Elections: Is Anyone Still Listening To Mahmoud Yakubu?

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

Obviously, Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Professor Mahmoud Yakabu, must be in love with the sound of his own voice. That is why he keeps blabbing even when no one is listening. 

*Yakubu 

He is, once again, playing the game he knows how best – lying to himself and taking Nigerians for a ride. In doing that, he probably thinks he is fooling the people. 

But he never reckons with the admonition of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, who once said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” 

The mistake Yakubu is making is to be so presumptuous in thinking that he can fool all Nigerians all the time simply because he tried it in 2019 and succeeded. And he did an encore in the 2023 elections, and while the country’s apex court is set to legitimise his chicanery once again, truth is, this time around, the people are not fooled. 

The joke is on him. He will go down in history as the man who conducted Nigeria’s worst election, a man who took billions of his country’s scarce resources, promising free, fair and credible elections but delivered sham polls. 

He will be remembered as the man who staged a bloody coup against Nigeria’s democracy and it remains to be seen if the system will survive it. 

But why am I still writing about this democracy undertaker called Mahmoud Yakubu? Well, I had made up my mind that the INEC chairman is not worth my while because it takes a certain level of numbness to shame for anyone to do what he did and still doing. But the man has started talking again. He has

refused to leave Nigerians alone to mourn in silence, having murdered their democracy. He is all over the place, once again, making promises he does not intend to keep. As you read this, it will be exactly 16 days to the offseason governorship elections in Bayelsa, Kogi and Imo states on Saturday, November 11. And Yakubu is once again giving assurances. 

On October 14, he was in Kogi State where he vowed that the polling unit results of the upcoming elections will be uploaded on INEC’s Result Viewing Portal, IreV. IReV is an online platform where photographic pictures of polling unit results are meant to be uploaded using the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, machines as soon as voting and collation end at the various voting units. Yakubu touted the technology as the game-changer in the 2023 elections. 

Giving the assurances in October last year during the Commission’s quarterly meeting with political parties in Abuja, the INEC boss said: “On this note, let me once again reassure Nigerians that there is no going back on the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, for voter accreditation. There is no going back on the transmission of results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal, IreV, in real time on Election Day… We are committed to ensuring that the 2023 general election is transparent and credible, reflecting the will of the Nigerian people

He failed woefully to keep his own promise. Rather than real time uploading of results as promised, the results took days, weeks and even months to be uploaded to the IReV for the public to access. That is even where they were uploaded at all. As I write, eight months after the February 25 presidential election, the full result is yet to be uploaded to the IreV. The Commission blamed the delay on an unforeseen system glitch. Till date, it failed to tell Nigerians whether it was human or technical glitch. Meanwhile, the Presidential Election Petitions Court, PEPC, in September, ruled that IReV had no place in the legal process of counting and collation of results, thereby giving a seal of authority to INEC’s tomfooleries. 

The Supreme Court is set to travel the same judicial route today. So, if IReV has no place in the legal process of counting and collation of results and INEC agreed totally with the courts, what is Yakubu still talking about? Speaking with journalists at Ward 009, LEA School, Ganaja Village, Ajaokuta LGA, Kogi, penultimate Saturday where he claimed to have monitored the mock accreditation exercise ahead of the November 11 governorship elections, he said the uploading of result to the IReV is a matter of legal provision.

“The method is as provided by law – electronic accreditation, electronic upload of results on the IREV portal – and that is why we are doing this mock,” he said. “That’s going to be the procedure and it’s for that reason that I will advise you also, for those who are registered on the IREV portal, that in the next two hours or so, go to the IREV portal and you will see the result of the mock accreditation from all the three states. We are uploading, as we have done in previous elections.” Shouldn’t there be an end to fibbing? Why is the INEC chairman taking Nigerians for granted, treating them in such a cavalier manner?

Truth be told, it is presumptuous of him to believe that anyone is still listening because no one is. Nigerians are too busy these days to waste their time listening to a man that no one can place any stock on any word that comes out of his mouth. Maybe, he is yet to realise that but that is the reality. And worse, he brought the calamity upon himself. 

Perhaps, the question to ask is: if anyone is still interested in any election conducted by INEC superintended by Mahmoud Yakubu? Maybe the political thugs whose ranks are multiplying by the day are. Other than those, I doubt if any self-respecting Nigerian is. In the last general elections, Nigerians travelled from all over the world – Europe, America, Australia, Asia – to the country to vote, believing that their votes will count and be counted as promised by Mahmoud Yakubu, INEC and Muhammadu Buhari. 

They were sold a dummy. As you read this, seven Justices of the Supreme Court, none of whom voted in the last presidential election are set to make a final pronouncement on who won. The winner is not determined by the votes of the people, leaving many to ask why they bothered. When these off-season governorship elections are held on November 11, I doubt if any electorate from Imo who is living in Abia State, for instance, will bother going home to vote.

Same applies to the two other states. In any case, none of the combatants is hoping to be returned elected based on the votes of the people. Ours is a democracy where the votes of the people don’t count in elections. I foresee voter apathy. Many Nigerians, and I am one of them, have vowed never to have anything to do with elections in Nigeria for as long as Mahmoud Yakubu remains INEC chairman.

Even after him, it will take nothing short of a revolution to change people’s mindsets. Some will argue that such attitude is selfdefeating. And I ask: what does it matter if it is? On February 25 and March 18, Nigerians trooped out in their numbers to vote. What difference did it make? Nothing. Instead, they were insulted, bullied, maimed and some killed. And INEC went ahead to dance to the tunes dictated by the pipers. As long as Mahmoud Yakubu remains INEC chairman, no self-respecting Nigerian will have confidence in elections, not to talk of going out to vote.

*Amaechi is the publisher of TheNiche