Between Guobadia, Iwu and Jega-Different Methods Same Farcical Results:
' No man is good enough to govern another, without that other's consent.' Abraham Lincoln: Nigeria is a fraud and the leadership continue to live the life of lies, deception and fraud, and 12 years after the commencement of this so-called 'democratic' exercise, election results are still been written in advance and thumb printing done later to match the magic numbers. Nothing has changed from Abel Guobadia's INEC chairmanship in the 2003 elections to that of Iwu ( no elections but there was a result of 'winners') to the current deception by the Jega led Independent National Electoral commission (INEC). Only in Nigeria will they be calling the Electoral commission 'Independent' when they are everything dependent on the president and the ruling party. I live in the UK and have witnessed more than 5 General Elections but never heard the name of any of the Chair person of their electoral commission in each of the elections, you wouldn't know there is any such thing as Election commission chairman unlike in Nigeria he is larger than life. nor do they close businesses and Schools to register voters over two weeks or more and shut their country down on election days like it is done in Nigeria .
Why did the PDP led government refuse to accept the Uwai's Panel recommendation stating that the Electoral Commission Chairman be selected by the National Judicial council? Because they know they will never win any election if they don't have control of INEC. And why did Prof Jega abandon the DNA-finger printed- voter register obtained in the countrywide registration that took place in Jan/Feb 2011, for the manual register for the election after so much money were spent getting those equipments and personnel in place? We love waste in that country and the government is most wasteful and unmindful of costs and costing. Iwu spent billions of Naira promising to get Nigerians a digital voter registrar that will last 50 years, and the Data capture machine had not even arrived INEC office when some of them were found in PDP chieftains homes, including some with the late Adedibu, the chief rigger of Oyo state! They were again abandoned with fake excuses for the manual register that facilitates multiple voting and thumb printing which the deceptive PDP-led Government fancies to achieve their vote rigging plans. Again Jega went further doing the registration with them, but abandoned its use in the April election with prompting from PDP chieftains, even though some lies were given as reasons why they can't be used.
If you ask me I will say Jega was a bigger failure than Iwu, never mind the deception going on across Nigeria in the last two weeks. In terms of input and output from the processes, Jega has cost Nigeria a fortune in money and too many lost lives, and by the time this exercise finishes we may be counting in hundreds of unnecessary deaths, apart from the fact that too much money has been handed INEC by the federal government- who had never wanted a free election in the first place- and the international donors who wanted to see Nigeria through with better capacity building and strong institutional framework for better governance. Iwu just wrote results and did not bother to bring the ballot papers from South Africa , and thereby saved lives of people now dying unnecessarily, particularly in the north, in sham elections! But both results were written in advance and thumb printing and ballot stuffing followed.
And why can't we use DNA technology for voting and even for recording census to prevent all the lies been told by all tribes and states to claim higher population, and lack of credible statistics for planning and control?
Ghana next door had conducted two general elections in which the incumbent political party was defeated by the opposition party; that is a yard stick for measuring credible elections. With the mess, greed and corruption entrenched by the PDP ruling party across Nigeria, it will be incredible, if not insane to believe they can achieve the millions of votes gained especially in the South- South and South East zones where there suddenly made 90% voter participations in an election where less than 300,000 people turned up yet PDP was scoring over 1,000,000 votes in Rivers, Delta, Anambra, Imo, Abia, Enugu and Cross River.
Don't get me wrong I am happy to see a minority tribe person in the name of Goodluck Jonathan becoming president of Nigeria, because it looks very unlikely that the chance will ever present itself again in the near future, but I abhor fraud and the manner this election was deceptively carried out- a hallmark of PDP and their rigging machine since 1999 when the preponderance of the rigging for Obasanjo was done in the SS and SE geo-political zones. If you have some time just go back and check the votes and the difference between PDP and the runner-up party from 1999, 2003, 2007 and what was awarded PDP's Jonathan in last Saturdays election and you will see the same pattern of vote padding and inflation by the PDP fixers aided by INEC and the security agencies. It is always PDP scoring more than 1 million votes and all the other parties scoring less than 20,000 votes put together, in other words the PDP gets at least 97% of votes cast and the runner up gets less than 1 percentage point. The fixers who did the latest Jega results used the same template, even though this time some semblance of elections took place, unlike the Iwu one in 2007 and Guobadia's one in 2003. The results are similar and marshaled by the same group of PDP fraudsters with the imprimatur of INEC.
