Mariam Mariam
“Our monitors throughout the country noted and documented numerous lapses, massive irregularities that characterized the elections in many states. Based on the widespread and far-reaching nature of these lapses, irregularities and electoral malpractices, we have come to the conclusion that on the whole, the elections where a charade and did not meet the minmum standards required for democratic elections. We therefore reject the elections and call for their cancellation. The Federal Government and the Indepennent National Electoral Commission (INEC) have failed woefully in their responsibility to conduct free, fair and credible elections. We do not believe that any outcome of the elections can represent the will of the people. A democratic arrangement founded on such fraud has no legitimacy” –Nigerian Domiestic Election Observation Group.
“Any administration founded on this fraud cannot have legitimacy” – EU Observers
“Democracy in Nigeria will survice only if the basic and elementary rules of democracy-free and fair elections for citizens to exercise their choice-are observed. The last elections did not meet even the fairest minimum conduct of election even in a failed state where there is no law or order. Our political evolution is moveing the opposite direction-a dangerous drift from rule of one party to a faction of the party and to one person. This is a drift towards modern slavery. This is what we are resisting. This is what we are rejecting, because neigher democracy nor Nigeria can survive and prosper under these conditions” – General Buhari
As we have predicted over the last one year or so (and nobody really needed any prescient dispositions in this respect), the Professor Maurice Iwu-led INEC this week finally took Nigeria to the well-laid out denouement of selecting Umar Yar’Adua as Obasanjo’s preferred choice to occupy the Presidency of Nigeria after the most fraudulent elections ever held in Nigeria’s history. It is part of the history of the past few years that if people felt that the perfidy of the PDP had reached the height of the absurd in the 2003 elections, Obasanjo was determined to surpass himself and shock the Nigerian people in the depth of his desperation with the elections held over the last two weekends. Never before have expectations for change, expectations to be part of the process to bring about change, been so high amongst the Nigerian people. And conversely, never in our history has the subversion of the Nigerian people been so openly, so brazenly, so incredibly and so annoyingly perpetrated in such an in-your-face, go-to-hell manner as Obasanjo and his clique have done in the last two weeks.
Nigeria has been taken to the dogs by President Obasanjo and his party apparatchik and an electoral body headed by the controversial Prof. Maurice Iwu who left no one in doubt over the past few years, but especially in the critical nine months leading to the elections, that he was occupying his position to implement an agenda which is to help Obasanjo achieve the ambition of manipulating the electoral process to subvert the will of the Nigerian people. Let us recollect that Maurice Iwu had been appointed by Obasanjo in the first place, according to various sources, on the recommendations of the equally controversial Nnamdi Andy Uba, and as the saying goes, the rest is now history.
The absurdities and illegalities that characterized the governorship and states houses of assembly elections were the first shot fired at the sovereign legitimacy of the Nigerian people. Votes were upturned and PDP losers across the nation were declared winners after voting processes had been hijacked with soldiers, policemen, and thugs forming an evil triumvirate at the behest of the PDP. Yet so comprehensive were the defeats suffered by the PDP that their desperation could not even hide the total rejection they suffered around the country. It was most indicative of the determination of the Nigerian people to reject Obasanjo’s despotic and incompetent rule that in his own polling unit, the PDP got only 23 votes and in anger, they chose to cancel the votes in the polling unit. In Anambra State, so sloppy was the theft that the votes they allocated to Andy Uba when added to those dashed to the other candidates became more than the registered voters! So INEC had to embark on a structural adjustment of the votes DOWNWARDS to fit the number of people on the electoral register.
The story of the manner that the PDP has achieved its ambition to turn Nigeria into a de facto one-party state is similar all around the country. It is becoming clear in fact that PDP might not have won any state in the south-west if the votes of the Nigerian people had counted. AC won in Lagos and apparently in Osun and Ekiti; labor seemed to have won decisively in Ondo while ANPP was arguably the winner in Ogun and Oyo states. Buy the Obasanjo-INEC-PDP voodoo was invoked and except in Lagos State, the elections were overturned in the remaining states in the same manner that the people’s mandate given to Adams Oshiomhole and AC was stolen by the PDP in Edo State. The same open daylight robbery was perpetrated in Anambra. In fact, election monitors from the European Union are suggesting a re-run of the governorship elections in about ten states awarded to the PDP.
