Category: Saturday

It is obvious that the same constellation of forces- opposition politicians, sections of the media, ethnically motivated intellectuals and partisan clerics – who have conspired to discredit and delegitimize the outcome of the 2023 presidential election because it did not follow their utterly misbegotten predilections, will stop at nothing to cast doubt on the integrity of any judicial pronouncements on petitions before the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) once such does not accord with their preconceived notions and preferences.

Without any reference to empirical facts or logical analysis, most of those who belong to these categories contend that the 2023 presidential elections were the worst ever in the country’s political history. Those who make such absurd and ridiculous averments were possibly far away on planet Mars and so did not witness the so patently flawed elections of 1983 in the Second Republic or those of 2003 and 2007 in this dispensation since 1999.

Right now, there is a fierce battle raging for the Speakership of the House of Representatives. While the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) won a comfortable majority in the Senate with 59 seats, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) won 37 seats while for the first time ever, the Labour Party (LP) won 7 seats and other smaller parties had 5 seats. The outcome of the election in the upper chamber can certainly not be described as a landslide victory for the APC as the opposition parties held their own in a keenly contested election. The APC had only eight seats more than the opposition parties combined which speaks to a stiff competition and is one of the key hallmarks of a credible election.

In the House of Representatives, the keenness of the context emerges in even bolder relief. The opposition parties combined have won more seats than the ruling APC. The latter must surely tap the depths of its ingenuity to ensure that its candidates for the various leadership positions in the lower chamber triumph for the opposition parties have the numbers to cause an upset should they succeed in putting together a common front. As the Leadership newspaper put it, “Since the introduction of the Presidential system of government in 1979, no ruling party has failed to win a majority in the two chambers of the National Assembly. Should the numbers claimed by the opposition be confirmed, it would be a first”.

Yet, this is an election that intellectually fraudulent characters are so desperately trying to denude of integrity and credibility albeit in futility. Suffice it to say that the National Assembly elections which took place on the same day and at the same time as the presidential polls only mirrors the stiffness of the competition that characterized the latter. This column has spent the last few weeks analyzing the irrefutable logic of the presidential election and adducing empirical facts why the results could not have been otherwise that there is no reason for these to detain us any longer.

Those who claim the elections were massively rigged simply offer arbitrary assertions – no rational argument, no empirical validation, no statistical demonstrations. The Director-General of the Labour Party (LP), Campaign Organization the otherwise perceptive Mr Akin Osuntokun, for instance, asserted in a television interview that his candidate, Mr Peter Obi, won at least one million votes in Lagos! Just like that! He does not tell us by what mystical alchemy he arrived at this magical abracadabra!

Our concern in this piece, however, is with the no less strenuous attempts to discredit the judiciary as an institution and shorn it of all dignity and integrity now that the battle for the 2023 presidential elections has, predictably, shifted to the courts. Ever before aggrieved parties had even filed their petitions before the PEPT, there had been an attempt to frame the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Kayode Ariwoola, as partisan and traveling in disguise to hold a clandestine meeting with the President-elect in London. The abysmal falsehood failed catastrophically.

Now, that the PEPT has begun sitting, there has been the resort to subtle blackmail, open threats and intimidation to browbeat the judiciary into arriving at decisions in tune with the fancies of ethnic political and intellectual entrepreneurs and jaundiced social media attack dogs.

Perhaps the most reckless in this regard were the threats issued against the judiciary by the Vice-Presidential candidate of the LP, Mr Baba Datti-Ahmed, warning of dire consequences if the victory of the APC’s Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, was upheld by the courts. The attempt by Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, to correct such aberrant, fundamentally anti-democratic behavior was met with torrents of abuse and insults by a horde of social media rodents most of whom are unworthy to untie the global icon’s shoe laces. But it is instructive that since then Datti-Ahmed has refrained from continuing on that path of ultimate self-immolation.

Read Also: Attempt to blackmail elected Rep lawmaker won’t succeed – Group

No less thoughtless and pedestrian was the outburst of the National President of the Nigeria Labour Congress ( NLC), Comrade Joseph Ajaero, who, shortly after the constitution of the election petitions panels, thundered that “the Labour Centre will create a “hall of shame” for those judges that undermine the tenets of the judiciary and come up with ridiculous judgements on election petitions”. The clearly erratic comrade did not tell us who qualifies to determine whether or not a court judgement is ridiculous. It would appear that any judgement that is not in line with Ajaero’s prejudiced thinking would be defined by him as ridiculous.

