Vagabonds in Power: Their Hubris and Edo Election

INEC

Late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was truly a man of the people and the prophet who saw tomorrow. The afrobeats inventor, super star and inimitable social activist, understood those who have held Nigeria by the jugular. That’s why he called them Vagabonds in Power, V.I.Ps.

They’re there to feed their insatiable greed while presiding over Nigeria’s ruination. They have vandalised its potentials, arrested its development and growth, destroyed its future. And turned dynamic Nigerians into people wracked by doubts and despair about themselves and their country.

If Fela were still here, contemplating the gross mismanagement of Nigeria in the past four-and-a-half decades, he would definitely have changed the moniker he gave to the vagabonds and their cohorts in power to Vampires In Power.

According to Wikipedia, “a vampire is a mythical creature that subsists by feeding on the vital essence of the living.”

The September 21 Edo State governorship election again highlighted two established facts about our rotten politics – the desperation of politicians to win at all costs and the ineptitude and corruption of the Independent National Electoral… Share on X

The September 21 Edo State governorship election again highlighted two established facts about our rotten politics – the desperation of politicians to win at all costs and the ineptitude and corruption of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC. With the connivance of election officials and security agents, they contrive to steal ‘victory’ from the jaws of defeat.

The latest electoral heist masterminded by the All Progressives Congress is a clear indication that our democracy has reached a dead end. The votes don’t count anymore. Electoral outcomes are now pre-determined and imposed on the people.

Having succeeded in subverting the people’s will in a very brazen manner, APC has been gloating and daring those whose victory they stole to go to court. Their amoral triumphalism speaks eloquently to the rot that pervades the electoral system and processes. It also confirms that INEC has long ceased to be fit for the purpose for which it exists. The ‘independent’ attached to its nomenclature is a mockery of the word itself.

As Dr. Sam Amadi and his Abuja School of Social and Political Thoughts recently pointed out, INEC, like the suborned judiciary, has become the most dangerous threat to our democracy. But their call for its disbandment will only sound as irritating noise to the ruling party that has found an effective formula for ‘winning’ elections.

In the wake of the success of their ‘Operation Steal Edo Governorship Election’, the party’s national chairman, Governor Abdullahi Ganduje, boasted that they would apply same formula for capturing Edo to retain Ondo State and get Anambra State into their fold.

The result announced by INEC in the governorship election is an absolute travesty, a mockery of the people’s will and an assault on basic democratic tenets. The opinions of all the election observers have been unanimous. INEC’s result is a product of deliberate manipulation of the collation process, and a clear contradiction of the results from the polling units uploaded on its IRev results portal.

The result announced by INEC in the governorship election is an absolute travesty, a mockery of the people’s will and an assault on basic democratic tenets. Share on X

In plain language, the results collation was rigged by INEC officials. Without their buy-in and active participation in the whole criminal act of upturning the real verdict of the voters, APC agents, acting alone, couldn’t have succeeded in doing it.

Despite vigorous protests by other party agents, INEC, as usual, never paused in announcing obviously fake results. Its officials were just working to legitimize an already pre-determined outcome in Favour of the APC. The electoral law provides a one-week window for it to listen to genuine complaints and review the results, especially when there’re solid grounds to question them.

The election mismanagement body has become a willing tool for politicians to make our votes irrelevant in electoral contests. Its executives at all levels no longer pretend to have any integrity and reputation to protect. They’ll bend to the will of whoever the appointing authority is at any moment. This is even more so now that many of the national and resident electoral commissioners are registered APC members.

Despite the widespread condemnation of how the rules governing collation of results were outrightly broken and the very dubious outcome that flowed from it, INEC has remained eerily silent. It has no explanation for the contrived failure of his officials to keep to the rules.

INEC’s contempt for the electorate it’s meant to serve is because it knows that no one can hold it to account. Those constitutionally mandated to make it accountable have co-opted it to serve their nefarious political ends.

This is why it pointedly ignored the People’s Democratic Party’s call for the Edo State resident electoral commissioner, Anugbum Onuaha, to be replaced before the election. He’s a cousin of Nyesom Wike, the FCT minister and former Rivers State governor, who has been openly supporting the APC since he lost his party’s presidential primary in 2022.

In response to the call for his removal, Onuoha admitted his filial relationship to Wike and assured that nobody could tell him to do the wrong thing. He then gaslighted those agitating for his removal by alleging that they had tried to bribe him without providing any proof.

But right under his nose, the election results were flagrantly tempered with by his officials working in concert with the benefitting party’s agents. Onuoha exemplifies the kind of persons who should have no business with election management. Unfortunately, INEC is now populated by people who’re beholden to politicians who facilitate their appointment into the commission.

Emboldened by their success in upturning Edo people’s will, APC and their spin doctors have been busy trying to create narratives to lend some measure of credibility to the outcome they contrived in collusion with INEC. They say Governor Godwin Obaseki hasn’t performed well in his two terms in office; that he has been fighting and disrespecting the Oba of Benin; that he alienated many of the PDP’S top leaders in the state and drove them into the arms of the APC and other parties.

