Nigerians know from history that PDP has no two means of winning elections other than by rigging.
In his electoral Beatitude in Jerusalem, President Jonathan promised a better electoral system saying, with glee, that ‘though we have challenges in our electoral system, at least, it is better than what it was yesterday.’ With due respect, Mr. President, I beg to disagree. 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 certainly 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, as well as, at least, the presidential election, come 2015. Of course, they will attempt to deploy the ‘Ondo template’ in Anambra where they will do everything to assist the president’s friend, Governor Peter Obi, to engineer the APGA candidate’s ‘victory’. Other candidates in that election, especially APC’s Senator Ngige, should, therefore, learn from Ondo and properly scutinise the voter’s register into which may have been imported hundreds of thousands of spurious names. They must insist on a public verification of the voters’ list which INEC tries its utmost to avoid whenever it is up to some dubious game. Examples of these recently compromised elections will further elucidate the point being made.
Commenting on the Delta Central Senatorial bye election which held recently as a result of the unfortunate death of Senator Pius Ewherido, Ede Dafinone , the DPP candidate in the election, has the following to say of the electoral process : ‘there was no election, as defined by our laws. The scale of impunity, assault, molestations and violence by the PDP, thugs/cultists and the supposed security agents was just unimaginable. The lopsided and partisan involvement of state security apparatuses in supporting the PDP and the brazen use of thugs to unleash violence and mayhem on our party members and the electorate is unprecedented. Thus there is now very serious concern for the progress of our nascent democracy and a diminishing hope for peace, unity and good governance in Nigeria, both now and in the immediate future’. The APC interim Publicity Secretary, Lai Mohammed, corroborated this and named specific areas where all these were most pronounced, citing reports from APC agents on the field, who he said indicated that armed soldiers and policemen were deployed strategically to intimidate voters, while trailers and tankers were used to block the roads leading to opposition strongholds. A particularly dangerous dimension to PDP’s rigging methods was to suborn Youth Corps members to refrain from doing their legitimate electoral duties on the day, a fact which, in future, could expose these young persons to extreme danger or why would they take that particular day to protest non-payment of their allowances if they were not being instigated by those who have the most to lose?
On the heels of that and within two weeks of each other, a whole state governor, Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State, also known to be the President’s friend , at least up until the last gubernatorial election in the state, had this to say of a local government election that was being held, unsuccessfully, for the third time simply because the PDP’s ‘Ogas at the top’ thought they could, as of old, rail road victory, in spite of the huge development the local government has enjoyed under the incumbent governor unlike when they were in charge: ‘As a Nigerian, I am embarrassed that the police are involved in carrying electoral materials, arresting EDSIEC returning officers and coercing them into a police station and converting it into a collation centre supervised by policemen imported from Abuja and Lagos in order to subvert the will of the people of Esan North East. As a civilised man, I felt ashamed that men in uniform at rather very senior levels supervised this criminal act of the police in yesterday’s (Tuesday) election. A federal minister and other federal functionaries, including Assembly men used their exalted positions, taking unfair advantage of the police assigned to protect them and deployed them for election purposes, detaining returning officers and treating them as if they were prisoners of war and, under duress, compelling them to sign fake results and police becoming Returning Officers writing result sheets.’
A comparison of the above quotes copiously corroborates the latest devilish devices of the PDP. But the question Nigerians must ask is this: if all these are happening in a state or local government election, what will they not do at the presidential? And that is not to forget the icing of the cake, the ‘Offa abracadabra’, where, in broad day light, the APC was robbed of its chairmanship victory even where everybody knows that the PDP could never have won.
Nothing worries me more than the fact that even if INEC, the electoral umpire, was not complicit, ab initio; it is completely acquiescent of the illegalities. The Delta Resident Electoral Commissioner, a woman who nearly reminds one of the Ekiti experience, could therefore say, without a hint of shame, that “there can never be 100 per cent perfection in any election conducted anywhere in the world’. Does that remind you of plane crashes as an act of God? Wonders, they say, will never cease. This was followed in the well-rehearsed choreography by the state Commissioner of Police, Ikechukwu Aduba, who said the bye-election was peaceful because his men were at all the voting centres to maintain law and order; the same policemen that stories abound were guarding ballot box snatchers.
Nigerians know from history that PDP has no two means of winning elections other than by rigging. They rig even those elections they should ordinarily have won. It is also well known that the much celebrated 2011 presidential election was massively rigged in the North as well as in the South-East where jumbo figures tumbled in.
In Ekiti where the first of the 2014 elections will hold, not a whimper has been heard from the colony of about 16 wannabe PDP candidates since they, minus former Governor Ayo Fayose, met on or about 30 July, 2013, to jointly sign a communiqué supporting a consensus candidate. It would appear the party has now located its consensus candidate and what remains to be done is find the ‘official’ PDP candidate, the caricature candidate, that is, who will be utterly dumped by the party as happened to Sola Oke in Ondo State. As in the Ondo case, Abuja would spare nothing; not money, tonnes of it, not the entire Nigerian security apparati, for the Labour candidate while, like Oke, their own caricature candidate, will be left hard and dry. The poor gentleman, Sola Oke, in case you had forgotten, even had to carry his own can at the tribunal as PDP treated him like a wet rag. That is what they are perfecting for Ekiti, and it will not matter whoever that candidate is, even if it is Oga’s former boss. But somebody should tell them they are mistaken. In the first place, they will have more than 70 percent of Ekiti people to contend with whatever their nearby South-West Coordinator-General may be telling them in Abuja. They should be told too, in case they cannot see, the tremendous developmental achievements the incumbent governor will, on campaign carnivals, take to the Ekiti people who are already very appreciative of his accomplishments, even in just three years. They should know that while the PDP has no record of achievement in the state, except you reckon that six governors in seven years is one, their real candidate on the Labour Party platform would have a hell of a time explaining off moral turpitude; at least, that of biting the fingers that fed him so generously and the very party that gave him an unmerited political leverage, even gifting him a House of Representatives’ ticket he never contested for, not to talk of winning, as well as explain why he thinks Iyin-Ekiti, the beautiful town of decent people, rich history and culture where he comes from, deserves to produce three governors for Ekiti State, having produced our revered father and the Omoluabi first Executive Governor of the state, Otunba Niyi Adebayo, even when an entire senatorial district in the state is yet to produce a single one and is crying marginalisation to high heavens. He will now officially be invited by us, his constituents, to personally identify those phantom constituency projects he has so elegantly claimed in publications but which the most due diligent search has not succeeded in locating; not bore holes, nor internet cafes, nothing. We, in Ekiti Central are certainly waiting for that 8th wonder of the world.
