By Charles Ogbu
If there is one thing the just concluded Ekiti State gubernatorial poll proved, it is that votes and PVC are not as useless as some folks would have us believe. In fact, it is very possible to remove President Buhari via the ballot come 2019.
ONLY IF,
The Democratic Coalition could open their eyes to see that they are dealing with a President who has no intention of conducting a free and fair election and is not even prepared to play by the existing democratic rule.
According to report from both local and Foreign Observers in the Ekiti gubernatorial poll, vote buying occurred in such a blatantly brazen manner that the Voters had to vote and lift their ballot paper for the party agents standing nearby to see which candidate they voted for which would then qualify them to receive cash reward from the party agents afterwards. This is a mockery of the “Open Secret Ballot System” the election was meant to be. And, this could never have happened without the consent and approval of the electoral commission known as INEC as well as the security operatives.
What this means is simple: INEC and the Security Agencies woefully failed in their duty.
Here, the Bukola Saraki-led National Assembly must as a matter of urgency exercise its oversight powers by first prevailing on INEC to respect the sanctity of the electoral process by ensuring that Voters are provided with an enclosed space where they can cast their votes very far removed from the prying eyes of agents of the political parties. If Voters can collect money from party agents and still vote in secret with no one seeing who they voted for, then the whole vote buying thing will have been eliminated.
Second and most importantly, INEC should be made to announce the result of each polling unit at that particular polling unit. This is singularly necessary because all through the ages of our electoral experience, the greatest electoral fraud has always occurred not at the voting stage but at the result collation stage.
The National Assembly must realize that democracy without a free and fair election is no democracy at all. And if citizens lose confidence in the electoral system, the whole essence will have been defeated. This is why the Legislature must stand up to be counted at this critical time. The Senate President must realise that his recent victory at the Apex court on false assets declaration charges should be an opportunity for him to truly prove that the National Assembly he is leading is on the side of the ordinary Nigerians and not an appendage of the Executive.
To millions of Nigerians, the current government of President Muhammadu Buhari represents deaths, mass burials and forceful acquisition of people’s ancestral land. For the very first time since the return of democracy, insecurity has been elevated to the level of official government policy with non state actors -Fulani herdsmen- being given unbridled access to the government monopoly of violence.
It has never been this worse!
But we need to come to terms with some hard truth here:
When President Buhari wanted political power, he didn’t come shooting his way into Asorock. He spent 12 solid years planning and scheming until he finally succeeded via the ballot. It is only through that same ballot that he can be removed.
This is why we must stop agonizing and start organizing. To remove the Buhari calamity from power and reverse all the damages he’s inflicted on Nigeria is doable. Very doable. It is a task that must be done. But this can only be done if measures are taken to “force” INEC to see to it that the official fraud seen in Ekiti election are not allowed to re-occur in the 2019 poll.
If the Democratic Coalition fails to insist on seeing that the aforementioned suggestions are implemented before 2019 poll, we are doomed politically.
All of us!
Ogbu, a journalist wrote in from Lagos.