estacodes, there is no justification for that trip.
To borrow a football parlance, this is injury time and there is some cleaning out to do. The elections were monitored and reported by both international election observers and media, including the ones that Lai Mohammed visited. Most of the foreign correspondents were dodging bullets and evading political thugs of the godfathers in Lagos, Rivers and Kano as their Nigerian counterparts.
So, the journalists reported what they saw and not what Peter Obi told them. The reports of the observer missions which impugned on the integrity of the process was based on what they saw, not what they were told and a million visits by the minister, a whopper specialist, to misinform cannot change the reality, which is: the 2023 elections were highly flawed and any government arising therefrom cannot, but suffer legitimacy crisis.
When I lamented last week about the “hypocrisy of the self-styed Nigerian progressives” I had Lai Mohammed and his ilk in mind. And not disappointing during his U.S. trip, the minister claimed that in challenging the election results in court, there was no pathway to victory for Obi and Atiku Abubakar, the PDP presidential candidate, because neither of them met the constitutional requirements.
“The Constitution has stringent criteria for anybody who wants to be president of the country. Not only must he have the plurality of votes cast in an election, he must also have scored one-quarter of votes cast in at least 25 states. Only the president-elect met the criteria by scoring 8.79 million votes and having one-quarter of all the votes cast in 29 states of the federation,” he said.
He said Atiku who came second with 6.9 million votes was only able to get one-quarter of the votes cast in 21 states, while “Obi came third with 5.8 million votes but won only one-quarter of votes cast in 15 states. You cannot win an election in a poll where you came a distant third position and failed to meet constitutional requirements.”
I don’t know where
the minister got his figures from but he deliberately lied with an intention to
misinform. The result Yakubu declared at 4.00 a.m on Wednesday, March 1 said
Tinubu garnered 8,794,726 votes, Atiku came second with 6,984,520 votes, and
Obi polled 6,101,533 votes to place third. So, where did Lai Mohammed get the
5.8 million votes he awarded Obi?
A total of 2,693,193 votes separated Tinubu and Obi. That is no shellacking. The three candidates won in 12 states with Obi as the only one that secured the mandatory 25 per cent in the FCT, Abuja. That cannot be “a distant third position” by any stretch of the imagination.
Besides, the same Lai Mohammed who today does not see any pathway to an Obi
victory in the courts because he came “a distant third”, was there when the
Supreme Court found a pathway three years ago for Hope Uzodimma who came a
distant fourth in the March 9, 2019 elections to become governor of Imo
State.
In that election, Emeka Ihedioha, PDP candidate, polled 273,404 votes ahead of the Action Alliance candidate, Uche Nwosu, who scored 190,364 votes. The All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA, candidate, Ifeanyi Ararume, came third with 114,676, while APC’s Uzodimma polled 96,458.
The APC didn’t even win a single seat in the 27-member Imo State House of Assembly, yet, a seven-member panel of the Supreme Court, led by Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun, unanimously created a pathway for Uzodimma to become governor. That is the hypocrisy that defines the conduct of APC and its demagogues. After the 2023 elections, the party’s propaganda machinery is on full throttle.
Buhari promised Nigerians free and fair elections but delivered the worst. And to cover their vile tracks, they are accusing Obi of treason. The question is how? Did Obi commit treason by challenging the outcome of the elections in court? Did he commit treason by telling his supporters to remain calm as he tries to convince the courts that the man Mahmoud Yakubu declared president-elect didn’t win the February 25 presidential election? What is treasonable in his insistence that he won the election?
For no crime whatsoever other than contesting the presidential election, Obi has been subjected to invidious harassment by the Nigerian State since February 25. He has been cajoled to leave the country or face the consequences. He has been warned to stop moving about and meeting with people.
The Nigerian State is practically stripping
him naked, poring over his mails, listening to his private telephone
conversations and combing through every business transaction he has made in the
last 10 years. Every movement of his is monitored by the Nigerian State and
puerile dramas are staged even in aircraft by paid mischief-makers in an
attempt to soil his reputation.
They
claim he is the “most dangerous” Nigerian politician alive today and he must be
contained. That is what this treason allegation is all about. It has nothing to
do with any offence Peter Obi committed. Treason is the crime of betraying
one’s country, especially by attempting to kill or overthrow the sovereign or
government. Peter Obi has no such capacity. He neither controls the military
nor the police. Those baying for his blood should let him be.
*Amaechi, publisher of TheNiche, is a commentator on public issues
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