By Ochereome Nnanna

THREE months from now, Muhammadu Buhari will leave the office of President of Nigeria. It will be a massive good riddance to the most incompetent, clannish and nation-destroying government ever to rule Nigeria.

On Monday, February 27, 2023, I was able to get to my workplace – about 35 kilometres from my home – in exactly 25 minutes. There were no holdups anywhere in Lagos. Monday was not a public holiday, but it wore a typical public holiday atmosphere. Very few vehicles were on the roads, and most businesses, including those of roadside traders, were not open. This is not a good picture. It simply means that millions of Nigerians who are already multidimensionally poor are also hungry not just because of their poverty but also because they have been forced to be idle.

Since the beginning of February this year, Nigerians have had to endure choking economic conditions. We have been subjected by the Buhari administration to fuel scarcity, cash scarcity and difficulty in electronic payments. Added to the perennial power failures at this juncture of the year when the weather is hottest, it is a harrowing time for most Nigerians.

It is only in Buhari’s Nigeria that people can be subjected to this level of unnecessary and avoidable suffering simply because, as they claimed, they want to conduct “free and fair” elections. We were told that the currency change, apart from being targeted at roping in excess cash in circulation, was meant to stop moneybags from buying the elections.

Which raises the questions: is it not possible to redesign currency without subjecting the people to hardship? Is it not possible to print and distribute enough new banknotes while still preventing massive vote-buying? Wasn’t it possible to have carried out the currency policy far ahead of the elections and still maintain a firm hold on the currency in circulation? These are questions bordering on competence which Buhari and the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, have failed to display here. And for their failures the people suffer.

Finally, the elections arrived, with the presidential and National Assembly polls in front. It has all the paw marks of the failure in the monetary policy. What we were promised was not what we got. For instance, Professor Mahmood Yakubu’s Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, promised that the 2023 general elections would be conducted with technology, which would virtually eliminate human interference. A long and tedious battle was fought between INEC (with the full backing of Nigerians) and President Buhari who, after rejecting the Electoral Act Amendment Bill a record four times, finally signed it on February 25, 2022, exactly one year to the presidential elections.

Over and again, Prof Yakubu and INEC spokesman, Festus Okoye, drummed it into us that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, would be used to identify and accredit all voters. The result would be inputted into the BVAS and electronically transmitted to INEC’s central servers and watched live on the INEC Result Viewing, IReV, portal. This was how Yakubu put it on November 17, 2022: “The Commission will upload the polling unit results, and citizens will have access to the results in real time”.

I bought into the confidence that INEC was exuding. I was invited to several of their seminars, and we all watched as the Commission demonstrated its technologies in the Anambra, Ekiti and Osun elections which were adjudged free, fair and credible. A few weeks to the elections, Prof. Yakubu said: “We are ready”. But when it was time to walk his talk, he failed so miserably.

The BVAS worked in most places but in some others, there were massive failures due to incompetent, corrupt or demotivated staff. Millions of voters were disenfranchised, and compromised staff of INEC in the pay of politicians tampered with the results. This was prominent in Lagos, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Imo, Ebonyi, Kano, the FCT and others.

INEC has “taken responsibility” for its failure to transmit results electronically. Usually, when you fail and take responsibility, you pay the price, first of which is voluntarily quitting the job. But not in Nigeria. We “take responsibility” and stay put. It is a failure that benefits election riggers, which is also capable of robbing the real winners of their victory; a recipe for disaster!

People have been holding their breaths since the cash crunch and fuel scarcity imposed untold suffering on them. To also deprive them of their right to vote the candidates of their choice through deliberate, incompetent, or corrupt conduct of the elections is inviting doom upon this nation. Those doing this are sowing the seeds of violence, bloodshed, anarchy and more. Buhari is about to give us a disastrous parting gift.

A careful look at some factors shows what is at play here is more of institutional rigging of the 2023 presidential election. Why should Olusegun Agbaje remain the Resident Electoral Commissioner in Lagos after he betrayed hatred for the Igbo electorate in Lagos. Why should Femi Olubiyi, a former Commissioner for Science and Technology under Tinubu in Lagos be made the head of the Information and Computer Technology of the INEC? So many things are being done to sabotage Peter Obi, the Labour Party candidate in some states, with INEC’s undisguised condonation.

The only way out is to review all results and collate only those captured on the BVAS. Wherever that is not possible, the election must be redone and transmitted. If this election ends in chaos, Buhari and Yakubu must bear the consequences. I say no to stolen mandate!