The treachery of Mahmud Yakubu must never be forgotten or forgiven (1)
Mahmud Yakubu, chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), is not only a pernicious liar with a history of lies as INEC chairman, but he is also a real treacherous human being with weak moral fibre and has absolutely no respect for Nigerians. He must be denied the social respectability that he and all men in his position crave and demand.
After the shambolic 2019 elections where INEC declared Muhammadu Buhari winner, whistle-blowers from the commission let it be known that despite the refusal of the president to sign the electronic transmission of results into law, INEC still went ahead to collate results electronically during the election.
According to insider sources, the electronically transmitted results showed that the Atiku Abubakar of the PDP won the election with a whopping six million vote margin. But after the results were massaged, tipp-exxed, and tampered with manually, INEC declared Buhari the winner.
The existence of the server and the results formed the fulcrum of Atiku’s challenge of the election results at the tribunal. Atiku and the PDP wanted INEC to allow them access to the server and the results therein. But INEC denied they ever had such a server, even though they were given money to procure one for the election, or uploaded any results electronically. At the Tribunal, INEC’s counsel declared: “They are asking us to bring something we do not have.” But that was a blatant lie.
INEC had campaigned for pressured the Nigerian National Assembly to include electronic transmission of results in the electoral act, arguing that it was the only permanent solution to election rigging and that it had everything in place to make it work. While the National Assembly included it in the electoral act and reassured of its capacity to deliver, President Muhammadu Buhari flatly refused to sign it into law, fearing it will imperil his re-election chances on account of his deep unpopularity.
But the real shocker was the conduct of INEC. Despite repeated promises and reassurances, the results of the presidential elections were not uploaded in real time
So, INEC arguing that they do not have a server was a very blatant and wicked lie. But they had the backing of the law. Since the electoral act in use did not make provision for electronic transmission of results, and the matter was purely an internal decision of INEC, they could plausibly deny the existence of the server. With no access to INEC’s server, Atiku and the PDP could not prove a thing at the tribunal and Buhari’s fraudulent re-election stood.
To date, however, senior INEC insiders and personnel continue to tell academic researchers and anyone who cares to know that INEC did electronically transmit the 2019 elections and that Atiku Abubakar won that election squarely based on the results transmitted.
Immediately after, however, INEC resumed its campaign for the legalisation of electronic transmission of results. This time, they succeeded and with nothing to lose since he’s tenure barred, Buhari signed it into law. INEC even made the point to test-run the method in the Edo, Anambra, Ekiti, and Osun off-season gubernatorial elections.
With the successes of these elections, Mahmud Yakubu declared that “going forward, INEC would transmit election results electronically,” and it will permanently eliminate rigging in our elections. In the lead-up to the 2023 elections and with rumours circulating that INEC planned to rig the elections by abandoning the electronic transmission of results, the commission came out strongly to deny such rumours, putting out several press releases stating that:
“The Commission has repeatedly reassured Nigerians that it will transmit results directly from the polling units as we witnessed in Ekiti and Osun Governorship elections and 103 more constituencies where off-cycle Governorship/FCT Area elections and bye-elections were held since August 2020…”
At the Royal Institute of International Affairs, (Chatham House) London, where all major presidential candidates go to campaign and where important public policy decisions affecting Nigeria are unveiled and discussed, Yakubu continued to reassure everyone that the public would be able to view “polling-unit results as soon as they are finalized on Election Day.” He even went triumphal about the readiness of the commission: “We did so in Ekiti and Osun. It was fantastic and we’re going to do so nationwide. Increasingly, our people are becoming more excited about the deployment of this technology and we’re really happy.”
Then on Election Day, everything went wrong. INEC staff arrived late, not universally, but strategically at opposition strongholds and even so, with insufficient voting materials. Violence, voter intimidation, and destruction of ballot boxes were rampant being perpetrated sometimes, at the instance of security officials and mainly targeting opposition strongholds and supporters.
But the real shocker was the conduct of INEC. Despite repeated promises and reassurances, the results of the presidential elections were not uploaded in real time. Curiously though, while polling unit officials could not upload the results of the presidential election, they could upload those of the Senatorial and House of Representatives elections. They claimed not to have the password.
It was only the next day that the results began to be slowly uploaded on the INEC portal. As many suspected, when compared with the results declared at polling units and which were captured by voters on their cell phones, they contained obvious alterations, with many of the original result sheets cancelled out with pen and rewritten over again.
Even with that, the numbers are still difficult to reconcile with many painstaking analyses of the sex-up results showing that the ruling party was declared winner even in states where the opposition won overwhelmingly. Like Chimamanda Adichie argued in her piece, “Nigeria’s Hallow Democracy”, “The election had been not only rigged, but done in such a shoddy, shabby manner that it insulted the intelligence of Nigerians.”
