Ibrahimcoomasie: Since Obidients are alteady blaming Tinubu for LP's crisis, we might as well agree that Tinubu is teaching them the game. The same man that Obidients said was senile and doesn't even know where he is.
Tinubu knows No shit.
You guys in APC are just using Government institutions to carry out evil.
You invaded LP headquarters with your officers and had to chase away LP officials in order to carry out your supposed appointment of new leadership of LP.
helinues: Does it change the fact that had Nigerians incarcerated in different prisons across the world were allowed to vote in the last election, Obi would have won convincingly?
Even your people that are now in several refugee camps in Benin Republic as real landlords have sacked them.
Their population would have helped Tinubu win at least his home state. Osun.
You guys are now sponsoring thugs to take over the leadership of the LP so that they can withdraw charges against your party?
Let me give you guys a tip of what happened in Anambra state.
During the heat of the court case between Obi and Ngige.
Chekwas Okorie did same when he was APGA National Chairman, he was on payroll of Ngige, he called a world press conference where he announced that APGA was no longer interested in the Anambra election court case. Obi continued his court struggle. The rest is now history.
Dear APC, you guys are just wasting your time.
It's very obvious you guys have nothing to use and defend your "mandate". Despite clamouring that LP should go to court.
The new leadership of the Labor Party should as a matter of urgency dissociate themselves from IPOB driven Obidients, reject ESN patron Peter Obi and his sadistic VP candidate Datti, accept defeat, congratulate APC and withdraw all legal charges from court, to save their sanity.
idealogical: Their rage and evil designs has nothing to do with the election or losing elections, this biafra woman, obi and their followers are all about destroying Nigeria, demarketing Nigeria, create chaos and instability in Nigeria, this is their main goal, they care less about Nigeria.
Americans are still fighting Biden over his own election, they had their own Jan 6th insurrection that already sent countless Obidient/like people to prison for years.
Obi himself knew he won't win the election, it was all about destroying Nigeria and forcing the break up of Nigeria to get his biafra through the back door, this is their agenda.
Imagine writing the American president to insert himself into Nigeria's internal and political affairs of a friendly country just because you lost an election, and not only lost sec, but came dead last, not 2nd, but 3rd.
This woman hates Nigeria, she never loved Nigeria to start with.
They must think Americans are not smart and intelligent enough to see through their evil and idiotic agenda.
Thank God Nigerians rejected your obi and his dangerous, bigoted and ethnic agenda.
Take am easy dey wail.
The longer the thread, the harder the cry. Take note
thesicilian: This is one of the major reasons you people lost the election. You insult any and every one who doesn't seem to be on your side, forgetting that who doesn't support you today can support you tomorrow. But when you insult people willy nilly, you tend to make enemies for life. And the worst kind of enemy you can make is one whose real identity you don't even know
thesicilian: Lol. America has their own issues right now, with other world powers trying to abandon the dollar thereby crashing the American economy. They're not going to have that time and energy assisting you people remove democratically elected president
Yes!!
But your information Minister is still in Washington DC to whitewash the election.
Nigeria's literary superstar, Chimamanda speaks truth to President Biden in open letter published in @TheAtlantic. Thanks, Chimamanda for your integrity and bravery.
Nigeria’s Hollow Democracy Why is America congratulating the winner of this disastrous election?
Dear President Biden,
Something remarkable happened on the morning of February 25, the day of the Nigerian presidential election. Many Nigerians went out to vote holding in their hearts a new sense of trust. Cautious trust, but still trust. Since the end of military rule in 1999, Nigerians have had little confidence in elections. To vote in a presidential election was to brace yourself for the inevitable aftermath: fraud.
Elections would be rigged because elections were always rigged; the question was how badly. Sometimes voting felt like an inconsequential gesture as predetermined “winners” were announced.