Of course, the NLC President is entitled to his display of intellectual shallowness. But he does a great discredit to the depth of cerebral talent available within the rank and file of the Labour movement. It remains to be seen whether the cadres of the Labour movement will allow themselves to be led by the nose by an essentially ethnically actuated leadership such as the likes of Ajaero offers. But then, we have heard little or nothing about this “hall of shame” for judges since then and we can only hope that the good comrade has yielded to wise counsel and is treading a more cautionary path.

Other attempts to influence the outcome of the

petitions before the PEPT have been more subtle, intellectually nuanced and refined. For instance, at a recent interaction with the media, the Archbishop Emeritus of the Abuja Diocese of the Catholic Church, John Cardinal Onaiyekan, averred that all eyes are on the judiciary to finish the job the INEC did ‘halfway’ during the February 25 election. In his words, “All eyes are on the court. We tried our best to vote; we were told to go to court. We are now in court. All eyes are on the court. We have trust in the court that they finish the job that INEC did halfway”.

The problem is that I am unaware that INEC did any job ‘halfway’. It has conclusively announced the outcome of the election and is stoutly defending its decision at the tribunal. Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, the cerebral Archbishop is not in court. The presidential candidates of the PDP, LP and APM as well as their parties are. Again, are the judges bound to come to a decision that aligns with the good cleric’s desire or else be upbraided and condemned? The court is the constitutionally designated channel for aggrieved persons in elections to seek redress. Once relevant parties have chosen this path, the courts should be given breathing space to perform their statutory functions.

Also in his homily during the last Easter celebration, the Bishop of the Sokoto Diocese of the Catholic Church, Bishop Hassan Kukah, had his own admonition for the judges. In his words, “To the Honorable Justices of the Bench: You face difficult challenges ahead and you are mortals. The future of our country hangs on your deliberations. I will not judge you. I can only pray that God gives you grace. It will be up to you to decide how you use that gift which no amount of influence or power can buy”. Continuing he said, “It is sad that your hard-earned reputation is undergoing very severe stress and pressure from those who want Justice on their own terms. Nigerians are looking up to you to reclaim their trust in you as the interpreters of our laws”.

Honestly, this kind of politically motivated sermon adds to the avoidable “severe stress and pressure” put on our judges. It amounts to insidious emotional and spiritual blackmail. They should be left to do their jobs in accordance with their consciences rather than be hectored, no matter how subtly, through unwarranted ecclesiastical intrusions into their decision making processes. This is particularly so from supposedly objective clerics whose partisan inclinations are hardly disguised.

And back to the highly revered John Cardinal Onaiyekan who threw his weight behind calls that the proceedings at the PEPT be broadcast live. As he put it, “It is in the interest of the judiciary to allow the people to see what is happening, even if it means adjusting their rules. Voters don’t havethe locus standi in court to challenge election outcomes. The matter is left to the candidates. That’s why it’s important that the court proceedings are seen live on the tv”. Of course, the PEPT has since thrown out this preposterous proposition. It is another subtle bid to undermine the integrity of the judiciary.

The insinuation is that unless the proceedings in court are being watched live on television, the judges cannot be trusted to serve the cause of justice. In any case, what percentage of the public who will presumably be the tv audience are intellectually, legally and technically equipped to make meaningful sense of the proceedings they are watching live? I presume that viewing centers across the country will make brisk business as the court proceedings will become the equivalent of football contests in the premier league with the side with the loudest cheering social media mob coasting home to victory. It makes scant sense to me.

Ever since the Second Republic, the judiciary has been a critical arbiter in resolving electoral disputes between ever so bitter contestants. Before now, parties and contestants were preoccupied with seizing control of the electoral umpire itself and thereby influencing electoral processes and determining electoral outcomes irrespective of the will of the electorate. However, with systematic constitutional amendments over time to strengthen the institutional autonomy of the Electoral Commission and the deployment of technology which has reduced the capacity of electoral officials to manipulate the process, it has become more difficult to rig elections particularly with respect to the 2023 elections. This has accentuated the role of the courts in being the final determinants of winners and losers in elections.

