By Kassim Afegbua
Na me win. No be you, na me. You come 3rd. You come 2nd. If the 1st person no dey, na the 2nd person go take him place. Abi you wan become another Uzodinma: Datti Baba-Ahmed was asked on Channels TV if he truly believed the elections were rigged; he answered in the affirmative. Also, he was asked if his 6.1 million votes were rigged; and he said, no. I then fell off my seat in a gale of laughter! What a smart alec. Mr Datti, your votes were not rigged, but other contestants votes were rigged; in the same election conducted by the same umpire, at the same time across the country. Hypocrisy will not stop amusing my sensibilities.
Desperate to make their own votes clean, Baba-Ahmed exposed the dubiety of his mind and the impropriety of his duplicity. His pair scored 6.1 million votes in the election; and following his response, his own votes were clean. Another candidate scored 8.7 million votes; still following his response, those votes were rigged. How shallow, ridiculous, insensible, and laughable. Double standards and the height of hypocrisy is my take. This is the hallmark of the Obi-Datti mentality; if it is not them, every other person is wrong. What a vacuous mentality!!.
The response of Datti Baba-Ahmed, Peter Obi’s second leg, typifies the desperation in their evocation. It is all about self interest, and not collective interest. The same Baba-Ahmed, who couldn’t penetrate his North to garner votes, is the one complaining about being rigged out. Like the chichidodo bird, his votes are clean, as he said they were not rigged votes, but was quick to say the election was rigged. Weren’t his 6.1 million votes part of the election? How did he separate the 6.1 million votes from the rest to arrive at their cleanness, while others are soiled with rigging? Probing further, Datti is crying out that the deserved winner of the election, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, should not be sworn-in on the 29th of May for reasons that I’ll say interrogate his mental presence. I guess he prefers an unelected system of an interregnum to replace this electoral outcome. How senseless!. So, because it doesn’t favour your expectation, all hell must be let loose. And this is the orientation of someone who was preparing to be the number two citizen with the possibility of becoming number one, displaying such level of warped reasoning. Making such an incendiary statement at this volatile period of our political trajectory is utterly condemnable and suspicious.
Now, let us advance a simple logic to expose the illogical position of the losers. For the Senate elections, the All Prohressives Congress, APC, dominates. For the House of Representatives elections, the APC dominates. These two elections were conducted on the same day and time as the presidential election. Having dominated the outcome of these two elections, Datti’s theory of victory, would then mean that the APC couldn’t have won the presidential: the APC voters, in Datti’s infamous reasoning, having voted for the APC for the Senate and House of Representatives, decided to ignore the presidential. How can a political party that won majority votes in both Senate and House of Representatives elections, not score majority votes in the presidential election, knowing full well that all three elections were held on the same day and hour?
Furthermore, Datti and his leader, Peter Obi, celebrated the outcome of the Senate and the House of Representatives election, but are picking holes with the presidential one. How logical is that? It would have made a remarkable difference if the Labour Party, LP, had gotten majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives elections, then fell short at the presidential. Then, we all would have been in doubt about the outcome. The APC led in all the three categories of the elections, and yet, you are shouting blue murder. Even in the governorship and House of Assemblies ones, the APC had majority votes. Sorry for your loss, those who lost.
Obi’s political razzmatazz is becoming a fluke, judging by the outcome of the governorship and the House of Assembly election, when compared with his previous outing at the presidential election. From 6.1 million votes at the presidential election, Obi’s LP fell quite on its back, to less than 700,000 votes throughout the entire country. That is a clear failure; and it goes to confirm the earlier claims that, the LP has no structure.
In the South-East, where it put up a mind-boggling showing, recording huge figures, the following election exposed its rotten underbelly, such that only one governor came out of the ashes of its structure-less architecture. Alex Otti’s win in Abia State was even actually based on his own popularity, and not on the razzmatazz of Obi’s father-figure. In Enugu, efforts were made by the LP to railroad the process to produce the governor.
A friend of mine, an LP chieftain, called me from Enugu and told me he would expose Obi if Enugu was wrongfully “allocated” to the LP. The threats and intimidation, according to him, were out of this world; he acknowledged that it was mortally wrong for a party that preaches new dynamics to be involved in such untoward conduct all in a bid to deliver Enugu into its fold. So, aside from Lagos, Enugu, and Abia, other states recorded abysmal outcomes for the Labour Party; with all their votes put together across the country falling at a little below 700k.
It then means that barely three weeks after Obi’s so-called showing, of 6.1 million votes, he and his party, plummeted to such an odious rejection. Obi’s 6.1 million votes could only produce one governor out of the 28 governorship seats that were vied for. The correlation defeats the very popularity upon which plank Obi hinged his presidential project. Or else what happened? His vice presidential candidate, Baba-Ahmed could not pull together any serious force in his native Kaduna State. Those who had latched unto Obi’s so-called popularity could not believe their eyes, when the other results were being released. And curiously also, complaints of INEC being “unfit” to conduct “credible elections” suddenly evaporated. All the razzmatazz about Obi’s popularity was a mere fluke, what we call ‘Obubuyaya’ in local Edo parlance; sheer malapropism, to describe an unreal situation. I am sure it has dawned on Obi that he cannot sustain the concentric force that aided his push for the Presidency.
Dropping to such an abysmal height within three weeks, is like pulling the wool off the people’s faces and forcing them out of reverie. When one reconciles all these realities and juxtaposes them with Obi’s strong claim to the Presidency, they don’t add up. They are like two straight and parallel lines that can never meet.
Finally on this issue, Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar should stop behaving like bad losers, raising all manner of issues to pollute public discourse and gather cheap sentiments. A winner has emerged, and deservedly so, and his party, the APC, has shown cause to be so recognised. It has the highest number of senators, the highest number of House of Representatives’ members and the highest number of House of Assembly members, and of course, the President and his vice.
The LP failed to show its grit and gravitas after the presidential election, and only managed to secure a governorship seat. The PDP also, followed its earlier pattern for governors and lawmakers. Nothing fundamentally changed. It is time to move on. It is time to sheathe the sword of election and chart a roadmap for a new beginning.
The Tinubu presidency, more of a pan-Nigeria presidency, will be more embracing and accommodating than Obi’s ethnic and pro-christian Presidency or Atiku’s pro-North Presidency. Tinubu’s presidency will be more unifying, and more engaging than the others. Given the present fragility across the land, people must bury their individual interest, and promote a sense of collectivism to deepen our national narratives. May 29 will surely be a new dawn and we must look forward to it without distraction.
Obi and Atiku are becoming more like irritants and pests, and soon enough, they would become boring actors in the political chess board. Welcome on board, President-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Laughter is in the morning ensconced.
Give Peter Obi some ‘guguru,’ (pop corn); give Atiku Abubakar some ‘epa,’ (groundnut), you would have gotten a perfect combination.
•Afegbua, a former Commissioner for Information, Edo State, writes from Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, FCT.