In 2003 I wrote an article in the Nigeriaworld.com web news after what I thought was a massively rigged election for Obasanjo and his PDP by the Abel Guobadia led INEC: http://nigeriaworld.com/articles/2003/apr/252.html Click on this link and check this result against what happened in the SS and SE and you will notice the same pattern. Indeed the thumb printing was overdone in Bayelsa for PDP's Alamiesigha that 'voters' exceeded the registered voter in the state. I am from Delta state and I know for sure that there were low turnout across Delta from Asaba to Agbor to Abraka to Warri and Ughelli, very few people came out as they felt nothing was at stake. Not up to 200,000 people voted that day across Delta, yet PDP awarded itself 1,400,000 votes and other parties less than 20,000 votes. Shame, for this is no democracy.
The elections on the 9 th for the National Assembly and that of 16 th April for the presidency were neither free, fair nor credible, except perhaps in the South West where they deliberately allowed the wish of the people to prevail. The International observers were massively deceived with the queues and orderly voting in the few cities were they can visit, whilst thumb printing, and vote result changing at collation centres were going on in the villages and hinterlands. It is the same pattern of either thumb printing at the polling units and falsification of results at collation centres up and down the country, including the northern part of the country were there was some resistance because the manipulators have blindfolded the people into believing our problems are ethnic or religious which it is not. The cabal that has remote controlled" Nigeria 's destiny since independence cuts across all zones and has individual zonal leaders: When they meet to decide how they will share the carcass, they do not think ethnicity or religion that they use to confuse the unwary, when they feel threatened. Same ploy has come to play when Northern peasants and unemployed youth descended first on the PDP riggers, before miscreants took over and started turning it into an ethnic and religious warfare.
Everyone in the Southern part of Nigeria, including the opposition party agents in aid with INEC acquiesced and colluded with PDP rigging machine because Jonathan is 'our Brother or Son' and he can rig as much as PDP like, The recalcitrant opposition party agents were bought over with cash and others intimidated into submission with force by PDP paid security agents. To be fair the opposition parties stand no chance with the type of cash war chest Jonathan and his PDP crooks deployed into this election. Some blame Ribadu and Buhari for not campaigning in the Southern states enough but where will they have the resources to go across Nigeria to campaign? Where will they get the number of presidential jets-bought with Nigerian tax payers money (Do we even know how many they are now!)- that Jonathan and his PDP crew deployed to their personal campaign use?
And so in every polling unit in the South South and South east zones last Saturday, there were little or no accreditation of voters, as required by INEC rules and every registered voter bar one in each polling unit was used to thumbprint for Jonathan. Same thing happened in Anambra, Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta Cross River ,Akwa Ibom, Abia, Imo, and Enugu states.
They did get away with it on Saturday because we all wanted Jonathan, even though there were treble the number of real votes, but you wait till Tuesday 26th April and see when the local thieves (PDP) start rigging and "brothers will fight against brothers" as LP, ACN,PPA,DPP and APGA will slog it out in who gets governorship and House of Assembly seats.
Again we can't continue to live this lie in perpetuity of imposition of rulers on hapless Nigerians with their views and wish not counting in who leads them. The cabal that boasted in 1983, then in the NPN, that only two 'Political parties' exists in Nigeria- The NPN and the military are the same one boasting that they will rule Nigeria for 50 or 60 years without interruption from any opposition party. Nigerians must be ready to confront this cabal that is growing in confidence everyday and adopting more sophisticated methods of rigging and manipulating wasteful elections that results are called long before elections in their books.
With so many parties deliberately allowed by the PDP mafias to be registered ( learnt they are about 60 at the last time of counting!) so they can continue with the gravy train, and milking the state at the expense of the majority of Nigerians, East, West, North and South, it will be very impossible for any party- never mind an unpopular PDP- to win any presidential election at first ballot with the incredibly stringent requirement from the constitution requiring 25% votes across 66.7% of the states of the federation, apart from scoring majority of the votes. This requirement means that there can only be a re-run before you can get a true winner of the presidency. Strangely Nigeria had never had a re-run because all the elections are rigged and numbers made up to avoid second ballot to favour incumbent or the 'anointed' candidate of the cabal holding Nigeria hostage.
Tony Ishiekwene