As Professor Richard Joseph noted in his classic, ‘Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria’, this is a most unenviable challenge for the judiciary to shoulder. As he presciently observed in the context of the contentious 1983 elections, “Yet, if FEDECO could not be the Leviathan needed to supervise the 1983 elections, the Nigerian judiciary was even less able to fill this role. The courts could not operate in any salutary way when drawn into the process of vote adjusting, of having to decide which of conflicting, and questionable, sets of results were most “improbable”, which impromptu solutions by overwhelmed election officials were most acceptable, which degree of malfeasance was excessive and which excusable. In the context of Nigeria in 1983, every decision of the judiciary could be made to appear, to some extent, to be the wrong one. Truth and fairness had become subordinate to political partisanship”. Not much has changed over four decades after. Our judges already have a Herculean task on their hands. Partisan clerics would do well not to compound their problems.

The point that Professor Joseph was making as regards the dilemma of the judiciary in deciding electoral petitions was amply demonstrated in the petition by Chief Obafemi Awolowo against the election of Alhaji Shehu Shagari in the 1979 election. The judiciary was called upon to decide what constituted two-thirds of 19 states. It came to the controversial decision that this was 12 two-thirds and not 13 as defined by the petitioners. Having come to this decision, it now had to decide what constituted two-thirds of Kano State, the 12th contentious state in which Shagari had substantial votes but did not meet the 25% threshold.

Quoting from the majority judgement of the apex court on the matter, Professor Kole Omotosho in his classic ‘ Just Before Dawn’ writes, “I see Exhibit T2. Under Kano State, the average total votes cast for the NPN was 19.94X. I see Exhibit T3. There are 38,760 possible two-thirds of Kano State going by local government area. In the absence of a computer, it will take at least one year to declare the result in respect of two-thirds of Kano State”. And the author notes wryly, “And the military did not have a year. In fact they had only a few days”. That illustrates the dilemma of the judiciary in determining election cases.

Even as this year, 2023, was being ushered in, the light of life was being snuffed out of one of the most cerebral, productive, prolific and patriotic Nigerian intellectuals of his generation – the late Professor Ayo Olukotun. More than five months after the demise of this stellar scholar who was one of the country’s best and brightest political scientists with specialization in political communication focusing particularly on the linkage between media and governance, his absence continues to be sorely felt and this sense of loss will persist far beyond our contemporary era. Although a bright young writer, Tunde Odesola with a unique literary style has taken over the back page column of The Punch on Fridays, it is still impossible for his ardent readers not to miss Professor Olukotun’s profound, stimulating and insightful offerings on diverse contemporary issues in that space for several years before his transition.

A public intellectual whose contributions to national discourse always evinced the highest standards of rigour, maturity, sobriety and restraint while being scathing and unsparing in its excoriation of societal ills and flagellation of erring leadership, it is not surprising that Professor Olukotun was found worthy to be appointed as the pioneer occupant of the Oba Sir (Dr) Sikiru Adetona Professorial Chair of Governance situated at the Department of Political Science, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye. Those familiar with the high standards with which the revered Awujale of Ijebuland is always associated readily testify that he would go only for scholars of the highest caliber to occupy his generously endowed academic Chair in Political Science.

One of the requirements of the occupant of the Chair is the delivery of an annual inaugural lecture on subjects relevant to the political and democratic development of Nigeria. In furtherance of this purpose, Professor Olukotun delivered the maiden lecture in this regard titled, ‘Governance and the Media in an Emergent Democracy: A Study of the Role, Record and Changing Profile of the Nigerian Media (1999-2017)’. Shining radiantly through this incisive lecture is Professor Olukotun’s thorough acquaintance with the Nigerian media terrain which is unsurprising given a career which in his own words “straddles town and gown, having alternated between university departments and editorial board rooms of newspapers”.

The lecture gives an elaborate portraiture of the state of the country’s media terrain in the period under consideration. He notes, for instance, “the phenomenal expansion in the media industry as a result of the liberalized political space, the exigencies of political competition warranting the replication of media outlets; as well as an economic boom riding on unprecedented increase in the price of oil in the world market for many of these “.

Thus, his research indicates that by 2015, for instance, Nigeria could boast of the biggest broadcast sector in Africa with 133 federal television, 122 state radio, 68 state television, 51 multi-channel, multi-point distribution services, 97 private radio, 43 private television, 63 federal radio and 27 campus broadcasting stations. This did not include community radios. In a similar vein, his research indicates that there are over 120 newspapers in the country not counting community publications “although many of these are shoe string enterprises which can capsize and sometimes reappear without notice”.

It is of course inevitable that the lecture also highlights the substantial increase in the range, role and influence of social media leading to “the growing number of Nigerians who are able to access the internet and social media networks, thus resulting in better engagement and participation of citizens in democratic discourse”. In his words, “It should be mentioned that the increasing use of social media platforms and internet application is a direct consequence of the continuous rise in the number of people who subscribe to the mobile telecommunications networks. The National Bureau of Statistics put the figure of subscribers at 86 million for 2016; up from 2.3 million subscribers in 2002”.

