When I lamented last week about the “hypocrisy of the self-styed Nigerian progressives” I had Lai Mohammed and his ilk in mind.
On Tuesday, April 4, Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information and Culture, did in the U.S. what he knows how best to do – fib.
Mohammed, in Washington DC on self-assigned official engagements with some international media organisations, including the Washington Post, Voice of America, Associated Press and Foreign Policy Magazine, accused the Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, and his running-mate, Datti Baba-Ahmed, of inciting insurrection over the February 25 presidential election outcome.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) quoted him as saying: “Obi and his Vice, Datti Ahmed, cannot be threatening Nigerians that if the president-elect, Bola Tinubu, of the All Progressives Congress (APC) is sworn in on May 29, it will be the end of democracy in Nigeria. This is treason… Obi’s statement is that of a desperate person, he is not the democrat that he claimed to be. A democrat should not believe in democracy only when he wins the election.”
Of course, Obi never said so but it is convenient for Lai Mohammed and the APC to lie against him.
But let us stretch Mohammed’s logic a little bit. Democracy is “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as espoused by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in one of his best known speeches, The Gettysburg Address, on November 19, 1863.
So, for any government to wear democracy label, it must be a product of the choice of a majority of the people in a free and fair election. The February 25 poll did not meet that threshold. So, any government therefrom can be anything but democratic. That was what Datti Baba-Ahmed said. I dare say his position is neither treasonous nor fascistic. Democracy dies in any country where the electoral will of the people is subverted whimsically as it is the case in Nigeria.
There are many discerning Nigerians who believe, and rightly so, that Nigeria is not a democracy. APC members in Rivers State who were not only disenfranchised but also prevented from accessing documents used by INEC in conducting the elections so as to prepare their briefs for the tribunals don’t believe in Buhari’s idea of democracy. For the thousands of eligible voters stopped by state-sponsored thugs from voting in Lagos because of their ethnicity, democracy is dead in Nigeria no matter what happens on May 29.
Lai Mohammed was also quoted as saying: “We have come here to balance that skewed narrative and to tell the world unambiguously that the just concluded general elections in Nigeria is the fairest, most transparent and authentic in the history of Nigeria.”
That is a white lie, a tall tell. There is almost a unanimity of opinion that the just concluded elections in Nigeria are the worst ever in the country’s chequered political odyssey. It is so bad that even those declared winners by the Professor Mahmoud Yakubu-led Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) are so ashamed of their “victory” that they are not celebrating.
Even if those who “won” for whatever reason refused to roll out the drums, which I must say is not in their character, Nigerians who purportedly voted for them ought to celebrate. Such celebrations are spontaneous like what happened in Abia State when INEC declared Dr Alex Otti of the Labour Party winner of the governorship election. The entire state erupted in wild jubilation.
The same thing happened in Kano when the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) candidate, Abba Kabir Yusuf, was declared governor-elect. Despite the strange Lieutenant Colonel Buka Suka Dimka-type dawn to dusk curfew after the February 13, 1976 abortive military coup, earlier imposed by the Kano State government, millions of NNPP supporters flooded the streets, in defiance, to celebrate their victory.
But at the presidential level, we have a president-elect who, rather than sitting in his royal court as the president-in-waiting receiving local and international statesmen, is in hiding, literally, with no one knowing his exact whereabouts.
Other than for the reason of fat estacodes, there is no justification for Lai Mohammed’s trip. To borrow a football parlance, this is injury time and there is some cleaning out to do.
The elections were monitored and reported by both international election observers and media, including the ones Lai Mohammed is visiting. Most of the foreign correspondents dodged bullets and evaded political thugs in Lagos, Rivers, Kano, etc.
So, the journalists reported what they saw and not what Peter Obi told them. The reports of the observer missions which impugned on the integrity of the process was based on what they saw, not what they were told and a million visits by the minister, a whopper specialist, to misinform cannot change the reality, which is: the 2023 elections were highly flawed and any government arising therefrom cannot, but suffer legitimacy crisis.
When I lamented last week about the “hypocrisy of the self-styed Nigerian progressives” I had Lai Mohammed and his ilk in mind.
And not disappointing during his U.S. trip, the minister claimed that in challenging the election results in court, there was no pathway to victory for Obi and Atiku Abubakar, the PDP presidential candidate, because neither of them met the constitutional requirements.
“The constitution has stringent criteria for anybody who wants to be president of the country. Not only must he have the plurality of votes cast in an election, he must also have scored one-quarter of votes cast in at least 25 states. Only the president-elect met the criteria by scoring 8.79 million votes and having one-quarter of all the votes cast in 29 states of the federation,” he said.
He said Atiku who came second with 6.9 million votes was only able to get one-quarter of the votes cast in 21 states, while “Obi came third with 5.8 million votes but won only one-quarter of votes cast in 15 states. You cannot win an election in a poll where you came a distant third position and failed to meet constitutional requirements.”
I don’t know where the minister got his figures from but he deliberately lied with an intention to misinform.
The result Yakubu declared at 4am on Wednesday, March 1 said Tinubu garnered 8,794,726 votes, Atiku came second with 6,984,520 votes, and Obi polled 6,101,533 votes to place third. So, where did Lai Mohammed get the 5.8 million votes he awarded Obi?
A total of 2,693,193 votes separated Tinubu and Obi. That is not shellacking. The three candidates won in 12 states with Obi as the only one that secured the mandatory 25 per cent in the FCT, Abuja. That cannot be “a distant third position” by any stretch of the imagination.
Besides, the same Lai Mohammed who today does not see any pathway to an Obi victory in the courts because he came “a distant third,” was there when the Supreme Court found a pathway three years ago for Hope Uzodimma who came a distant fourth in the March 9, 2019 elections to become governor of Imo State.
In that election, Emeka Ihedioha, PDP candidate, polled 273,404 votes ahead of the Action Alliance candidate, Uche Nwosu, who scored 190,364 votes. The All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) candidate, Ifeanyi Ararume, came third with 114,676, while APC’s Uzodimma polled 96,458. The APC didn’t even win a single seat in the 27-member Imo State House of Assembly, yet, a seven-member panel of the Supreme Court, led by Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun, created a pathway for Uzodimma to become governor.
That is the hypocrisy that defines the conduct of APC and its demagogues.
After the 2023 elections, the party’s propaganda machinery is on full throttle. Buhari promised Nigerians free and fair elections but delivered the worst.
And to cover their vile tracks, they are accusing Obi of treason.
The question is how? Did Obi commit treason by challenging the outcome of the elections in court? Did he commit treason by telling his supporters to remain calm as he tries to convince the courts that the man Mahmoud Yakubu declared president-elect didn’t win the February 25 presidential election? What is treasonable in his insistence that he won the election?
For no crime whatsoever other than contesting the presidential election, Obi has been subjected to invidious harassment by the Nigerian State since February 25. He has been cajoled to leave the country or face the consequences. He has been warned to stop moving about and meeting with people.
The Nigerian State is practically stripping him naked, poring over his mails, listening to his private telephone conversations and combing through every business transaction he has made in the last 10 years. Every movement of his is monitored by the Nigerian State and puerile dramas are staged even in aircraft by paid mischief-makers in an attempt to soil his reputation.
They claim he is the “most dangerous” Nigerian politician alive today and he must be contained. That is what this treason allegation is all about. It has nothing to do with any offence Peter Obi committed. Treason is the crime of betraying one’s country, especially by attempting to kill or overthrow the sovereign or government.
Peter Obi has no such capacity. He neither controls the military nor the police. Those baying for his blood should let him be.