Beyond campaign rhetoric that usually traffics in exaggeration and inversion of facts, the right to pass a verdict on Obaseki’s performance belongs to the people. And they exercise that right in elections when they vote. They did that on September 21 by electing PDP’s Asue Ighodalo by majority of the votes. But APC and INEC colluded to change their verdict.

A commission that gets very generous funding (in hundreds of billions of naira) and whose major remit is to deliver free and fair elections has become partners in electoral malfeasances. Share on X

Most Nigerian politicians play transactional politics. When they don’t get what they want, they easily port to another party. They do so all the time. And they’ll continue to do so long after Obaseki ceases to be governor.

Obaseki himself left the APC in 2020 after Adams Oshiomhole, the party’s national chairman at that time and self-appointed godfather of Edo politics, denied him the ticket to contest for a second term. He was re-elected on PDP’S ticket.

Desperate, unprincipled politicians, wanting to capitalize on the power and prestige of the Benin royal palace, exaggerated whatever differences exist between the governor and the Oba, and wittingly dragged him into their campaign conversations. They tried the same gambit in 2020, but it didn’t work for them. They lost the election then, just as they did on September 21.

Even if their narratives about Obaseki were true, is that a justification for the electoral heist they perpetrated against the people? Or they didn’t trust the voters to deliver the verdict they wanted hence they resorted to self-help by literally stealing the election?
Long after Obaseki has left office, he’ll most probably emerge as the most consequential governor the state has had. Being an apolitical politician or one who tries to place governance over and above mere politicking, he isn’t inclined to advertising his achievements. He believes that his work will speak for him.

But given the nature of our politics dominated by carpetbaggers and transactional characters, he’s been naive in this respect. By electing to be less effusive about his achievements, he gave the opposition the opportunity to define a narrative about him that serves their political goals.

As Atedo Peterside, chairman of Stanbic IBTC, said, all decent and right-thinking Nigerians should be outraged by INEC’s criminal and shameful partisanship in the election. And they should voice their outrage loudly and clearly.

INEC keeps getting away with willful disregard for the electoral laws, its own rules and regulations and subversion of the will of voters. Very illustrative of this attitude is the deliberate sabotaging of the uploading of polling unit results of the presidential election last year.

While the results of the National Assembly elections held simultaneously with the presidential election were uploaded to the IRev portal, those of the latter couldn’t be uploaded. Same B-VAS (Bi-modal voters’ registry system) devices were used to accredit voters. But for results uploading, it worked seamlessly for the National Assembly election but failed for the presidential.

INEC attributed the failure to what it termed “technical glitches”. Which was a most infantile excuse. The nation is still waiting to know the nature of the technical glitches. What we know is that the commission lied, and it’s yet to apologize for wasting humungous amounts of money in election technology it isn’t willing to use to secure the integrity of the electoral process.

A commission that gets very generous funding (in hundreds of billions of naira) and whose major remit is to deliver free and fair elections has become partners in electoral malfeasances. For the outcome of any poll to be credible, all the processes must be free and fair and the rules and regulations governing it vigorously enforced.

And this is why the conclusion of the election observers was so damning. They were unequivocal in saying that the results collation process was manipulated and, therefore, didn’t meet the basic criteria for a credible election.

It’s very obvious that the commission has now become a clear and present danger to our fragile democracy. The continuing drop in voters’ turnout in every election reflects the public’s lack of confidence in the commission and the electoral system it has bastardized in connivance with desperate politicians. In the Edo election, the voters’ turnout was an abysmal 22 percent. Indeed, it’s an indictment of the commission that’s lost its way and is now comfortably in bed with politicians who seek power for their own benefits and self-aggrandizement.

When Obaseki and his party refused to sign the so-called peace accord for the election, they were lampooned and accused of throwing tantrums. APC signed what’s become a meaningless exercise purely for the optics it generated. But it didn’t commit them to not stealing the election and defying the people’s will.

As Joseph Stalin, the former Soviet Union’s leader, said almost a century ago, voters don’t decide the outcome of an election. Those who count the votes do. In other words, the vote counters are more important than the voters in an electoral system that isn’t free and fair, and the outcome has been pre-determined.

This the anomaly that INEC has foisted on our democracy. But our elections are even worse than what obtained in Stalin’s Soviet Union. In the communist system, they never pretended that they were holding democratic elections as we do now.

APC can indulge in the hubris of celebrating what’s a Pyrrhic victory. The man they seek to impose on Edo people would always be deemed illegitimate and treated as an interloper. The day of reckoning will certainly come for all those who have held this country down. And Nigeria shall be truly free.

Email: nosaigiebor@tell.ng
Phone: 0807 629 0485 (WhatsApp & SMS only).

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Written by Nosa Igiebor

TELL President

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