Dele Alake, Special Adviser on Communications to President-elect Bola Tinubu, on Saturday insisted that the Labour Party presidential candidate cannot emerged Nigeria’s president because his campaign was based on religion and ethnicity.
Alake stated this in reaction to an open letter by Nigeria’s globally acclaimed novelist, Chimamanda Adichie, and addressed to President Joe Biden, of the United States of America, questioning his congratulatory message to President-elect, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
Chimamanda had in the letter described Nigeria’s democracy as hollow, insisting the 2023 presidential election was flawed by a number of irregularities.
However, in a rebuttal, Alake insisted democracy in Nigeria was thriving, contrary to Chimamanda’s claims.
Alake, who described the celebrated author as an unrepentant Igbo jingoist, argued that the Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi, had campaigned on the basis of religion and ethnicity.
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He insisted the former Anambra State governor would never emerge Nigeria’s President having based his campaigns on those basis.
The rebuttal reads in part: “Obi targeted Igbo and Christian votes in his campaigns and he got his victories in the South-East and South-South. He won two out of six states in the North-Central and did not have up to 25% of the votes cast in either the North-West or North-East.
“He had no realistic electoral path to victory in the presidential election. Victory in two out of the six geopolitical zones cannot give any candidate victory in a presidential election in Nigeria. What is most tragic about Chimamanda’s letter to President Joe Biden is that she wrote as an unrepentant Igbo jingoist masquerading as an objective intellectual and patriotic Nigerian.
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“The writer can of course afford the luxury of pronouncing Nigeria’s democracy ‘hollow’ from the distance of her foreign abode all because her favoured candidate, Peter Obi, fell short in the election.
“She avers that Nigerians went out to vote on the morning of February 25 with high hopes mainly because of the promise by the electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to upload results of the exercise online from polling units in real time to enhance transparency.
“The INEC has admitted that its system suffered unanticipated glitches on that day which made it impossible for it to upload the polling units results of the presidential elections on its portal immediately as promised but it began to do so once the technical hitches had been resolved.
“It is instructive that Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso broke away from the PDP to contest the election on the platforms of the LP and NNPP respectively. Had the PDP contested the election as one with Obi and Kwankwaso in its fold, winning the election would have been an uphill, almost impossible, task for the APC. But contesting on three separate platforms against the ruling party as they did, the victory of the APC was logically and empirically inevitable.