It is again unfortunate, disheartening how the presidential and National Assembly Elections held few weeks ago were rigged from the word ‘go’ by the Ombudsman – INEC, due largely to lack of inadequate preparations.
This Election will go down in history as worse than the 2015 and 2019 elections, no thanks to Professor Mahmoud Yakubu for taking our Electoral process several years backwards. A postmortem of what happened during and after the elections showed that there was a grand design to disenfranchise the mass of the Nigeria population performing their civic responsibility.
Too bad!
As a participant in the voting process, I had gone to my ‘usual’ polling unit which I have been using in the last 8 years; I was duly given a tag number to enable me file into the queue, as soon as the Electoral officials arrive.
We waited for more than 3 hours before the adhoc staff of the Independent National Electoral Commission arrived. To our greatest surprise, they announced that only those whose surname initials start from A-F should stay on while those from F-Z should go to other polling Units to cross-check their names.
This, we did, and again we could not see our names using the BVAS. Some of us were told that the INEC had redistributed so many voters to other polling units which were far off. This, discouraged a lot of voters who could not trek this distance as there was restriction in vehicular movements.
It is obvious that neither INEC nor political parties did any enlightenment programme on the redistribution of voters to other Polling Units. This is a huge factor which disenfranchised many Nigerians.
Notwithstanding the huge funds allocated to the INEC, most voting materials were still not provided. Inadequate ballot papers, Ink and other necessary logistics were absent. The late coming of materials as well as the INEC staff did not help matters.
In some cases, elections started very late and ended late raising suspicions of likely manipulations. The ‘almighty’ BVAS did not fail to disappoint, as sometimes, the passwords were said to have failed as a result of network problem. The most atrocious act by the INEC which will definitely dent the 2023 elections is the delay in uploading of the results to the INEC Server at the Headquarters, immediately after the results were announced at the polling stations.
How else can one justify this ineptitude, after several promises by the Electoral umpire that the difference between previous elections and this one is the transmission of results from the polling units to INEC Server. This was the practice in the Osun and Ekiti Elections.
A lot of Nigerians who have consequently lost faith in this election have roundly condemned the INEC Chairman with the entire staff as complicit in this regard. Organized violence precipitated at various States of the federation has also given credence that the exercise was from the onset programmed for failure through rigging.
A survey round the country has shown that Nigerians are not satisfied with the processes leading to the Elections, describing it as fraught with irregularities. It is obvious that the country has a long way to go in her electoral reforms as it has gone from bad to worse. The credibility of this election is therefore, morally at stake as whoever is the President now will have a lot of burden and workload to convince Nigerians that he emerged from a free and fair elections.
Nigeria, as a result of this manipulated electoral process will remain a laughing stock in the comity of reasonable nations. It is indeed a long night and Nigerians will continue to mourn the loss of an opportunity to make a difference. Too bad!