[b]A law passed last year, the 2022 Electoral Act, changed everything. It gave legal backing to the electronic accreditation of voters and the electronic transmission of results, in a process determined by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The chair of the commission, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, assured Nigerians that votes would be counted in the presence of voters and recorded in a result sheet, and that a photo of the signed sheet would immediately be uploaded to a secure server. When rumors circulated about the commission not keeping its word, Yakubu firmly rebutted them. In a speech at Chatham House in London (a favorite influence-burnishing haunt of Nigerian politicians), he reiterated that the public would be able to view “polling-unit results as soon as they are finalized on election day.”
Nigerians applauded him. If results were uploaded right after voting was concluded, then the ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), which has been in power since 2015, would have no opportunity for manipulation. Technology would redeem Nigerian democracy. Results would no longer feature more votes than voters. Nigerians would no longer have their leaders chosen for them. Elections would, finally, capture the true voice of the people. And so trust and hope were born.[/b]
By the evening of February 25, 2023, that trust had dissipated. Election workers had arrived hours late, or without basic election materials. There were reports of violence, of a shooting at a polling unit, and of political operatives stealing or destroying ballot boxes. Some law-enforcement officers seemed to have colluded in voter intimidation; in Lagos, a policeman stood idly by as an APC spokesperson threatened members of a particular ethnic group who he believed would vote for the opposition.
Most egregious of all, the electoral commission reneged on its assurance to Nigerians. The presidential results were not uploaded in real time. Voters, understandably suspicious, reacted; videos from polling stations show voters shouting that results be uploaded right away. Many took cellphone photos of the result sheets. Curiously, many polling units were able to upload the results of the House and Senate elections, but not the presidential election. A relative who voted in Lagos told me, “We refused to leave the polling unit until the INEC staff uploaded the presidential result. The poor guy kept trying and kept getting an ‘error’ message.
There was no network problem. I had internet on my phone. My bank app was working. The Senate and House results were easily uploaded. So why couldn’t the presidential results be uploaded on the same system?” Some electoral workers in polling units claimed that they could not upload results because they didn’t have a password, an excuse that voters understood to be subterfuge. By the end of the day, it had become obvious that something was terribly amiss.
No one was surprised when, by the morning of the 26th, social media became flooded with evidence of irregularities.
Result sheets were now slowly being uploaded on the INEC portal, and could be viewed by the public. Voters compared their cellphone photos with the uploaded photos and saw alterations: numbers crossed out and rewritten; some originally written in black ink had been rewritten in blue, some blunderingly whited-out with Tipp-Ex. The election had been not only rigged, but done in such a shoddy, shabby manner that it insulted the intelligence of Nigerians.
Nigerian democracy had long been a two-party structure—power alternating between the APC and the Peoples Democratic Party—until this year, when the Labour Party, led by Peter Obi, became a third force. Obi was different; he seemed honest and accessible, and his vision of anti-corruption and self-sufficiency gave rise to a movement of supporters who called themselves “Obi-dients.” Unusually large, enthusiastic crowds turned up for his rallies. The APC considered him an upstart who could not win, because his small party lacked traditional structures. It is ironic that many images of altered result sheets showed votes overwhelmingly being transferred from the Labour Party to the APC.
As vote counting began at INEC, representatives of different political parties—except for the APC—protested. The results being counted, they said, did not reflect what they had documented at the polling units. There were too many discrepancies.
“There is no point progressing in error, Mr. Chairman. We are racing to nowhere,” one party spokesperson said to Yakubu. “Let us get it right before we proceed with the collation.” But the INEC chair, opaque-faced and lordly, refused. The counting continued swiftly until, at 4:10 a.m. on March 1, the ruling party’s candidate, Bola Tinubu, was announced as president-elect.
A subterranean silence reigned across the country. Few people celebrated. Many Nigerians were in shock. “Why,” my young cousin asked me, “did INEC not do what it said it would do?”
It seemed truly perplexing that, in the context of a closely contested election in a low-trust society, the electoral commission would ignore so many glaring red flags in its rush to announce a winner. (It had the power to pause vote counting, to investigate irregularities—as it would do in the governorship elections two weeks later.)
