What does Yakubu take Nigerians for?

F or years, elections in Nigeria have always been characterised by killings, destruction of properties and other vices. These elections have continued to produce winners who lacked ideas and true legitimacy, hence, the leadership challenge which has become the bane of the Nigerian nation. For a long time, Nigeria has been in search of an effective electoral compass. The nation moved from secret ballot through opensecret ballot, the biometric voters registration, manual accreditation, card reader accreditation, to bi-modal voters accreditation system and electronic transfer of election results as enacted by the 2022 Electoral Act and the 2023 Election guidelines/manuals.

It was the provisions for bi-modal voters’ accreditation system, BVAS, and real-time electronic transmission of election results that revived the interest of Nigerians in the electoral system, killed voter apathy and gave rise to the political revolution witnessed in Nigeria. However, to the shock of Nigerians, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), on whose shoulders the implementation of Electoral Act 2022 rests, was seen during the presidential and parliamentary elections of 25th February 2023 violating the provisions of the Act in various places in Nigeria even before security agencies.

These violations included bypassing the bimodal voters accreditation system or resort to the proscribed manual voters accreditation, multiple thumb printing of ballot papers to create over voting and cause cancellation where the opposition parties are leading, refusal or failure to transmit election results electronically from polling units to INEC result viewing portal, i-REV, in real time, and accepting and authenticating manually transmitted election results without reviewing same. For the avoidance of doubt, it must be stated here that the electoral act prohibited manual accreditation and made bi-modal voters accreditation mandatory.

In the same vein, the INEC guidelines/manuals for the 2023 election unequivocally states that election results not transmitted electronically real time amount to nullity. Mutilations on the result sheets were also not permitted by the law/guidelines. All the foregoing notwithstanding, the world watched with consternation as INEC electoral officials, resident electoral commissioners, non-state actors violated the electoral laws with impunity in the February 25 elections. This impunity was taken to its pinnacle when the chairman of INEC, Prof. Mahmoud Yakubu, ignored genuine protests from political parties and ratified the results from that charade without review.

Yakubu went ahead to announce the All Progressives Congress (APC) as winner of the incurably flawed election and, in an unbridled display of insensitivity and lack of patriotism, sneered on other political parties and contestants who are aggrieved to seek legal redress in the election tribunals or courts of competent jurisdiction. To the chagrin of Prof. Yakubu and INEC, aggrieved presidential candidates and political parties doused the fully-charged emotions in the country, gathered evidence to support their respective claims and approached the tribunals/courts for redress.

The courts have granted the presidential candidates, who approached them, permission to inspect materials used by INEC in the conduct of the February 25 presidential and national assembly elections. These include but are not limited to ballot papers, result sheets, BVAS gadgets and the INEC result portals. After the order was granted, the Commission over which Prof. Mahmoud Yakubu presides appealed the order for inspection of the BVAS gadgets and result viewing portals and even applied for the court’s order to re-configure the bi-modal voters’ accreditation system gadgets.

This reconfiguration which INEC is asking for, it stated, might mean deleting all the records and data generated from the presidential and national assembly elections which are already being contested in the courts as provided for in the laws and advised by Yakubu! To push his quest to delete records of the contentious elections home, Yakubu and the Independent National Electoral Commission resorted to blackmail in which they claim that if the court refuses to grant the order permitting them to delete all records of the February 25 elections, it would be impossible to conduct the governorship and state assemblies elections scheduled for March 11, 2023.

This obnoxious claim of Yakubu has made people ask: How can Yakubu claim that a portal built to contain data of 91 million registered voters in all the elections is filled up by data of 21 million voters only who voted in the February 25 elections? What does Yakubu take Nigerians for? Followers of Prof. Yakubu’s unpatriotic conduct have come to the conclusion that the application for order to destroy evidence of the democratic will of the people was made by the Yakubu-led INEC. It is evident that Yakubu and his INEC, which expected Nigerians to embark on protests and get crushed by already arranged military tanks, are rattled by the maturity with which Nigerians are managing their grievances. The fact that the electoral frauds are too bare to be covered and the global bedlam that trail the electoral fraud all combine to give Yakubu and his INEC goons whimsical amnesia.

In Yakubu’s bid to cover his unpatriotic tracks, he should show respect for Nigeria and her citizens and stop creating further tension in the country. Like Ezza Ezekuna, people of eastern Nigeria say, “There is a limit to the extent to which shy person’s rights can be usurped”!