By Ugo Onuoha
Nigeria’s federal government of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and its enforcer, the [In]dependent National Electoral Commission (INEC) must be ruing their failure to stop by any means, fair or foul, Mr. Peter Obi, candidate of the Labour Party (LP or Elup) from being on the ballot in the February 25th presidential and national assembly elections. If the numerous youths of this country had not been on the ballot through their chosen team— Obi and Datti-Ahmad – the President, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari regime and the APC would have casually walked away with the numbing electoral heists of February 25th and March 18th.
If the presidential contest had been the about the usual Peoples Democratic Party represented by Alhaji Atiku Abubakar versus Alhaji Bola Tinubu’s APC, Tinubu and APC and their collaborators would have been celebrating since March 1st when INEC awarded them the presidential trophy in the dead of the night when majority of Nigerians were sleeping. Nigerians were expected to wake up to a ‘faith accompli’ and to the phrase of ‘go to court’ by INEC and APC to the candidates and political parties who believed that they were raped and robbed.
It appears that as far as the regime
and the APC are concerned, the PDP does not matter in the ongoing contest for
the soul of Nigeria. The PDP is their traditional customers and they have the
antidote to whatever problems they would pose in the aftermath of any election.
But nothing prepared Gen. Buhari, Alhaji
Tinubu and the APC for the calibrated ‘irritations’ of the ‘upstart’ LP and
what they now labeled the insurgency of the many young and not too young
Nigerians who rooted for an Obi presidency.
They are matching the state and the awesome propaganda machinery and disinformation paraphernalia of the ruling regime, the party and the president [s]elect foot soldiers grit for grit. And this has angered the Nigerian state and the APC so much so that a resort to state violence appears to be inevitable. The ground is being prepared at home and even abroad for a possible scotch earth operation.
The outcomes of the results
of the 2023 elections were the first time in the last 24 years that the winners
of the ruling party were fretful, irritated, uncertain, unsure, violent and
threading towards fully deploying the coercive instruments of state power to
bludgeon opposition parties, demurring civil society groups and skeptical
ordinary folks into accepting the results of the elections that had been widely
regarded as fraudulent. Ordinary folks,
domestic and foreign observer groups came to the same conclusions about the
elections.
But APC’s
Josef Goebbels, read Alhaji Lai Mohammed, whose grandson once asked why so many
Nigerians regarded him as a serial liar was in the United States of America
recently to beg for the world to recognise the recent [s]elections in Nigeria
and to congratulate the ruling party’s candidate who was declared the winner of
the fraudulent presidential election.
He
reportedly approached some influential Americans to help make a pitch for
Nigeria’s regime for the acceptance of a flawed election and a grabbed and
snatched mandate. A lone voice spoke in support and struggled to justify how
the ruling party won. They did not gain traction. Mohammed who is the minister
of information and culture was also alleged to have a firm mandate from the
regime to engage a lobby and a public relations firm to help fend off the
global reproach that Nigeria has become in wake of what was supposed to be
consequential election.
The APC regime was birthed in falsehood, propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, lies and deceit right from inception in 2015. And it must be conceded that the party and its apparatchiks were good at the tools they deployed to win elections in 2015, if winning by deceit is acceptable. But propaganda could only take you thus far in governing a diverse but not too demanding country like ours. Everything has its expiry date. It could also be that the now generation of Nigerians whose futures are imperil because of the spectacularly failed administration of the APC these past eight years have found an antidote to the lies of the ruling party.
In
America, an apparently frustrated Mohammed told his listeners that the INEC
deliberately shut down its server and disabled IREV, the portal that would have
enabled Nigerians to monitor the results from the almost 177,000 polling units
nationwide online and real-time, because hackers laid siege to the server and
portal to corrupt and compromise the results. He was still spewing his lies in
Washington DC when Nigerians, especially those who called themselves OBIdients
[supporters of Peter Obi and Datti-Ahmad of the LP], called him out. They said
Mohammed who has almost perfected the art of lying has lied yet again. They
reminded the lying minister that his latest version of the February 25th
industrial scale election fraud was the third to be manufactured by the regime
and its comrades-in-crime.
They
told the junketing minister and the world that the INEC had earlier given two
weak and laughable versions of why their server failed and the IREV collapsed.
One indefensible story by INEC was that the systems which they had hyped prior
to the elections as game-changers were afflicted by glitches. But when they
were asked a simple question of how the same server and IREV which delivered
seamless results of the national assembly election held same time as the
presidential election suddenly failed, they went mum. To the best of my
recollections, INEC has still yet to answer that simple question. The second
rationalization by INEC for the fraud of that day, which was also lame and pathetic,
was that their digital infrastructure was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the
nationwide elections.
They
claimed that they neglected to upscale the system to withstand the shock of the
traffic. The tech-savvy younger elements dismissed this claim as an after-
thought. They warned that if the election management body continued with this
line of argument, then ranking officers of INEC should be charged to court for
sabotage. Faced with the shame of having been caught red-handed, Mohammed made
a feeble attempt to eat his lies.
Boxed
into a corner and facing global opprobrium, Mohammed went for the nuclear
option. He alleged without any shred of evidence that Obi and Datti who are in
court to challenge the presidential election results, and their supporters were
planning insurrection and treason. He also alleged that the ‘accused’ were
plotting to upstage the regime and then install an interim government. Again,
Mohammed and the APC made themselves laughing stock.
The last time this country had an interim national government (ING), it was installed by a sitting military regime. Now a sitting civilian administration is foolishly suggesting that ordinary folks who are not in control of the police, the armed forces and other security agencies were plotting to install an ING. Nigeria’s secret police even said that they knew the persons behind the plot. But when challenged to name names and indeed arrest and charge such persons to court, they recoiled into their shell.
We are talking about the same so-called Directorate of State Services (DSS) that has failed to deploy intelligence to arrest kidnappers who routinely and brazenly used public and open telephone lines to demand and collect millions of Naira in ransom payments from the families of their victims. The same agency has been unable, or probably they have neglected, to curb frequent killings by so-called herders in parts of the country. As we write, herders were reported to have resumed their killing spree after observing a ceasefire during the recent [s]elections.
Between 60 and 80 persons were reported killed in
Benue state last week. The saddest development in the current saga arising from
the recent fraudulent elections is the apparent recruitment of our only Nobel
Laureate, Wole Soyinka, into the ranks of the triumvirate of evil doers and
justifiers. For the first time it appears he has overreached himself. He even
assumed the garb of a candidate in the presidential election and summoned the
vice presidential candidate of the LP Datti-Ahmad to a one-on-one television
debate.
He
got a humiliating answer when he was told pointedly that the only condition to
accept his invitation was that he would commit to bring the man he was fronting
for, Tinubu, to partake of the debate. There will be no need to recount the
pillorying he has received from equally enlightened folks from across Nigeria.
Prof. Soyinka has been thoroughly demystified with his not too ennobling past
utterances and activities dug up and pasted all over the social and
conventional media. With APC’s lying merchants and their proxies in the battle
for the soul of Nigeria on the back foot, citizens should prepare for a reign
of terror. The assurance, however, is that the troublers of Nigeria will still
not win.
*Onuoha is a
commentator on public issues
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