What the PDP has shown Nigerians is that we do not matter; politics is not premised on performance and the democratic process is not based upon the right of the Nigerian people to change leaders periodically if and when they have not performed. The PDP vowed that they want to rule Nigeria for the next thirty years and they set about it with the illegality which ushered in Obasanjo in 2003. We did not go into the streets to stop them in the tracks of their illegalities having taken cover under legal niceties of a compromised tribunal system and appeals to our religious feelings and even crudely ethnic chauvinistic solidarity. Obasanjo and his clique spent the following four years stealing Nigeria to stupor, destroying the fabric of our sovereign existence and philosophically entrenching an uncaring form of capitalism. They ran the most anti-people regime in our national history, knowing that Nigerians were likely to reject them massively in the 2007 elections. Their answer to that problem was to ambush the Nigerian people and perpetuate even more impunity in 2007, worse than they did in 2003.
The ambush witnessed in the governorship elections two weeks ago demoralized the Nigerian people across the country; the central plank of observations and reports was that turnout was very low during the presidential poll. However, INEC in cahoots with the PDP using thugs, the police and other secretly agencies, had plans completely mapped out and eventually delivered. The absurdities are still being analyzed, but on Sunday, the 22nd of April, 2007, AIT reported an absurd scenario from Edo south where the PDP man allocated the Senate seat was said to have won over 340, 000 votes in that constituency alone. But in the gubernatorial election the previous week, the PDP candidate rigged into power also got allocated to him votes around 300,000; meaning that the senatorial candidate got all over the state just the previous week, never mind the low turnout of voters in Edo and other part of the country last week.
The PDP and their INEC hirelings are very cynical indeed. In the massively rigged 2003 elections, Obasanjo was allocated 24.4 million votes and his closest challenger, General Buhari was given 12.7 million votes. But so determined were they that this time around, Yar’Adua whose party could not deliver electricity or security was allocated over 24 million votes and Buhari was given six million votes less than they gave him in 2003, while Atiku was dashed slightly over two million votes. The whole world has now seen that Obasanjo’s election is a fraud, a charade; while the so-called elections have been rejection by all sane people around the world. Even Obasanjo realises the fact and he is clearly troubled and that is why he has been saturating Nigerians with presidential broadcasts to pacify the citizenry after they have been victims of daylight robber.
Significantly, participating in the BBC’s HAVE YOUR SAY programme on Monday, April 23, 2007, presidential adviser, Akin Osuntokun canvassed the frankly harebrained argument that pre-election opinion surveys have always said that Yar’Adua would win the election. He forgot to add that not a single poll said it must be won fraudulently, brazenly and without respect for the wishes of the Nigerian people. President Obasanjo also canvassed the same absurd argument in an interview with the BBC’s Jamilah Tangaza on the same day. He said there had been suggestions that PDP would win either 21, 28, or 35 states; but they eventually won only 28. What President Obasanjo did not remember to say was that it was his party subalterns who use to boast that they would conquer 35 states as part of the plan to rule Nigeria as a de facto one-party state into the next 30 years.
It is a grand plan to have not just a one-party state, but the continued rule of Obasanjo by other means. He is said to have awarded a contract a few months ago to renovate Aguda House where he is alleged to be planning to relocate from Aso Villa. His intention to continue to dominate the scene has never been hidden. In one of his last campaigns in Lagos before the elections, he told the rented crowd that as the chairman of the PDP’s Board of Trustees, he would get them new local governments if they voted for PDP.
PUNCH newspaper of Monday, 23rd April 2007 also reproduced the interview Obasanjo gave to FINANCIAL TIMES. In response to a question, Obasanjo had admitted that his party “has not brought to bear the right amount of pressure to put people on the straight path.”
