But whoever thinks these jejune tricks will result in successively rigging any of the coming elections in the Southwest must think again
Just in case our dear president does not know, or knows but has forgotten, the South-west, aka Wild, Wild West, has been the grave yard of many a federal government of Nigeria. It has serially posed questions, especially at elections, bordering on the very survival of this country as we saw in 1966, 1983 and ’93 and barely escaped asking same questions in ’03 and ’07 when, under President Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigerians witnessed the most rigged elections anywhere under the sun. This was no design of the West as its peoples, the Yoruba, did not sit down anywhere to plan mayhem. Rather they were a victim of what GBOGUN GBORO captured beautifully in his column in The Nation’s edition of Thursday, January 02, 2014.
We will quote him, mutatis mutandis, at some length.
In the article: YORUBA NATION: TIME TO STAND STRONG, he wrote: ‘We must also make it clear to Nigeria that we are now much more determined to uphold and show our rejection of electoral fraud – that heinous disease that has periodically brought disaster upon Nigeria since 1964. The source of this Nigerian disease is no more than those in control of the federal government who, since independence, assumed that it is their prerogative to dictate, through fraudulent means, the outcome of elections in any part of the country. In the context of this disruptive assumption, respective electoral commissions, electoral tribunals and Appeal courts, as well as the Nigeria Police – have usually operated like invading armies wherever the people show abhorrence to this fraud; Yoruba land being the foremost of such areas. The result is that thousands of our young men have needlessly been dispatched to their early graves as was the case in 1965 – 1966 when hundreds were killed by Nigerian law-enforcement agencies all over the Western Region. In Ondo State in 1983 when falsified results were announced by federal authorities in the gubernatorial election, scores of those who rose to resist the fraud were again mowed down by the police. Similar examples abound as in the rigged 2007 gubernatorial election in Osun State when tens piled up in the morgue for weeks. The lesson here is that the Yoruba, having been accustomed to choosing their own rulers for over a thousand years, are too culturally attached to free and fair elections to tolerate electoral fraud.’
In the full knowledge of this Yoruba resistance, our current tormentors have devised two ingenious ways of achieving the same result without noisily showing their hands: the first is to abandon their own party in the choice of a hireling as gubernatorial candidate; a practice recently condemned by former President Obasanjo. The ‘candidate’ is then maximally supported: money, tonnes of it –after all, some 10 billion dollars in oil money remain unaccounted for, police, soldiers, all. This, of course, is the second stage as much earlier, elements of the Electoral Commission, acting on orders from above, would have maliciously imported hundreds of thousands of fictitious names into the voters’ register. INEC then ensures there is no verification whatever, or allocates very insufficient time to the exercise.
In ‘THIS IS NO SCARE MONGERING’, Sunday, 3 November, 2013, I wrote as follows on this phenomenon: ‘A pattern of election rigging ahead of 2015 is emerging as any keen observer of recent elections in the country would readily affirm. And it is not by happenstance; rather, it is a well choreographed test run of what will be put into play in the 2014 elections in both Ekiti and Osun states. Of course, they will attempt the ‘Ondo template’ in Anambra where they will do everything to assist the candidate of Governor Peter Obi, the President’s good friend.
How perceptive!
In Anambra, where the voters’ register was heavily manipulated again, Professor Atahiru Jega, the INEC Chairman, personally undertook to ‘clean up’ the compromised register but, you believe that and you will believe anything. In the end, the election turned out worse than the Obasanjo elections.
But whoever thinks these jejune tricks will result in successively rigging any of the coming elections in the Southwest must think again. As in previous elections, we have over a thousand eagle eyes that will tear into INEC’s convoluted Voters’ registers to identify hurriedly imported, but fictitious names, just as a million soldiers cannot scare a determined people even in the unlikely event that the military high command succumbs to the army being used as ex-President Obasanjo already indicated in his letter to the President. We know there are enough men of honour in the Nigerian army to reject such evil plans even if, unfortunately, that cannot be said of a Nigeria Police that has largely become an armed wing of the ruling party. But they will meet the Yoruba doubly prepared for a government we know hates the majority of our people whilst eagerly romancing an insignificant minority. Apart from President Jonathan’s need for new friends, especially in an ‘electorally hostile’ geo-political zone like ours, we can never forget that he personally declared himself the overall campaign manager for the PDP candidate in the 2009 rerun election in Ekiti.
We are not unaware of the boast within PDP and its crony political parties in the state that the high command has charged them to do anything to rig Fayemi out of office following which the icing on the cake would be Mr President personally ensuring Aregbesola is equally rigged out. Talk we say, is cheap; but we warn and pray that those so minded would learn from our history, dating back to the Kiriji war and, especially, the fact that every wrong done to the Yoruba collective has brought down every offending government : Balewa’s, IBB’s, for instance.
The Yoruba will hate to be the leitmotif – the recurring theme -for a dismemberment of Nigeria but nobody should foolishly dare us. Governor Kayode Fayemi has very succinctly enunciated the Yoruba attitude to the coming elections. This he captured in his New Year message to his Ekiti compatriots when he said: ‘My dear honourable people of Ekiti, as you know, this year 2014 is a year of crucial decision in our State. Our still young republic grapples with the legacy of militarism, its violent imprint on our politics, and a generational perception of political competition as a form of warfare. It is unfortunate that politics is not widely seen as a contest of ideas for hearts and minds but a desperate means to get to power by all means possible. I take this opportunity to remind all and sundry, particularly those who would be interested in contesting the upcoming election, that the quality of power is defined by the nature of its pursuit. When we mortgage our consciences and values in the pursuit of power, no matter how dignified or admirable our intentions, it costs us bits of our humanity and deprives governance of the moral authority that is its true foundation. We should refrain from inciting our people to violence and other negative tendencies. Ultimately, an anarchic approach in which the contestants for power deploy all means, fair or foul, to win, de-legitimises and de-humanises politics. We cannot afford to lose the grounds we have gained in establishing peace and tranquility in Ekiti over the last few years’.
We can only hope that a word will be enough for the wise.