Even though the lecture considers diverse media genres such as print, electronic and digital, Olukotun narrows down primarily on the print media despite the downward trend in the circulation of newspapers in the period under reference because “newspapers continue to exercise considerable influence on policy making and enjoy a pedigree as arbiters of national conversation dating back to the anti-colonial and anti-military struggles. Hence, despite the fact that broadcasting and social media are increasingly relevant in a population made up preponderantly of youths, the focus on newspapers increasingly accessed online, is justified on account of their continuing influence “.

This lecture details virtually every instance of harassment and intimidation of journalists in the period between 1999 and 2017. It gives details of the economics of newspaper publishing and how prohibitive production costs are a key factor in the high attrition rate of publications. He dilated on the poor working conditions of Nigerian journalists, the non-payment of salaries by most media proprietors for prolonged periods and the link between the immiseration of the average journalist and the pervasive corruption that undermines the dignity and devalues the efficacy of the profession.

Casting a look at the ownership structure and spatial distribution of major publications, he notes that “although nine out of eleven major media institutions are located in Lagos, only three of these, The Punch, The Nation and National Mirror have Yoruba proprietors. Indeed, the emerging trend…is a preponderance (four out of eleven) of media owners from the Niger Delta area, a fact that may not be unrelated to the Petroleum-driven political economy of Nigeria and the incorporation of the elite from the Delta area into the national framework of accumulation and distribution of spoils”.

He notes the apparent breaking of the jinx of the all too frequent collapse of northern-based newspapers in what he describes as “the return of the north to Nigeria’s discourse map because of the rebirth of the Northern media in the years under study”. He contends that this rebirth is crucial especially within the context of Professor Wale Adebanwi’s jibe that Nigeria lacks a national media, but an Arewa media, Ngbati media and Nkenga media. Expatiating on this point, he notes that “What is of interest is the recent establishment and relative profitability of a clutch of newspapers based in Abuja such as Leadership, Daily Trust, People’s Daily and Abuja Inquirer among others…When you add to these, private television stations such as Desnims, founded by Halifa Baba-Ahmed, Gotell TV based in Yola, as well as the Kano based Radio Freedom owned by Bashir Dalbatu among others, one gets a sense of the bounce back of a northern regional media”.

Olukotun cites instances of success in the crusading role of the Nigerian media during this period including the forced resignation of the first Speaker of the House of Representatives in this dispensation, Salisu Buhari, for certificate forgery, the abortion of former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s third term agenda and the forced resignation of Ms Stella Odua, former Minister of Aviation as well as Mr Babachir Lawal, former Secretary to the Government of the Federation for alleged corrupt practices.

One interesting point made by Olukotun is what he describes as the negative impact on the media of “the incorporation of prominent journalists into an elaborate, spoils sharing arrangement through seductive appointments”. Amplifying on this, he notes that “One of the most prominent examples is Dr Reuben Abati, a widely respected columnist of the Guardian, who was appointed as President Goodluck Jonathan’s Special Adviser on Media and Communication. Before Abati, the late President Umaru Yar’Adua appointed Mr Olusegun Adeniyi, former editor of This Day to serve in the same capacity under his government; while President Muhammadu Buhari who took office on May 29, 2015, appointed the respected Femi Adeshina, former President of the Nigerian Guild of Editors to a similar position. This pattern is replicated around the states in the country and is believed by some to be one of the reasons why the media have lost their bite and for the most part failed to carry out investigative reporting”. This is certainly pertinent food for thought.

Despite his status, academic renown and reputation as one of the foremost political scientists with specialization on the politics of Africa particularly Nigeria, Professor Richard Joseph appears to have been substantially swayed by the largely propagandistic opinion polls that predicted a Peter Obi/Labour Party (LP) victory in the 25th February presidential election and the attempt to rely on this failure in electoral futurology to discredit the polls. In a brief critique of the election in the Chicago Tribune, the author of the classic, ‘Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria’ which was a rigorous and insightful analysis of the politics of the Second Republic, opined that “A highly touted system of electronic transmission of votes failed, leading to the manual collation of ballots. Accusations swirled that the failure was contrived so the results could be manipulated. Disregarding the protests on February 28 the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a former governor of the most populous State, Lagos, to be the elected President”.

