2023 Presidential Election: Chimamanda Adichie Writes President Biden

"The smoldering disillusionment felt by many Nigerians is not so much because their candidate did not win as because the election they had dared to trust was, in the end, so unacceptably and unforgivably flawed. Congratulating its outcome, President Biden, tarnishes America’s self-proclaimed commitment to democracy. Please do not give the sheen of legitimacy to an illegitimate process. The United States should be what it says it is."

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Dear President Biden,

Something remarkable happened on the morning of February 25, the day of the Nigerian presidential election. Many Nigerians went out to vote holding in their hearts a new sense of trust. Cautious trust, but still trust. Since the end of military rule in 1999, Nigerians have had little confidence in elections. To vote in a presidential election was to brace yourself for the inevitable aftermath: fraud.

*Chimamanda Adichie 

Elections would be rigged because elections were always rigged; the question was how badly. Sometimes voting felt like an inconsequential gesture as predetermined “winners” were announced.

A law passed last year, the 2022 Electoral Act, changed everything. It gave legal backing to the electronic accreditation of voters and the electronic transmission of results, in a process determined by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The chair of the commission, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, assured Nigerians that votes would be counted in the presence of voters and recorded in a result sheet, and that a photo of the signed sheet would immediately be uploaded to a secure server. When rumors circulated about the commission not keeping its word, Yakubu firmly rebutted them.

On Bola Tinubu's Chatham House Visit

 By Wole Olubanji

I find it funny that political leaders in Nigeria are more inclined to speak to foreign entities about their country than they are with their people. I am not saying there is anything wrong with openness to cross-national ideas, but there is a problem with suggesting the unworthiness of the press or people of one's country. 

It became a tradition with Buhari that some of us started awaiting the next presidential trip abroad to know the take of the President on policies and national issues. Is it the case that these people think us unworthy of their perspectives on the job they were hired by us to do? 

Impeaching Buhari? History Will Deliver A Harsher Verdict!

 By Olu Fasan

Two weeks ago, some senators gave President Muhammadu Buhari six weeks to tackle the worsening insecurity in the country or face impeachment. Speaking after a closed-door session, the Senate minority leader, Phillip Aduda, said: “So, we agreed that we will give the President an ultimatum failing for which we will move to give an impeachment notice.”

Of course, the threat to impeach President Buhari is not a credible one, and the presidency wasted no time in poopooing it. In a statement, the presidency dismissed the threat as “performative and babyish antics”. Femi Adesina, President Buhari’s senior media adviser, later described those behind the impeachment threat as “the minority of minorities” and accused them of giving “flippant ultimatums”, saying “it’s bravado”!

*Buhari 

In his characteristic condescension, Adesina was making the point that, with both Houses of the National Assembly controlled by the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, the dissident legislators lacked the numbers, two-thirds majority of all members of each House, to impeach the President. True. But that would change if APC members in the National Assembly put country before party, as British Conservative Members of Parliament did recently when they removed their own errant leader and prime minister, Boris Johnson, from power.