By
UGO ONUOHA
One, two, three…, 17, 18, 19…, 28, 29, 30. Counting may no longer be of any use. The figure changes at the drop of a hat. It has remained a moving and elusive target since 2024, and especially so since last year. They were in a queue. And on cue. They said the regime had done good for the country. But when you look around, you only see a mountain of bad and ugly things. Poverty bestrides the country – relentless poverty. Nevertheless, the Presidency was overwhelmed by the rush by many governors elected on the platforms of opposition political parties to align with the regime at the centre. To synchronise the obviously hostile acquisitions of the mandates of opposition political parties, the Presidency which present occupants are Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Alhaji Mohammed Kashim Shettima, and their collaborators were compelled to draw up a schedule, a roster and a calendar for the admission of the mandate thieves into the fold of the ruling and ruining All Progressives Congress [APC] political party.
The governors who were jostling among themselves as to who would be the first to jump ship were of the former ruling, and we dare say ruining party, the People’s Democratic Party [PDP]. This party held Nigerians in a chokehold for 16 years from 1999-2015. They boastfully told Nigerians that they would rule the country for an unbroken 60 years, ostensibly in the mold of PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party, 1929-2000] that ruled Mexico for 71 years. Innocent Ogbulafor who was once the national secretary of the party said this much. And publicly. He’s long dead, and this democratic dispensation is barely 27 years old.
The PDP as a behemoth, ruling party, and a self-styled largest political party in Africa lasted for barely 16 years in office before it was swept out. The party is dead in spite of the delusions of the remnants of its fractured leadership at the centre and in the states and the local governments and the wards. Its national headquarters, the Wadata Plaza has been shuttered for weeks by the obviously partisan Nigerian Police and wrapped with barbed wire. Minister of the federal capital territory [FCT], Nysom Wike, who’s the face of a faction of that party which is working for President Tinubu and the APC has assured that the PDP secretariat would be unchained this week [yesterday really]. Wike is believable because he’s the Law and works hands-in-gloves with judges. He builds our judges’ houses and buys them cars. In fact, the chief justice of Nigeria [CJN] was at the sod turning ceremony for an estate that Wike is building for judges working in the FCT. Wike as Rivers state governor routinely fêted the immediate past chief justice in Port Harcourt. It was during one of those occasions that the erstwhile CJN endorsed the rebellion of five PDP governors led by the same Wike against their party. That pathetic man was still the CJN at that time.
That Wike is the law is not a conjecture. Somehow, disputes involving him routinely managed to be assigned to particular judges in Abuja. It could be a coincidence. But it should be concerning that some words spoken by Wike in public during political stomping manage to be replicated, sometimes word-for-word, in the judgments of a particularly notorious Abuja judge. What could not be coincidence are the words that proceed from Wike’s mouth. For instance, in the course of a very public spat with the national chairman and national secretary of the APC over who was the leader of the APC in Rivers state, the minister reminded them that they did not know how the court judgment that ensured the continuing seizure of the federal financial allocations to Osun state local government councils was procured. Osun state is governed by the opposition PDP. State governor, Ademola Adeleke, has since left the crises-riven PDP for the Accord Party, preparatory to his contesting for a second term in an election slated for later this year. Unlike other PDP governors, he did not join the APC which is led by his Yoruba kinsman, Tinubu. It should be curious that while the PDP governors from virtually every geopolitical zone of the country had been joining the APC, the two in the president’s south west zone, Seyi Makinde of Oyo state and Adeleke, have refused to do the same. By the way, Makinde was part of the insurrectionist PDP governors who worked for Tinubu to be declared president in 2023. So his new stance is really after the fact.
The fact that for now Tinubu’s governor – kinsmen have not joined the APC bandwagon has not affected the deluge. It should be instructive that the gale of defections of state assembly lawmakers, local government chairmen and their councillors, and federal legislators had been in spite of a ruling by the Supreme Court in 2015 or thereabouts in a suit involving former governor, Rotimi Amaechi, in which the court ruled that votes cast in elections were for the political party that sponsored the candidates. The court said only the names of political parties were on the ballot, not the candidates. Elsewhere, Supreme Court judgments serve as precedents. But that appears to strictly not apply in our jurisdiction. Otherwise, what would be the explanation for a governor who ascended office on the strength of ballots cast for the PDP, dumping the party and moving to another party, and still remained a governor. And there are no consequences. Part of the strangeness of our judicial system is that the Supreme Court can make a ruling, and then forbid lower courts and lawyers from citing the judgment as a precedent. Ballots cast for political parties could be one such case.
Now back to the counting of governors and others who have defected to the APC ahead of the general elections next year. As at the last count which may not be accurate since defections have become a daily fare, the ruling APC had 82 of the 109 senators; 242 out of the 360 members of the House of Representatives; 30 of the 36 state governors; it has the judiciary firmly in its grips; APC has the Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC]; the Armed Forces [after all the leader of the ruling party is also the Commander-in-Chief]; the Police, the civil defence militia; national union of road transport workers; and sundry area and city boys. One Abdulkadir Musa dutifully conducted the count which was shared on social media. But he’s likely to have under-counted.
