I am not speaking of, nor would I dwell on, how he brought back the All Progressives Congress (APC) from the brink of disintegration two years ago. No, everyone knows that. Everybody is aware of how he stabilised the party and made it grow in numbers. He attracted the grassroots, who trooped into the party in numbers as well as the high and mighty who could make things happen.
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The third truth about the February 23 election is that the leadership of INEC is guilty as charged for eroding the credibility of the election by proposing an integrity test for the elections – INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) and failing to deliver on it. The main technology innovation, BVAS, would ensure that only those eligible to vote participate and additional “votes” cannot be added subsequently. Recalling the 2019 debates, there cannot be fabricated votes subtracted or added by any INEC server. At the end of voting in each polling unit, the results would be counted in the presence of voters and written into the poster EC 60E which will be posted on the wall. It is this result that was to be captured through a scan and sent through BVAS directly to the INEC viewing portal that all citizens and voters can see live. This transparency means everyone will be seeing the results as they come in and citizens, candidates and parties can cross check that the results on the portal reflect what was compiled at the polling unit. Citizens would have therefore all participated in confirming that the portal results replicate what was counted at the polling units. The IReV component of the integrity test failed and therefore the credibility of the election was lost using the definition of the integrity test crafted by INEC itself. This failure for me is really catastrophic because it created the basis for loss of confidence of citizens in INEC and its processes.
There are 18 presidential candidates, out of which we have the “big four”, among whom we expect the next president of Nigeria to emerge. They are Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Peter Gregory Obi of the Labour Party (LP) and Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP).
Tomorrow is the big day when for the seventh election since the return to democracy, more than 93 million Nigerians are registered to vote. It is likely to be a closely contested race with four candidates – Ahmed Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Peter Obi of the Labour Party and Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) being the front runners.
The above quote by Sheikh Usman Ɗan Fodio, a Fulani philosopher, Islamic religious teacher, revolutionary, and leader who founded the Sokoto Caliphate and ruled as its first Caliph, is quite true. This is so because an unfit leader can cause the death of millions and plunge a nation into chaos, anarchy and civil war.
The Centre for Democracy and Development has just published a major study on social media and the 2023 election campaigns, which I summarise here (click here for the full report). Currently, the number of active social media users in Nigeria has risen from 27 million in 2019 to 36 million ahead of the 2023 elections. Given the challenge of prevailing misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms, and the way such disinformation can permeate into the media more generally, greater access to online information does not necessarily create more informed citizens. In fact, in Nigeria, it has confused the citizenry while entrenching pre-existing divides based on ethnicity and religion, especially as malinformation, the deliberate sharing of genuine information with an intent to cause harm, thrives in this election season.
A few years ago, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) rated eighty-six countries as low-income and food-deficient nations, thus, considered to be food insecure (http://www.fao.org/docrep/w9290e/w9290e01.htm). Forty-three out of these food-deficient countries are located in the African continent, which has a total of 58 countries. The most affected among the forty-three countries are in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where chronic hunger, squalor, and abject poverty are widespread. This is despite overall gains recorded in food production and food security over a decade on a global scale.
There is something about Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Jagaba of Borgu, the presidential candidate of the All Peoples Congress (APC), and Abeokuta. Whenever he feels threatened or that things are not going the way he wants them to, he goes to Abeokuta and delivers what we can term a declaration – in Yoruba. Appealing to the sentiments of the Yoruba, he plays the victim of a conspiracy. True or false, it somehow pays for him. Agreed declarations are not legally binding but they show certain aspirations.
The National Council of State is meeting today to address a series of crises affecting the country. Commerce is dying and the economy is likely to go into recession because of a cash crunch the government decided to create. By ensuring people with cash in their bank accounts cannot get their money, the intention of the policy is to raise the level of anger and frustration in society. Government timed the policy move to coincide with an existing fuel shortage that is also annoying citizens. Thirdly, all this is fabricated at a time of unprecedented cost of living crisis. My reading of the multiplication of vexatious policy interventions at the same time is conceived as an experiment to see how far Nigerians can be pushed before they explode.
The Nigerian economy was once described as a “voodoo” economy, “the more you look, the less you understand” as it defies all kinds of known remedies. The mystery of Nigeria as a nation is not limited to its economy but includes socio-political and cultural dispositions. Longtime ago, western pundits postulated, hypothesized, and predicted the disintegration of Nigeria by the year 2015. Time has since revealed their empty prediction; regrettably, however, the nation is still sliding into the abyss of squalor and poverty, exacerbated by the population explosion – a kind of time bomb that must not be allowed to detonate.