Not surprisingly one of those quoted in Professor Joseph’s piece presumably with some subtle approbation was the globally acknowledged novelist and thinker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who in an open letter to President Joe Biden of the United States, had excoriated the election in which her fellow Igbo kinsman, Peter Obi, came third despite his much hyped pre-election probability of emerging triumphant in the polls.

Thus, echoing Chimamanda’s letter characterized by flawless prose reminiscent of her fiction but of negligible analytic value, Professor Joseph writes that “Peter Obi, a former governor from the South-East, galvanized a large following, particularly among youths, and was officially credited with 25% of the presidential vote. His ethnic group, the Igbos, feel excluded from Nigeria’s highest offices, and a fair share of power since the Biafran war of 1967-70. Obi’s “third force” poses a major challenge to the two-party dominant system”. Being substantially a fiction writer, Chimamanda can be forgiven for her imaginative flights of fancy in the realm of political analysis but not so a political scientist of Professor Joseph’s towering standing.

For one, within a decade after the Nigerian civil war, an Igbo man, the cerebral Dr Alex Ekwueme, had risen to become Nigeria’s Vice President in the Second Republic between 1979 and 1983. But for the military intervention of December, 1983, and the consequent prolonged absolutist rule, there is nothing to suggest that the dynamics and interplay of political forces would not have since produced an Igbo President. Again, during the respective presidencies of General Olusegun Obasanjo and Dr Goodluck Jonathan in this dispensation since 1999, qualified Igbo men and women occupied critical, influential and powerful national offices such that the hysteria of Igbo marginalization is mere emotive fantasy.

And while the dearth of Igbo representation particularly in the top hierarchy of the security architecture in the President Buhari Muhammadu administration was undesirable, the South-East has gained more in terms of infrastructural development in the region during the last eight years of the All Progressives Congress (APC) since 2015 than the preceding 16 years of the PDP despite the prominent positions of Igbos in government between 1999 and 2015. Professor Joseph thus ought to be more nuanced and restrained in his unquestioning regurgitation of the mantra of Igbo marginalization.

In any case, does the perceived marginalization of an ethnic group in high political offices in a complex, plural society like Nigeria mean that the apex political authority of the presidency will be conceded to them on a golden platter within the context of competitive elections even when they ignore the imperatives of negotiation, bargaining and bridge-building needed to actualize their objectives? If indeed Peter Obi’s “third force”, presumably the LP, has come to pose a major challenge to the two-party dominant system as posited by Professor Joseph, how come that the force of the veritable political “hurricane” had petered out by the governorship and State Houses of Assembly elections of March 18 with the LP winning only one governorship seat in Abia and even unable to win majority of legislative seats in Anambra, Peter Obi’s home state which he had previously governed for eight years?

Like Chimamanda, Professor Joseph makes much of the ‘large following’ supposedly enjoyed by Peter Obi among youths as a key factor in his undoubtedly impressive performance in the presidential election. But then, how come that his victories were in his ethnic South-East where he secured over 90% of the votes, Lagos and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), with considerable Igbo enclaves and Christian populations as well as the largely Christian-dominant areas of the South-South, Southern Kaduna, Plateau and Nasarawa states? Do we not have substantial youth populations among the electorate in the South-West, North-West, North-East and half of the North-Central where tremors of the supposed Obi electoral earthquake were hardly felt? All the claims of a national groundswell of youth support for Obi and the LP surely deserves more rigorous and serious analytic scrutiny.

Even then, Professor Richard Joseph is too honest an intellectual not to acknowledge the improvement in the electoral structures and processes in the 2023 elections relative to most previous elections. Thus, he states, “Were there machinations to secure his (Tinubu’s) commanding 37% of the popular vote? Perhaps, but that is not a novelty in Nigerian elections. However, the bar is set higher because of the work of many civil society groups, a new Electoral Act, huge government sums in improving INEC’s capacity and extensive social media”. Incidentally, Professor Joseph devotes a whole chapter in his magnum opus to ‘Electoral fraud and violence’ in the Second Republic.

As we noted last week, the 1979 elections, despite the undisguised partisan preferences of the military umpires of the election as represented by the General Olusegun Obasanjo regime, was competitive and credible just like this year’s elections were to objective and intellectually honest observers.