If the APC has this armada behind it, as it surely does, the expectation would have been that the party will rest assured that the results of the elections in 2027 are already firmly in the bag. No, that surely is not the case. The party is jittery. It’s scared stiff. Why? It is because the APC cannot vouch that the vast majority of Nigerians are with them. The party faces the reality that the next general election will be a referendum by the people on the performance [more like its non-performance] since 2023. Actually since 2015 under the regime of Nigeria’s affliction, the late Muhammadu Buhari. The APC has forfeited the right to again campaign on the basis of promises of delivery. It will have to seek a mandate renewal on the strength of promises that had been delivered. The tragedy is that the right hand side of its governance ledger is hopelessly light and scanty on deliveries, but heavy on sloganeering and propaganda and gaslighting. The hallmark of good and focused governance is how many citizens had been lifted out of poverty during the tenure of any administration. On this count, Tinubu and the APC have performed terribly poorly. Indeed, many of our compatriots have been dropping below the poverty line everyday since 2023. As at the last count about 70% of Nigerians are dirt poor. Late last year, a ranking federal government official said that about the same percentage of our people did not know where their next meal would come from. In any case, Nigeria has held the dubious record of being the global capital for poverty for seven years since 2019.
So, it should not come as a shock if the national assembly [NASS] which is overwhelmingly dominated by the APC and the fair weather defectors are stoutly against anything that could ensure that the 2027 elections are free, fair and credible. It would not bode well for them. To be sure, the remnants of opposition lawmakers are part of the game to sabotage the widespread demand by Nigerians for mandatory and real time transmission of election results as part of the amendments of the Electoral Act. The few opposition lawmakers who have spoken up on the raging controversy have skillfully avoided the word ‘mandatory’ in their references to the affected provision. But that’s the key word in addition to ‘transmission’. The bone of contention in the proposed provision from the Electoral Act [Amendment] Bill is: “The presiding officer shall electronically transmit the results from each polling unit to the INEC Result Viewing Portal [IReV] in real time, and such transmission shall be done after the prescribed Form EC8A has been signed and stamped by the presiding officer and, where available, countersigned by candidates or polling unit agents”. Allowing this amendment should not be difficult except with fraudulent politicians. The excuse of weak internet infrastructure is just that – excuse. The other rationalisation, energy deficit, for being hesitant with this amendment is even more damning. It is self indictment that our rulers have failed and neglected to provide stable public power supply to citizens in 2026, almost 200 years after Lagos, a British colony, started enjoying electricity.
Well, expecting politicians to be altruistic in their conducts would be expecting too much. Politicians are by nature selfish. They are incapable of building anything that would endure. Their style is ‘chere were’ or expediency. So Nigerians would have to own their country. The test of the resolve of our people does not come any better than the current battle to bring a measure of sanity to the country’s electoral process. Anything that will discourage or eliminate “grab, snatch and run” or “technical glitch” in our electoral process will be another step forward. Nigerians have to seize the moment.
Meanwhile, many knowledgeable persons have rubbished the poor rationalisations by the leadership of NASS who are working in cahoots with the APC on why mandatory real time transmission of election results in 2027 will not fly. One such person is Dr. Alex Ter Adum of the Narrative Force. He wrote on the social media under the headline ‘Senate’s Tech Illiteracy As Electoral Policy’: “I have listened carefully to the arguments advanced by the Senate President Godswill Akpabio and the Senate spokesperson and other proponents of retaining the discretionary provisions of the 2022 Electoral Act on electronic transmission of results… The claim of inadequate internet connectivity in rural areas is hogwash… To begin with, voter registration in Nigeria was conducted manually. However, voter accreditation on election day is carried out electronically using the BVAS. The same BVAS is also designed to capture Form EC8A at the conclusion of voting and collation, and to transmit the polling unit results to the INEC electronic viewing portal called IReV electronically in real time.
“If a network exists to enable electronic accreditation with the BVAS, then that same network necessarily exists to enable electronic transmission of results using the same device. This is a basic technological fact, not a matter of conjecture or complexity. It is a standard system functionality, and certainly not rocket science. Moreover, the argument that voting is manual and therefore cannot support real-time transmission is…baseless. What is required to be transmitted is not the act of voting, but the final results tally at the polling unit after voting has concluded, votes have been counted, and the figures duly entered on Form EC8A, which is the primary result sheet. Once the presiding officer announces the results, the completed EC8A is snapped and transmitted immediately. This process is entirely independent of whether voting itself was manuel or electronic.
“Furthermore, where a temporary network blind spot occurs during transmission, the BVAS automatically stores the data and uploads it once the device enters a network coverage area. This is standard operating protocol for computing devices. So the claim that results transmission will fail due to poor network coverage therefore collapses under even the lightest scrutiny. In addition, internet connectivity across INEC’s approximately 176,000 polling units is today close to 98 percent. The narrative of widespread network absence is thus a choreographed smokescreen, not a genuine concern. To drive the point home. Point-of-Sale [POS] machines, which are equally dependent on internet connectivity, function in virtually every village and hamlet across Nigeria. [So], if POS machines can operate almost everywhere in the country, there is no logical basis for claiming that the BVAS cannot do the same when they rely on the same internet operating protocol… The Senate should therefore desist from its attempt to cripple electronic transmission of election results using the BVAS on the basis of exaggerated, contrived, and largely non-resident network concerns”. 2027 might just be the last stand in the battle for the soul of this country.