Rage is brewing, especially among young people. The discontent, the despair, the tension in the air have not been this palpable in years.
How surprising then to see the U.S. State Department congratulate Tinubu on March 1. “We understand that many Nigerians and some of the parties have expressed frustration about the manner in which the process was conducted and the shortcomings of technical elements that were used for the first time in a presidential election cycle,” the spokesperson said. And yet the process was described as a “competitive election” that “represents a new period for Nigerian politics and democracy.”
American intelligence surely cannot be so inept. A little homework and they would know what is manifestly obvious to me and so many others: The process was imperiled not by technical shortcomings but by deliberate manipulation.
An editorial in The Washington Post echoed the State Department in intent if not in affect. In an oddly infantilizing tone, as though intended to mollify the simpleminded, we are told that “officials have asserted that technical glitches, not sabotage, were the issue,” that “much good” came from the Nigerian elections, which are worth celebrating because, among other things, “no one has blocked highways, as happened in Brazil after Jair Bolsonaro lost his reelection bid.” We are also told that “it is encouraging, first, that the losing candidates are pursuing their claims through the courts,” though any casual observer of Nigerian politics would know that courts are the usual recourse after any election.
The editorial has the imaginative poverty so characteristic of international coverage of African issues—no reading of the country’s mood, no nuance or texture. But its intellectual laziness, unusual in such a rigorous newspaper, is astonishing. Since when does a respected paper unequivocally ascribe to benign malfunction something that may very well be malignant—just because government officials say so? There is a kind of cordial condescension in both the State Department’s and The Washington Post’s responses to the election. That the bar for what is acceptable has been so lowered can only be read as contempt.
I hope, President Biden, that you do not personally share this cordial condescension. You have spoken of the importance of a “global community for democracy,” and the need to stand up for “justice and the rule of law.” A global community for democracy cannot thrive in the face of apathy from its most powerful member. Why would the United States, which prioritizes the rule of law, endorse a president-elect who has emerged from an unlawful process?
Compromised is a ubiquitous word in Nigeria’s political landscape—it is used to mean “bribed” but also “corrupted,” more generally. “They have been compromised,” Nigerians will say, to explain so much that is wrong, from infrastructure failures to unpaid pensions. Many believe that the INEC chair has been “compromised,” but there is no evidence of the astronomical U.S.-dollar amounts he is rumored to have received from the president-elect. The extremely wealthy Tinubu is himself known to be an enthusiastic participant in the art of “compromising”; some Nigerians call him a “drug baron” because, in 1993, he forfeited to the United States government $460,000 of his income that a Chicago court determined to be proceeds from heroin trafficking. Tinubu has strongly denied all charges of corruption.
I hope it will not surprise you, President Biden, if I argue that the American response to the Nigerian election also bears the faint taint of that word, compromised, because it is so removed from the actual situation in Nigeria as to be disingenuous. Has the United States once again decided that what matters in Africa is not democracy but stability? (Perhaps you could tell British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who quickly congratulated Tinubu, that an illegitimate government in a country full of frustrated young people does not portend stability.) Or is it about that ever-effulgent nemesis China, as so much of U.S. foreign policy now invariably seems to be? The battle for influence in Africa will not be won by supporting the same undemocratic processes for which China is criticized.
This Nigerian election was supposed to be different, and the U.S. response cannot—must not—be business as usual. The Nigerian youth, long politically quiescent, have awoken. About 70 percent of Nigerians are under 30 and many voted for the first time in this election. Nigerian politicians exhibit a stupefying ability to tell barefaced lies, so to participate in political life has long required a suspension of conscience. But young people have had enough. They want transparency and truth; they want basic necessities, minimal corruption, competent political leaders, and an environment that can foster their generation’s potential.
This election is also about the continent. Nigeria is a symbolic crucible of Africa’s future, and a transparent election will rouse millions of other young Africans who are watching, and who long, too, for the substance and not the hollow form of democracy. If people have confidence in the democratic process, it engenders hope, and nothing is more essential to the human spirit than hope.
