MAHMUD JEGA FROM THISDAY
A member of the British House of Lords, when told that money is difficult to come by these days, said he is nearly 90 years old but cannot remember any time in the past when money was easy to get. I have been watching Nigerian elections since 1979 and I cannot remember a time when those who lost the election did not allege rigging and intimidation. For a time, there was hope that President Goodluck Jonathan’s 2015 concession phone call could become the norm in Nigeria. It now looks like it was a one-off event. Instead, it was Godsday Orubebe’s 2015 attempt to storm INEC’s National Collation Centre that has endured, with Dino Melaye attempting a poor carbon copy in 2023.
The young men and women who are saying on social media that the 2023 election was full of rigging and intimidation, have no personal knowledge of the golden age of rigging and intimidation in Nigerian elections. In this election I saw no reports in the media of thugs snatching ballot boxes and stuffing them. I saw no reports of security agents cordoning off whole polling stations while ballot boxes were being stuffed. There was no story of soldiers scattering voters in any place. Where is the mother of all rigging, when Supreme Court ruled in 1983 that UPN’s Bisi Onabanjo got 1.2million votes, NPN’s Akin Omoboriowo got 500,000 votes but the returning officer added 1 behind the figure and it became N1.5million?
This year, the President did not declare the election a do or die. I saw no story of armed hooded security agents descending on a state, as in Ekiti in 2014. There was no story of an opposition governor’s plane denied landing rights at any airport. In 2023, we didn’t have a Police Commissioner Mbu denying an opposition party governor entry into his own Government House. Pray, where in Nigeria in 2023 did we have Police Commissioner Tahir Jidda denying Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe entry into Maiduguri and firing tear gas at Zik, even though Borno State Governor Muhammadu Goni stood beside him? Even the party primaries of last year lacked drama, because we saw nothing like the Babalawo who tried to enter the UPN state congress in Ibadan in 1983 with a live tortoise strapped to his waist.Another youngster wrote on social media that “this generation of Nigerian politicians do not know how to concede, unlike the older generation.” Sorry sir, they actually copied it from the older generation. In 1979, as soon as election results started trickling in, we saw GNPP leader Waziri Ibrahim dashing around to see UPN leader Chief Awolowo and NPP leader Dr. Azikiwe. The three of them, minus PRP leader Aminu Kano who refused to join, appeared together before pressmen, rejected the election results and alleged rigging, even though it was an election conducted by a military government, not like now when APC controls the Federal Government [at least, it used to]. The scene was re-enacted last week when PDP and LP running mates held a joint press conference and tried to present a common front, a case of locking the stables after the horses have bolted.
