IF WISHES were horses, beggars will ride, so goes a saying. The maxim speaks to those hell-bent on stopping the smooth transition of power from President Muhammadu Buhari to President-elect Bola Tinubu on May 29. The rabblerousers have been railing against the system since they lost the February 25 election. Where they should be circumspect, their action has become a byword for carelessness. Their attitude is since ‘we could not get it, no one else should’.
The bitterness exhibited by Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate Peter Obi and his running mate Datti Baba-Ahmed over the poll is beyond imagination. Nothing will satisfy them more than the cancellation of the election, which they claimed was rigged, but in places where they won, they deny this allegation of rigging. They are approbating and reprobating, as lawyers would say. They have gone to the tribunal to challenge the outcome of the election.
Despite being at the tribunal, they have resorted to self help to win. These democrats who believe so much in the tenets of democracy and rule of law cannot wait for the outcome of the case! They are in a hurry to get justice in their own way and have thus become a tribunal on their own, issuing warnings, threats, orders and all what not that they expect the President and the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Kayode Ariwoola to comply with. The long and short of their rambling is that the President and CJN would be acting unconstitutionally if Tinubu formally takes office on May 29.
In a magisterial tone, Baba-Ahmed, while pointing to no one in particular while appearing on a television programme on March 22 , declared: “I am saying to you, the President of Nigeria and the Chief Justice not to swear in Tinubu on May 29 because that would amount to a coup against democracy. I am being extreme because Tinubu did not win the election, we won it and the records are there”. Only Baba-Ahmed knows the records he was talking about. What is in the public domain is that Tinubu was validly declared the winner of the election on March 1 by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
It is a different kettle of fish if some people feel otherwise. That is bound to happen in an election and we have seen it happen around the world, even in the so-called advanced democracies. What matters is the way people disagree with an election and go about to pursue their grievances. In doing that, they are not expected to polarise their country. Candidates in an election with the love of their country at heart do not behave that way.
There is nothing bad in losing an election. What is bad is trying to overheat the system because of it, even where the loser strongly believes that he should have won. Those shouting “rigging, rigging” forget that it is not their duty to determine that. This is the tribunal’s job. Theirs is to provide overwhelming proof of the rigging to help the tribunal arrive at a just decision. They have no case, if they cannot do that. Cases are not built on sentiments or by whipping up the public to take to the streets.
They are also not built on threatening the President and CJN not to perform their constitutional duty as Baba-Ahmed did on television. Calling on the President and CJN not to participate, according to him, “in an illegal act”, amounted to levying war against the country. In effect, Baba-Ahmed was saying that the President should stay in office beyond May 29, after completing his constitutionally- approved second and final term of four years, while the CJN should not, on the traditionally-recognised Inauguration Day, swear in Tinubu, the validly elected president.
Now, who is acting in breach of the Constitution. Obviously, it is Baba-Ahmed, whose tantrums are threatening societal fabrics. He claims to know the law and I think he should as the owner of a university that runs a law degree programme. According to him, Section 134 (2), which talks about winning 25 percent of votes cast in at least two-thirds of the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), is self explanatory and so needs no further interpretation by the tribunal. On the basis of his own interpretation that Tinubu did not fulfil the requirement, he wants the inauguration cancelled. The section is only self explanatory to the extent of Baba-Ahmed’s wishful thinking.
If Section 134 (2) has interpreted itself, why then is he and his principal asking the tribunal to interpret it again in order to settle the dispute over the election? May we remind him that he and Obi are at the tribunal mainly because of their contention that the winner of the election must score 25 percent in FCT. Since he has already decided the case in their favour, we wait to see if the tribunal and eventually the Supreme Court will see it that way too. Baba-Ahmed, Obi and their supporters should exercise patience.
It is in their own selfish interest that they do not want the inauguration to hold; they are not considering the consequences of that on the society. They will lose nothing if the inauguration holds, while the country will suffer huge loss if it does not hold. Since Buhari cannot constitutionally remain in office after May 29, who will then be President? Someone or people selected by them since they are kicking against Tinubu’s inauguration? Their plan to foist an interim government on the country through the backdoor won’t work. Nigerians are wiser than that.
The country is in transition and representatives of the outgoing Buhari administration and the incoming one have been working together to ensure a seamless handover which Baba-Ahmed is seeking to truncate. He should stop wasting his time trying to incite their supporters into acts of insurrection as Trump did in the United States (US) on January 6, 2021, after losing the November 3, 2020 election to President Joe Biden. They call themselves decent; they refer to themselves as agents of change and champions of the masses.
They say they are different from those who brought Nigeria down to its knees. They say they are everything good and beautiful; the light and the salt of the earth. We are not denying that, but they should live and not just talk it. Their glib talk resonates with their wildness. They are preaching anarchy, instead of peace, and appealing to their supporters to await the outcome of their petition at the tribunal. What a double faced kind of people. If this is the picture of the future of Nigeria they are talking about, then we are doomed.
Nothing captures their double faced nature more than the video-clip of Baba-Ahmed’s response to a question in that March 22 television interview, which is featured here today. I leave you to draw your conclusion from it.
