The February 25, 2023 presidential election is regarded by many Nigerians as one that would determine the future of the country. But there seems to be palpable fear, apprehension and anxiety everywhere, with many engaged in all kinds of calculations, permutations and projections, as to what the outcome would be. While many hinge the survival or cessation of the corporate existence of Nigeria on the way and manner the election is conducted, others still believe in the status quo and that nothing would change. To them, it will still be business as usual.

Unfortunately, tension is mounting and tempers are flaring, but the good news is that people are still waiting anxiously for the D-day to exercise their civic responsibility of selecting the next president. Many Nigerians expect a level playing field to guarantee free, fair and credible elections, so that they will be able to pick their preferred candidate on Election Day. Many believe the election would be a watershed, even as they insist that only the electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), holds the ace.

However, less than two weeks to the presidential election, Nigerians are still expressing concerns and fears as to the preparedness and willingness of the INEC to deliver free, fair and credible elections.

Those in this school of thought are quick to draw attention to the activities of some elements within the Commission, with a particular reference to the Lagos State Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), Olusegun Agbaje. Their argument is that if the recent utterances and actions of the Lagos REC were anything to go by, then one might not be wrong to accept with a pinch of salt the INEC chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu’s consistent gospel of the Commission’s readiness to deliver free, fair and credible elections.

Expectations are high that the INEC would do everything possible to stop anything or anybody that would cast even a modicum of doubt or semblance of it on the credibility of the Commission and its promise of delivering free, fair and credible elections to Nigerians.

Agbaje appears to have stirred the hornet’s nest with his recent statement about the failure or inability of INEC to give the Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) to many residents of Oshodi/Isolo and Okota areas of Lagos, populated mainly by the Igbo. He was quoted to have said that majority of those who were unable to get their PVCs were the Igbo who did double registration after they ‘migrated’ to Lagos from the South East.

Recall that many residents of Okota have complained that after several visits to various INEC offices within the Oshodi/Isolo area, they were told that their PVCs could not be found. This simply meant that they had been disenfranchised and would not be able to vote on Election Day. Most of them lamented that the INEC officials kept promising them that they would get their PVCs on so many occasions that they visited their offices to get the cards, only to be told eventually that their cards could not be found. This, they reasoned, was a deliberate and calculated move to disenfranchise them.

Soon after the Lagos REC disclosed why such a huge number of Igbo in Okota area could not get their PVCs, many Nigerians, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), as well as some civil society groups, began to demand for Mr. Agbaje’s removal if the INEC boss, Prof Yakubu wants Nigerians to have faith in his Commission delivering free, fair and credible elections, particularly in Lagos State.

Those pushing for Agbaje’s removal as Lagos REC noted that while the dust of his response to why many Igbo in Okota were denied their PVCs was yet to settle down, his alleged contract to the Lagos State Park and Garage Management Committee led by Musliu Akinsanya, also known as MC Oluomo, for the movement of INEC’s election materials in the state surfaced. Agbaje was alleged to have made the disclosure on Tuesday last week during the Inter-Agency Consultative Committee on Election Security (ICCES) meeting in Lagos.

This piece of information did not go down well with a section of the populace, particularly the PDP presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, who felt that Oluomo is a known ally of the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and as such, would be partial in carrying out such responsibility.

The PDP presidential candidate, through his Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shuaibu, accused Agbaje of partisanship and compromise with his move to engage Oluomo’s Park Committee to distribute INEC’s sensitive materials in Lagos.

A statement by Shuaibu said that Atiku who is also the Waziri Adamawa, described as curious Agbaje’s insistence on the use of the Lagos State Park and Garage Management Committee, led by transport kingpin and member of the APC Presidential Campaign Council, Oluomo, for election logistics on February 25 and March 11, 2023.

He described as watery Agbaje’s excuse that INEC would not be able to use the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) and Road Transport Employers Association of Nigeria (RTEAN) because they had been barred in Lagos State.

Also, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has equally thrown its weight behind the former vice president to reject the logistics arrangement in Lagos with Oluomo’s group.

Its National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, in a statement, said deploying members of an organisation sympathetic to the APC amounts to compromising the polls even before the D-day.

He accused the Lagos REC of working for the ruling party and clandestinely perfecting schemes to actualise the plot to rig the exercise and put his person in power against the will of the Nigerian people.

“The INEC’s plan to use the organisation, led by a known APC member who has been seen in Tinubu’s many rallies in Lagos, Ogun, Kwara, Osun, Ekiti and other places is condemnable and anti-democratic. HURIWA rejects the move in its entirety.

“Apparently, the Lagos REC is working for Tinubu and APC. INEC needs to immediately redeploy him for electoral integrity if any at all will be achieved in the next elections.

“Also, HURIWA demands that INEC finds an alternative to the Central Bank of Nigeria and not keep sensitive and non-sensitive materials in the custody of the apex bank, headed by a known APC member, and in fact, a former presidential aspirant of the ruling party. This is totally wrong,” Onwubiko stated.

However, Agbaje has dismissed Atiku’s call for his resignation as a joke and waste of his precious time, denying that the electoral body in Lagos State had any agreement with Oluomo to move electoral materials in the forthcoming elections in the state.

He made the disclosures at an enlarged stakeholders’ forum of the electoral body which was held last week at the Media Centre, INEC State Office, Sabo-Yaba, Lagos. Agbaje also revealed that Lagos State recorded 88 per cent of PVCs collection before the end of the exercise.

Reacting to the development, the INEC National Commissioner in charge of Voter Education and Publicity, Festus Okoye, insisted that the Commission does not go into contract with transport unions for the movement of its materials, but rather deals with individual drivers. He said the Commission only enters into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with transport unions to help the Commission trace any of their members who is given a job of moving INEC’s materials from point A to B but fails to turn up.

