Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, first African-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Nkem Ekeopara is a contributing editor of USAfricaonline.com
Nigeria’s February-March 2023 elections and votes collation issues have made it the most contentious and fraudulent in the history of Nigeria. It is especially so for the February 25 disputed presidential election.
Let me reiterate the facts and figures.
For the 2023 elections, 93.4 million voters were registered. Out of this 93.4 million registered elegible voters, 48 million are youths and first-time voters. Indeed, the youths constituted 51.93 per cent of the registered voters.
Of this, 87.2 million collected their Permanent Voters Card (PVC), meaning that 93.6 per cent collected their PVCs.
Most were spurred by the promise of a new Nigeria that Peter Obi and his young running mate, Dr. Datti Baba-Ahmed were pushing convincingly, in their campaign stumps.
At the end of the day, valid votes counted less than 25 million. This is part of the stats that the Government of Britain ignored, rushed and recklessly applauded the presidential election, in particular. This figure does not reflect the turnout, enthusiasm and endurance of the Nigerian people, who against the elements stood to cast their votes till the next day, Sunday, February 26, 2023.
I have read the transcript of the interview Nigeria’s Info FM had with Ben Llewellyn (the British Deputy High Commissioner to Nigeria) on Sunday, March 26, 2023. That’s a month after the controversial presidential election.
He talked about visa ban for those who undermine democracy in Nigeria.
Among other things, he condemned a spokesman of the APC Presidential Campaign Council, Femi Fani-Kayode, for inciting violence against a people, the Igbo in Lagos.
I think someone needs to remind Llewellyn that his condemnation was too little, too late.
I was wondering where Llewellyn was when the APC presidential candidate Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu addressed his thugs and told them a few weeks to that election that:
“Power is not to be served in a restaurant. It’s not served a la carte. It’s what we are doing. Fight for it. Grab it. Snatch it and run.”
After this inflammatory statement, which went viral on the social media, Tinubu’s Man Friday, MC Oluomo, told anyone coming out to vote in the Lagos governorship election to stay at home if that person will not vote for the APC.
That threat was issued against the Igbo whose blood has, several times, been spilled in many areas of Nigeria’s vast political space, starting in Katsina in 1931, under the British watch.
What is the crime of the “uppity” Igbo, this time? Their crime this time is the outcome of the February 25 presidential election.
In that election, Peter Obi of the Labour Party, a young man with national and international appeal, who happened to be Igbo, had beaten the ruling APC’s Tinubu in Lagos. Obi defeated Tinubu in his fiefdom.
So, afraid to be humiliated in the gubernatorial election, they engaged in burning of Igbo-owned and south eastern-owned businesses, macheting, maiming, strangulating, killing and preventing them from exercising their civic right for those who were lucky to have PVC. At least, 21 fatalities were reported by the media and the international observers.
They were disenfranchised.
Those who managed to register faced problems from compromised INEC agents, officials and ethnic bigots made it impossible for them to pick their PVCs.
It’s praiseworthy to note that London-based Chatham House where the major candidates went to market their manifesto before the presidential election, stepped out of line, as it were, to objectively assess the election.
The world took notice of who among the four frontline candidates should lead Nigeria out of insecurity (terrorism, banditry, forceful sacking of different nationalities from their ancestral land by Fulani herdsmen, banditry and kidnapping); pervasive corruption, unacceptable high rate of graduate unemployment, perennial shortage of petroleum products, crude oil theft, burden of debt, rot in the educational and healthcare sectors, hyperinflation, incessant power cuts, poverty, denial of civil liberties, and the currency redesign fiasco etc.
Nigerians wanted a duo that will deploy technologies, technocrats and team spirit to curb these challenges.
Chatham House’s official reaction to the outcome of the Presidential election was unambiguously and factually stated:
“The INEC’s performance and controversies over these results mean that the electoral reforms and lessons declared to have been learned were not fully applied”, said Dr. Leena Koni Hoffmann, Associate Fellow, Africa Programme, at Chatham House.
In their preliminary reports issued on February 27 and March 21, the European Union Election Observation Mission (EU EOM) stated what could be regarded as a counterpoise to position of the British establishment:
“Public confidence and trust in INEC were severely damaged on 25 February due to lack of transparency and operational failures in the conduct of federal level polls. Up until the postponement, INEC continued to abstain from providing information, limiting its communication to a few press releases and ceremonial statements and hence failing to address public grievances and rebuild confidence in the electoral process”, according to Barry Andrews, EU EOM Chief Observer and member of the European Parliament.
In another damning report by International Republican Institute (IRI) and National Democratic Institute (NDI) Joint Election Observer Mission (JEOM) that was led by former Malawian President, Joyce Banda, JEOM posited that:
“The election fell well short of citizens reasonable expectations despite the much-needed reforms to the Electoral Act….”
Video evidence and documents show there are alterations of numbers and other criminal acts by some of these Nigerian politicians and individuals.
The United States, the EU and the international community should ensure that the appropriate statutes are deployed to bring them to book.
That’s the only way to stop a reoccurrence of the violence, impunity and the compromising of the process that we saw on February 25 and March 18, 2023.