So cleary, Obasanjo envisages that he would continue to rule the roost using the suffocating dictatorial redoubt that he has constructed within the most elaborate vote-rigging contraption ever known on the African contiment, the PDP. In the meantime, president-elect, Umar Yar’Adua comes without legitimacy on the back of massively rigged elections. He would have to wrestle with a questionable and tainted mandate and be under the shadow of a despotic Obasanjo whose ambition is to have Yar’Adua as merely the extension of his own ambitions and preferences. This is a very serious problem which they must find solution to, given the myriad of problems that need to be cleared in the first place; problems that would tax a leader who enjoys the support and legitimacy of the Nigerian people, not to talk of a president who is the product of very serious controversy. Those able to read the body language of the man would be worried that Yar’Adua was literally collapsing under th moral weight of the faulty process which mae him president-elect when he faced the press at the Aso Villa soon after he was declared winner last Monday afternoon. In contrast with the French election that was announced almost simultaneously, ther were no jubilations greeting the PDP. Nigeria resembles a nation in mourning and it is mourning, because its people have been robbed by the PDP of their sovereign will, and like bandits, they accomplished the robbery with the serial rape of their victims!
It is obvious that this fraud cannot persist and something just has to give; what will be the consequence of the perfidy is now in the territory of the Nigerian people. We must either fitht to reclaim the right to transparently, freely and fairly choose the people who rule us in periodic, well-organized elections or we cling to an oppressive fatalism that there was divine intervention in the emrgence of those who stole the electoral process and subverted the will of the Nigerian people; this is clearly to acquiesce the enslavement of our present and the desecration of our future and the mortgaging of the future of our children. Elections under the Obasanjo PDP regime have become a monumental hoax, a charade and clearly they cannot be an avenue to express the popular will in our country. We are faced with the unfortunate sequential worsening of the electoral process from one election to the other: 1999 was better than 2003 and 2007 is worse that the 2003 elections. The people have become more exasperated and the democratic process suffers consequently.
As we have seen in the eight years under Obasanjo the regime was not constructed on the basis of the legitimacy arising from the freely expressed wishes of the Nigerian people, it, therefore, went on a policy ride which did not have a patriotic content, used governmental power to steal our patrimony, and feathered the next of President Obasanjo and his cronies. The nation is poorer, the people are in agony, the land is desecrated and the moral fabric is being gradually but surely damaged on the basis of the monumental fraud of the last eight years, which has now been replicated in the past two weeks.
Now that INEC has made its choice and the PDP has been awarded another four years under Umar Yar’Adua, the Nigerian people have to seize the coming days and months to determine the direction that the country will go:the electoral system must be interrogated, the party structure must be queried, the democractic process must be renewed, be people-centered and deepened. But first of all, the legal process must be adequately explored along with the extra-legal mass mobilization of the Nigerian people. I will like to quote from General Buhari’s statement on the election to end this piece: “I am aware that the struggle against injustice and inequality is going to be a ling and hard one; this is what I hve dedicated my life to . it is now up to the Nigerian people to accept a status of slavery or to stand up and demand their rights”.
This sums up the reality which faces Nigeria today. And before I sign off, it is pertinent that in the spirit of “do-or-die”, the Nigerian chapter of Amnesty International reported that 260 Nigerians lost their lives while 330 “sustained various degrees of injuries” and there were 15 reported disappeared persons during the April 14 elections. So Obasanjo did not only steal the votes of the people, he went on a swimming spree in their blood too! But that will not delay the day of jugement for Obasanjo.
Postscript
“Let us attempt a profile typical of dictators. Dictators who rule by force of power, oppression and intimidation seldom relinquish power and control voluntarily to others. Out of fear, when they are apparently not pursued, they prefer to be the late rather than to be the former. And, of course, every person’s sin will seek him out. Throughout history, oppressive and ruthless dictators behave similarly and their end is invariably predictable. They carry out oppressive and heinous atrocities and inflict great injustices. They fear for their lives and they are haunted by the fear that nemesis may catch up with them. Therefore, they become stubborn, intransigent, unyielding and more oppressive. They harden their hearts, listening only to sycophants and insincere praise singers. The less gifted they are, the harder they try to make up for their deficiency inintellect and intelligence. They withdraw more and more into their cocoons, wreaking untold hardship on their people and their country.
In the end, they flee their country or die disgracefully or are thoroughly discredited after death with the sycophants who may as soon disclaim them. Sadly, one of the greates tragedies of man is that he never learns from history. Dictators show nothing but contempt for the human race and for God and His laws. They behave like animals of the most violent nature in the wild”.