Today, election results are still being uploaded on the INEC server. Bizarrely, many contradict the results announced by INEC. The opposition parties are challenging the election in court. But there is reason to worry about whether they will get a fair ruling. INEC has not fully complied with court orders to release election materials. The credibility of the Nigerian Supreme Court has been strained by its recent judgments in political cases, or so-called judicial coronations, such as one in which the court declared the winner of the election for governor of Imo State a candidate who had come in fourth place.
Lawlessness has consequences. Every day Nigerians are coming out into the streets to protest the election. APC, uneasy about its soiled “victory,” is sounding shrill and desperate, as though still in campaign mode. It has accused the opposition party of treason, an unintelligent smear easily disproved but disquieting nonetheless, because false accusations are often used to justify malicious state actions.
I supported Peter Obi, the Labour Party candidate, and hoped he would win, as polls predicted, but I was prepared to accept any result, because we had been assured that technology would guard the sanctity of votes. The smoldering disillusionment felt by many Nigerians is not so much because their candidate did not win as because the election they had dared to trust was, in the end, so unacceptably and unforgivably flawed.
Congratulating its outcome, President Biden, tarnishes America’s self-proclaimed commitment to democracy. Please do not give the sheen of legitimacy to an illegitimate process. The United States should be what it says it is.
For those that have suddenly found their voices over Datti's interview and APC goons forming saint now, here is a throwback of your VP saying a more "treasonous" statement as regards 2015 Election.
Forming parallel Government is even a more treasonous offense than Datti's Channels interview. But nobody arrested anybody. Nobody even threatened to arrest them.
“We have said and our Party the APC has Said, if this coming elections is stolen or rigged, WE WILL FORM A PARALLEL GOVERNMENT in Nigeria 🇳🇬”.- Prof. Yemi Osinbajo vice-president of Nigeria said in Washington DC in 2015📌
raskymonojendor: Sowore's populist agenda never materialized. But Peter Obi's populist agenda is now the monster we have in Nigeria today. Nigeria has not been this divided in a long time.
So a party that floated Muslim Muslim and Emilokan didn't divide NIGERIA?
A High Court sitting in Benin, the Edo state capital, has restrained the Labour Party and all its members from any suspension or purported suspension of its national officers till the determination of a motion on notice.
A statement made available to news men and signed by the National Secretary of the Labour Party, Alhaji Umar Farouk said the party’s lawyer, G. C. Igbokwe (SAN) confirmed to journalists that he has got a High Court order that status quo be maintained and no action which may result to the suspension of any national officer of the party be taken.
According to the Senior Advocate, “Our attention has been drawn to a latter order purportedly from another court of equal jurisdiction restraining my clients. Of course, such order is of no consequence and will have no effect untill after the determination of the motion on notice.”
Recall that the entire leadership of Labour Party in Edo state including the State, Local Government and Ward executives on Monday had passed a vote of confidence on Abure, who was allegedly suspended by a factional group of the party.
The party recalled that some groups who claimed to be ward three executives of the party in Edo State, led by the Ward’s Chairman, Martins Osigbemhe, had earlier announced the suspension of the LP national chairman.
However, in a solidarity visit to Barrister Abure at the National Secretariat of the party in Abuja, the chapters said the Osigbemhe faction are unknown to the party and are working for the opposition political parties.
Mr Kelly Ogbaloi, Chairman of the Edo State Chapter of the party, while addressing newsmen said that the constitution of the party did not empower any group or party members to suspend a national officer.
Ogbaloi said that since Abure was elected by a national convention, “imposters “who are not registered party members cannot suspend him, so their action is out of ignorance. Those who did it don’t even understand the message they were asked to deliver.”
Politics › Re: I’m Done With Elective Positions – Peter Obi by Nonny95: 9:12pm On Apr 06, 2023
