President Goodluck Jonathan played a direct role in
efforts to rig Nigeria’s presidential election that took
place March 28, 2015, including placing telephone
calls to pressure returning officers to alter vote tallies,
an investigation by SaharaReporters has revealed.
The extent of the effort to rig the polls for Mr.
Jonathan, and the outgoing president’s direct role in
the scheme, emerged from interviews and tips offered
by electoral officials, security agents, foreign and
Nigerian election monitors, and members of the
president’s own Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Weeks before the election, as Mr. Jonathan’s internal
pollsters warned that his reelection prospects looked
dire, the president and his inner circle of associates
approved several measures to rig the elections. These
included massive deployment of soldiers to several
states in Nigeria’s southwest to help intimidate voters
sympathetic to the main opposition All Progressives
Congress (APC), the redeployment of police and other
security officials to ensure that those who favored the
incumbent president were assigned to “politically
tough” states, and the movement of massive amounts
of cash to designated states to entice both voters and
opposition party agents to swing their support to Mr.
Jonathan.
When all the steps failed to deliver enough votes to
the president, Mr. Jonathan and his inner circle went
into panic mode once collation of results began. At
the end of the first day of election collation by the
Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), as
it dawned on the president’s team that he was
headed for defeat, Mr. Jonathan sent retired Colonel
Bello Fadile to shop around for any judge who
would give an order to stop the collation.
A judge told SaharaReporters that this effort
largely failed because the Chief Judge of the Federal
High Court had warned other judges to refrain from
entertaining such controversial and potentially
incendiary election-related cases. The one judge Mr.
Fadile thought he could count on pleaded that he
had left Abuja for his hometown for Easter holidays.
Once the plan to use the judiciary to scuttle the
collation collapsed, Mr. Fadile recruited former Minister
of Niger Delta Affairs, Godsday Orubebe, to play the
key role in a plan to physically disrupt the collation of
results.
Mr. Orubebe drove into the collation center with two
heavily armed men believed to be Niger Delta
militants. Once Mr. Orubebe arrived at the
International Civil Center (ICC), of the collation venue,
the Department of Security Services (DSS)
withdrew its security detail clearing the way for Mr.
Orubebe’s thugs to foment mayhem. The agency also
jammed the Internet service at the center, making it
near impossible for reporters at the venue to
access the Internet.
Our investigation revealed that what saved the day
was the refusal of the Nigerian police at the venue to
accept the order to withdraw from the venue. The
police commanders at the collation center demanded
an official letter from their Inspector General if they
were to leave, arguing that their posting to the venue
had been done via an official letter. “We said it would
be unwise to leave [the collation center] without a
counter letter or signal from our headquarters,” one of
the police officers told our correspondent.
As Mr. Orubebe began his disruptive action, Usman
Abdullahi, an aide to INEC chairman Attahiru Jega,
sent text messages to a few notable Nigerians as well
as some Western diplomats alerting them to the
possibility that the armed men who accompanied Mr.
Orubebe would abduct Mr. Jega. SaharaReporters saw
a copy of the text message.
Mr. Jega’s calm response to Mr. Orubebe’s antics, as
well as the refusal of the Nigerian police personnel to
quit the ICC, foiled the plot to abduct the INEC
chairman.
Mr. Jega remained on his seat for the better part of
the day, refusing to leave the table even as he
declared short breaks to await the arrival of election
returning officers from various states.
SaharaReporters learned that several of the returning
officers were flown into Abuja on a presidential jet.
However, the jet made
unusual “disappearances” and curiously long delays
in bringing in returning officers from the South South
and South Eastern states. One of the Presidency
sources said the president ordered a delay in flying in
the returning officer of Borno State by at least four
hours. The president figured that the poll results from
the state would widen Mr. Buhari’s lead, giving
Nigerians and the global community a clear picture of
the APC candidate’s decisive and irreversible
domination of the presidential polls.
While the returning officer from Borno State was
abandoned at the Air Force base in Maiduguri, the
returning officer from Delta State presented figures
that temporarily seemed to boost Mr. Jonathan’s
electoral fortunes.
Several sources disclosed that these delays were part
of President Jonathan’s tactical game. President
Jonathan made frantic calls to several returning
officers from the South South and South East urging
them to bump up his final figures to enable him to win
by at least 500,000 votes against his rival,
Muhammadu Buhari. At the time of the president’s
calls to returning officers, Mr. Buhari was already
leading by at least three million votes according to
authentic results published by SaharaReporters the
day before Mr. Orubebe’s meltdown at the ICC.
A source at the Presidency confirmed to
SaharaReporters that President Jonathan personally
reached out to at least four returning officers to ask
them to inflate presidential election figures by several
hundred thousand votes to enable him to win the
elections. In one instance, the source said, one of the
returning officers told the president that the number of
accredited voters was not up to the figures Mr.
Jonathan wanted called for him. According to our
source, the president remained unfazed. “Just declare
the votes, I will take care of the rest,” the official
quoted Mr. Jonathan as stating.
Our sources at the Presidency said Mr. Jonathan was
counting on the usual tactics of using corrupt judges
in the Court of Appeal as well as Supreme Court to
uphold the outcome of fraudulent elections.
The sources also revealed that SaharaReporters
played a critical role in frustrating the president’s
rigging plan by publishing the unofficial results of the
presidential polls based on accurate compilation of
results called at various state collation centers. “When
your website published the results, there was little or
no room to maneuver,” one source at Aso Rock said.
He added that Mr. Orubebe’s reference to the
publication of the election results was actually a
reference to SaharaReporters’ accurate representation
of the polls tally from across the country.
Our source said that, having been convinced that
President Jonathan could pull off a victory by
manipulating figures, some of his ministers and party
officials began celebrating. For instance, a junior
minister for Foreign Affairs, Musiliu Obanikoro, tweeted
that he wished to be the first to congratulate Mr.
Jonathan for emerging victorious. Also PDP
spokesperson, Olisa Metuh, spoke on Channels TV,
urging the APC to accept defeat and behave
peacefully.
In the end, President Jonathan and his team came to
terms with the reality that no amount of hanky-panky
could secure victory for them. Mr. Jonathan’s much-
praised acceptance of defeat was not part of his
original design, according to sources close to the
president. They said world leaders had inundated Mr.
Jonathan with calls demanding that he accept the
outcome of the polls. The calls were intensified as
soon Mr. Orubebe began his public action aimed
at disrupting the collation.
Diplomatic sources in Abuja told SaharaReporters
that the UK and US put enormous pressure on
President Jonathan not to undermine the collation
process or scuttle the polls. The barrage of pressure
finally worked. Mr. Jonathan gave orders for the pilot
of the presidential jet to head for Maiduguri to pick up
the Borno State returning officer. Once the official
was brought to Abuja, the final collation of
results was done and Mr. Buhari emerged the winner.


http://saharareporters.com/2015/04/17/how-president-jonathan-plotted-rig-polls-abduct-jega-and-personally-phoned-returning

i keep saying, these poison you people r cooking will swallow all of u when exploited

Lies and propaganda well cooked by APC messed Jonathan's administration up more than his weaknesses......APC must be ready to be served back!

Qui sera sera.. Whatever will be will be.

APC still sees themselves as opposition, of what benefits are these lies from Liar Mohammed/sharia-reporters?