Businessday.NG The treachery of Mahmud Yakubu must never be forgotten or forgiven (2)
[quote]The explanations INEC and Mr Yakubu gave for the non-uploading of the results of the presidential election to the INEC server in real time were unconvincing and even downright insulting. While INEC national commissioner, Festus Okoye, acknowledged they “promised that results would be uploaded in real time to our result viewing portal,” he conceded that “there were challenges” that were not anticipated. But as to the nature of those challenges that curiously only affected results of the presidential elections and not those of the National Assembly elections conducted the same day, Okoye didn’t explain.
The All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential campaign council, however, in defence of INEC, said no law mandated INEC to transmit election results electronically. In subsequent court filings, INEC adopted this line of argument wholesale, completely ignoring its promise and repeated reassurances that: “there is no going back on the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for voter accreditation. There is no going back on the transmission of results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (iReV) in real-time on Election Day.”
Mr Yakubu and his like know they will never be held accountable. He knows that Nigerians have a short memory, and in a little while, they will forget about his treachery
Make no mistake about it, what Mahmud Yakubu and his minnows at INEC did was to directly insult Nigerians to their faces. It is a way of saying: “We’ll deceive you; we’ll raise your hopes; we’ll get you giddy with excitement; we’ll get you to the polls, and we’ll do exactly as we wish because you all don’t matter and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it”.
That is exactly how elected and appointed public officials treat Nigerians. The concept of legitimacy and accountability is foreign to them. What matters is capturing power by any means necessary and being appointed to high office where they could enrich themselves at the expense of the public.
Mr Yakubu and his like know they will never be held accountable. He knows that Nigerians have a short memory, and in a little while, they will forget about his treachery and welcome him into the noble/respectable, and wealthy class of ex-government officials who possess institutional knowledge and wisdom and would be consulted from time to time to lecture and educate citizens on national events.
He will demand and be accorded undeserved respect and honour at private and public events, and no one will remember or bother to recall his misdeeds and betrayal of the Nigerian people. Sadly, even among the staunchest pro-democracy advocates, there seems to be an uncanny reverence for monied former government officials.
After all, he has precedent to learn from. After conducting the worst election in the history of Nigeria in 2007 where results were being announced in Abuja even as voting was ongoing in states, Maurice Iwu, the extremely corrupt and amoral Chairman of INEC, who was announcing results where purported votes are higher than the total number of registered voters in some places, retired to a life of affluence and honour.
Shortly after, in 2011, at the height of the Ebola pandemic, he was even being entertained on primetime television shows discussing his nonsensical research on the use of bitter kola to cure Ebola. Today, he moves about comfortably in social and academic circles and still enjoys some respectability that he clearly didn’t earn.
Ditto Charles Soludo, the cantankerous, low self-esteemed hustler who managed to sweet-talk his way into being appointed the central bank governor. Once there, he went about satisfying his deep cravings for power, wealth, and influence and virtually forgot about one of the most important jobs he was meant to do – regulate the banks to ensure the stability of the country’s financial system.
So preoccupied was he with living a luxurious life (he went about with a retinue of bodyguards and travelled on private jets) and cosying up to the bank executives that he pretended not to notice as bank executives hollowed out the banks and almost collapsed Nigeria’s entire financial stability in the process. Soludo’s dereliction of duty cost Nigerian taxpayers about N5.67 trillion through the Asset Management Company of Nigeria (AMCON) to stabilize the financial markets.
In a saner society, such an individual will be in jail or at least, will retire and live out the rest of his life in solitude and shame. But not in Nigeria. As if under a spell, Nigerians – even well-enlightened and genuinely pro-democratic and good governance advocates – continued to regard him as a well-intentioned technocrat, financial expert, and intellectual celebrity.
Aided by that false and totally unearned reputation, he jumped into politics, promising to transform Anambra into the “Dubai, Taiwan, and Singapore of Africa.” He has been elected governor of Anambra state and we’re now witnessing how he is indeed transforming Anambra.
Since Nigerian institutions have shown no appetite or capability to hold anyone accountable for his/her actions in public office, the only avenue left for citizens to hold public officials accountable is through the strategic deployment of public shaming.
Nigerians must learn to hold grudges against public officials who behave badly while in office. They must learn to continuously heckle, and like some religious sects, aggressively humiliate, and shun badly behaved current and former public officials, like Mr Yakubu, who has shown that he is nothing but a lying, deceptive, and unscrupulous scoundrel.
The only problem is that many of Nigeria’s civil society, pro-democracy activists and academics who are supposed to lead this aggressive humiliation and shunning campaign are of the same mindset as corrupt public officials. They all consider Nigeria as a huge cake and they are all waiting in line for their turn to “chop and clean mouth”. Activism for them is only a waiting game and a way of getting noticed.
Source: Businessday.NG |
