Nigeria can never conduct free, fair and credible election under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, this is the conclusion of all reasonable citizens who watched the conduct of the 2023 charade during which the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC’s) IReV developed glitch when a particular candidate was winning the presidential election.
While the electorate waited for the glitch to be fixed, mischief makers and haters of credible election announced Tinubu as the winner in the dead of the night and damned the consequences. Since then, from Edo, FCT election to Anambra and elsewhere, the story has remained that of a manipulated outcome.
The coming Osun State election may not be different except that the eyes of Nigerians have been wide open to see what would happen. The pre-election shenanigans being orchestrated by the APC-led Federal Government, including the freezing of the state’s account with impunity, indicate the desperation of the APC to take over the state. But governor Ademola Adeleke had since sounded a warning that any form of manipulation that would deprive the electorate the opportunity to choose their governor would be resisted.
But Peter Obi and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar who are contesting the presidency with Tinubu on the platforms of NDC and ADC respectively, appears not to be as vigilant as Adeleke in sounding harsh warning to avoid a repeat of the 2023 presidential election outcome.
Snippets from the INEC offer indication that the presidential election had been won by Tinubu before the election proper, next January. Babachir Lawal, a former Chief of Staff to President Muhammadu Buhari, had also confirmed it in a recent interview. Will Obi and Atiku start dishing out threats now as with Adeleke?
The Presidential Foreign Intervention (or Investment?) Promotion Council (PFIPC) scandal which rocked and shook the presidency, has been swept under the carpet, what with the jamboree investigations conducted by the House of Representatives and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) which have given a clean bill of health to all the government officials indicted, but only heaped the blame on the Director General, Adeniyi Adeyemi? Nigeria will remain a country of the absurd as long as these crop of politicians perpetuate themselves in power by crude means, with little or no resistance from the masses.