However, the matter has assumed a different dimension with the recent denial by Agbaje of ever having any such contract with Oluomo’s Park Committee. Agbaje, who was reported in several media platforms as insisting that members of Oluomo’s Park Committee would be deployed to convey materials for the Commission in Lagos, is today singing a new song. He has denied ever having such a discussion with Oluomo.

With the latest twist in the unfolding drama, many Nigerians feel deeply concerned as to the sincerity and willingness of the Commission to conduct free, fair and credible elections on February 25 and March 11, respectively.

Interestingly, as the drama unfolds, Nigerians can only pray and plead with INEC to do the right thing so that Nigerians can freely pick leaders of their choice and not those who manipulate the process with the tacit connivance of some dubious and unscrupulous INEC personnel to win elections.

Responding to the development, President of the Middle Belt Forum (MBF), Dr. Pogu Bitrus, noted that the issue required proper scrutiny since INEC had promised Nigerians that it would deliver free and fair elections.

However, within the ranks of the INEC, he noted that there are people who are ready to compromise and sabotage the electoral process for their own personal gains. “The unfortunate thing is that it may not be the INEC itself that has the problem, but those people within the INEC who are ready to compromise. Such elements should be identified from the beginning and kicked out of the system if INEC must deliver free, fair and credible elections as it has promised Nigerians,” he cautioned.

He also disagreed with Agbaje’s submission of double registration as the reason for disenfranchising the Igbo in Okota area of Lagos. He said: “With regard to Agbaje’s argument of double registration as to why many people, particularly South Easterners in Okota axis could not get their PVCs, I don’t think that is tenable because when you go to register and you have registered in another place earlier, you will only inform them that you have registered in another place but only want to transfer your registration to your new place. And if that is done, it is not double registration.” In this line of argument, Dr. Bitrus used his personal experience to drive home his point, saying, “I had PVC but it didn’t have my picture; it was blank. So, I came to Abuja, registered again supplying the same data I used before and I got another one without any problem. If what the Lagos REC is saying is true, it means the INEC registration officers didn’t do their job during the registration, because in my own case, I just told them that I have PVC but it doesn’t have my picture and I would like to have a complete one. They told me what to do, guided me, and registered me. I later went and collected my new PVC in my local government, not in Abuja where I did the correction. That should have applied in the case of those Igbo in Okota area of Lagos, and it is suspicious because it appears as if it is targeted at the Igbo community in Lagos. When such a thing happens, a proper and thorough investigation has to take place to ascertain whether the claim of the REC is genuine or not.”

He further stressed that the credibility of an election is based on so many parameters, not just one thing and warned that Nigeria should not be allowed to descend to the politics of the First Republic where each region was being controlled by regional parties. “Yes, INEC has moved forward by introducing BVAS but certain processes also have to be checked so that some people don’t get disenfranchised just because they belong to a particular community or because it is believed or presumed that they may vote for a particular candidate. Now, if such a thing is allowed to happen, we will end up with a situation we had in the First Republic, where the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC) was controlling the North by force, and the Action Group (AG) was by force controlling the West and everybody was controlling his own enclave.

That is not healthy; we should have grown beyond that. People should be free to vote for whomever they like and not to be forced to do what some people want because they feel the territory where such an election is holding is their own,” he stated.

In the same vein, the National Publicity Secretary of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, Chief Alex Ogbonnia, noted that at the level of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, it is believed that anybody who is deprived of justice will not have interest in peace. “When you deny somebody of his right, he becomes agitated and equally angry,” he added.

Extrapolating the above principle and situating it to the prevailing circumstance, he is of the view that the Lagos REC, by his alleged action, is creating anger between himself and the Igbo population; a development he said is not even to the advantage of the APC and Tinubu. “So, anybody who is reasonable will want to create friendship; not animosity and enmity during an election. So, my advice is that it is better to create friendship than enmity because by the time you create enmity, it will bounce back. It will boomerang because people will become more aggressive in trying to vent their anger. So, what the Lagos REC has succeeded in doing is creating more enmity and distancing the Igbo from the election. And even those who would have had sympathy for the APC will no longer be there. It is not supposed to be. So, our advice again is that the APC and Tinubu group should try as much as possible to attract votes from diverse interests, and ethnic groups. But, to begin to force people or create enmity and develop animosity is not even helping the process, especially the candidate that is contesting elections,” he submitted.

On the alleged move to engage Oluomo’s Park Committee for the distribution of election materials, he said: “If there is no National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) in Lagos, I don’t have any problem with that because Ohanaeze Ndigbo wouldn’t come from the South East, and begin to impose on Lagos State what they want to do. But also, trying to give such a contract to somebody believed to be a member of the APC Presidential Campaign Council is an indication that things are not working well and this is the kind of thing that people are revolting against. What is happening in Nigeria currently is a revolt against the system and this alleged action of the Lagos REC is trying to add value to it.

“So, the more you try to use some of these obnoxious methods in the political system, the more people continue to revolt. When they say vote wisely, it is to sharpen your eyes against injustice and vote for the right person. So, they are creating problems for Tinubu and his party, the APC, by adopting the wrong method. It is advised that they do the right thing; it is to their own advantage that things are working well,” he said.

Chief Ogbonnia advised the Lagos REC to do the right thing to avoid people’s anger and revolt against any party or candidate. “The more you create hardship and an obnoxious system and method, the more people will revolt against you. So, whatever injustice they want to impose on the people will be to the advantage of the opposition party and that is why you hear the slogan, ‘vote wisely”, he noted. (Daily Sun)

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