ATIKU ABUBAKAR. |
With just President Muhammadu Buhari's response the only
one pending to complete the cycle of arguments and counter-arguments arising
from the conduct and outcome of the 2019 presidential election, it may pretty
well be said that the orchestra of the February 23 tragic-comedy is just
beginning to set its own stage.
The highlights of the petition
from the Peoples Democratic Party and its presidential candidate, Atiku
Abubakar against the Independent National Electoral Commission and the All
Progressives Congress very well paint the picture that the February 23
presidential election was rigged to favour incumbent President Muhammadu
Buhari.
Both Atiku and the PDP had raised
some salient questions such as the allegation that the results that was
officially declared by INEC was different from the result that was
electronically fed into the back-end server of the commission and that the
electoral commission did not follow its own guidelines on the use of card
readers. The third major red flag that the PDP raised was that President Buhari
lacks the basic educational requirement by the 1999 constitution that should
have qualified him to participate in the election.
The PDP/Atiku legal team went a
step further by providing the actual data captured on the server of INEC which
shows that the opposition party defeated the incumbent by a margin of about one
million, six hundred thousand votes. And so, expectedly, the sound-bite of the
stolen mandate had rented the air and it was assumed that the response of both
INEC and the APC to the petition will put paid to that sound-bite.
Regrettably, that was not to be.
In separate replies to the
petition brought before the Court of Appeal presidential election tribunal,
both the INEC and APC came up with two ludicrous claims that, other than bemuse
public sensibilities, is very infirm to float an argument that the February 23
election was indeed free and fair.
In the case of INEC in its reply,
the commission makes a shameless volte-face on its own guidelines concerning
the use of card readers; and rather than dismiss figures being bandied by the
PDP and its candidate by presenting the actual data captured in its server, the
electoral commission retorts that its servers are blank of any data.
In its own reply, the
APC made a more prostrate submission, saying that Atiku is not qualified
to be elected as Nigeria's president because he is a foreigner from the
Republic of Cameroon.
Many commentators have been
interrogating the topic of Atiku's nationality since last week Friday when APC
made the laughable claim. But it is doubtful if the intention of the APC was to
actually make an issue out of Atiku's Nigerian identity, but rather establish a
construct in parallel with the allegation that Buhari's educational background
does not merit his being presented for election as Nigeria's president.
However, whether Atiku is not a
Nigerian or Buhari is too illiterate to be elected Nigeria's president is
better left for the court to decide. In either case, if Atiku is indeed a
Nigerian, he will not require 15 senior advocates to prove his case in court
and if President Buhari too has the requisite education he should simply give
the country a breather by proving his case beyond all reasonable doubts.
What is even more interesting, if
not stupid, about the argument being advanced by the APC on Atiku's nationality
and eligibility is that by saying that anyone who was born before 1961 around
that specific place in Adamawa cannot contest for Nigeria's president also
implies that the ballot cast by those people is also null and void on account
of universality of franchise in the Nigerian law - a good enough ground to
throw out the entire election.
It is so disingenuous how the APC
in aiming at just one individual will ram an entire electoral demography under the
bus. And, to think of it, between Atiku and Buhari the latter has raised his
fingers in the air high enough for all to see that he probably has a soft spot
for a neighbouring country of Niger Republic more than Atiku has shown
any inclination towards Cameroon.
If, as Vice President, Atiku had
championed the construction of a railway line from Maiduguri straight into the
heart of the Cameroonian territory or political VIPs from Cameroon had graced
Atiku's campaign rallies, one only wonders how plausible the allegation by the
APC would have been. There is absolutely nothing in public record to accentuate
the argument that Atiku is in any way related to Cameroon, but President
Buhari's profile in the last four years of his presidency is a rich lode of evidence
that the president has some sort of affiliation with Niger Republic that is too
cold for comfort.
Again, it is an insult to the
intelligence of Nigerians when INEC came up to announce that the card reader
was only for the purpose of authentication of the ballot process (whatever that
means) and that nothing was transmitted electronically to the backend server of
the electoral body for the purpose of vote counting during the election.
The director of public
communication of INEC, Festus Okoye was unequivocal about it when he said, few
weeks before the presidential election and indeed after, that the non-use of
card readers in the 2019 election may lead to the outright cancellation of the
election.
It was a major news item on every
of Nigeria's newspapers and blogs on March 5, 2019 that the electoral
commission denied a selective use of card readers and even stated clearly that
the technology will be a major fulcrum upon which the credibility of the
election would rest.
The question to ask then is why
is it that INEC is changing its words over a commitment to technology it had
made to all political parties and stakeholders in the election?
Why would the electoral
commission commit a whooping sum N27 billion into constructing backend servers
when it knew that it would not transmit any result thereto?
It is thus not difficult to read
the handwriting on the wall that in-between the fallacious claim by APC that
Atiku is not a Nigerian and the fraudulent decision by INEC to renounce its
commitment to technology for credibility of the election is a deliberate
attempt to hamstring the course of justice at the presidential election
tribunal.
Babajide Balogun, a solicitor
and wrote from Lagos
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