In the distinguished professor’s words in that book, “At 1.30am on the morning of 11 August 1983, a long five days after the first elections were held, Alhaji Shehu Shagari was declared re-elected President of Nigeria by a vote of 12,037,648 to 7,885,434 (for his nearest rival Obafemi Awolowo). Shagari’s vote had doubled from his 1979 total, that of Awolowo had increased by approximately 40 per cent. Of equal importance is the fact that Shagari obtained a minimum of 25 per cent in 16 states of the Federation, compared with 12 states in 1979…”.

Pinpointing the import of the NPN’s purported victory in 1983, Professor Joseph notes that “One major cause of the electoral disorder of 1983, as earlier advanced, was the effort by the NPN to move from being a ruling party whose strength exceeded that of other parties, to one which enjoyed a monopoly of power within the political system. To achieve this objective, it was necessary for the party to increase the size of its vote in the states it already controlled, through its control of the voter registration and voting process, and to pry away from the opposition the heart of their political bases”.

The keenness of the contest and the outcome of the elections, shows that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) did not even attempt the kind of electoral heist perpetrated by the NPN in 1983 in the February and March, 2023, elections. Even if the party had wanted to, the reforms referred to earlier by Professor Joseph had enhanced the institutional autonomy of the electoral umpire as well as the technology-driven transparency of the voting procedures particularly the introduction of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines, that made this impossible. Consequently, unlike the NPN which doubled its vote size between 1979 and 1983, the APC vote in the presidential election decreased from 15,191,847 in 2019 to 8,794,726 in 2023 while that of the PDP fell from 11,262,978 in 2019 to 6,984,520 in 2023.

Indeed, Professor Joseph ignores the fact that both Peter Obi who contested on the platform of the LP and Musa Kwankwaso’s New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) were break away key stakeholders from the PDP and they had a combined total of 7,598,204 votes. Had they not depleted the votes of the PDP in its erstwhile strongholds in the South-East, South-South and Kano states, the latter could very well have emerged victorious if it had contested the election as a cohesive whole. This speaks to the credibility of the election. Beyond this, while the APC won 19 states in the 2019 presidential elections and the PDP 17 states and the FCT, both parties won 12 states each in the 2023 polls with the LP winning in 11 states and the FCT and the NNPP sweeping Kano. Had Professor Joseph taken all these factors into consideration, and there is no reason why he shouldn’t have, he would have been unlikely to lend his not inconsiderable intellectual weight to dishonest attempts to dent the integrity of the elections.

In any case, the main reason cited in the public domain by the PDP and LP for questioning the credibility and integrity of the Presidential election was the non real time uploading of the results from polling units to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IREV) as admittedly promised by the electoral body. INEC has since explained that its system suffered unanticipated glitches which made it impossible for it to do so immediately but this commitment in its guidelines has since been complied with – and all the results now fully uploaded. Since all political parties have copies of results on designated forms signed by their polling agents, electoral and security officials, they should now be in a position to compare these hard copy of results in their possession with the uploaded figures on the IREV so as to demonstrate the discrepancies between both and the consequent alleged massive rigging in favor of Tinubu and the APC. To the best of my knowledge, only one Online medium has reported yet unverified differences in the results posted on the IREV portal and the actual results declared in one state.

The responsibility to credibly discredit the results on the IREV portal is particularly that of Peter Obi who vociferously claims to have won the election despite coming third. Just like Chimamanda, Professor Richard Joseph apparently places much store by the failures associated with the promised uploading of polling units results on IREV and the alleged implications on the outcome of the elections. But this appears to be treated only as a tangential issue in Peter Obi’s petition as the focus of his claims and prayers are on Tinubu’s alleged forfeiture of funds in the US almost three decades ago, the alleged illegibility of Tinubu’s Vice-Presidential candidate, Kashim Shettima to contest the election and Tinubu’s failure to score one-quarter of the votes cast in the FCT. None of these appear designed to demonstrate convincingly and conclusively that Obi won and should have been declared Victor in the election.

As a one time governor of Enugu State, Senator Chimaroke Nnamani, aptly put it in a statement this week, “Obi’s petition is dead on arrival. He does not have the spread or national appeal. His appeal to non-electoral matters is to de-market the President-elect and besmirch his reputation. His petition is ego-driven, a joke carried too far. His attempt to highlight non-electoral issues is trying to embarrass the President-elect. Obi now needs to come down from his high horse to allow sedate minds to negotiate on behalf of the Igbo and the South-East for a safe landing to include our stake in the national palaver and share of the accruals of the commonwealth”. Nnamani is a medical doctor and not a lawyer but he makes eminent sense in my view.

• This article was first published April 29, 2023