By Adesina Soyooye
Chimamanda Adichie, Nigeria’s celebrated Writer, has chided the State Department of the United States of America for Congratulating Asiwaju Bola Tinubu for his victory at Nigeria’s Presidential Election. She also urged President Joe Biden not to keep quiet over the process that produced the Nigeria’s President-elect.
The Election which took place on February 25, 2023, and, according to the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, won by the Candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Asiwaju Tinubu, has generated more controversy, protests and anger than joy and celebration.
Even though the three frontline Candidates – Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and Peter Obi of the Labour Party, LP – won in 12 States, each, Tinubu was declared winner based on the plurality of votes scored
But both Atiku and Obi cried foul, and on many grounds, including alleged monumental rigging, ballot box snatching, violence, insist, like not a few people world-wide, that the Election was a brazen fraud. Both have gone to the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal to challenge the outcome.
In a letter to President Biden which she released on Thursday, a disappointed Adichie told Biden that Nigeria’s Presidential Poll was ‘deliberately manipulated’ to produce Tinubu. She insisted that the thinking in some quaters thar the process of the Presidential Election was marred by technical faults was wrong, as it was deliberately manipulated.
In the letter, titled Nigeria’s Hollow Democracy, to President Biden, Adichie opined that the February 25 Poll was full of discrepancies and irregularities which, shockingly, INEC, deliberately played deaf, blind and dumb to.
However, Bayo Onanuga, Director Media and Publicity, Tinubu/Shettima Campaign Council, has enjoined Biden to treat Adichie’s letter as trash.
Onanuga in response to Adichie tweeted: “Dear President Joe Biden, please just trash the open letter by Chimamanda on Nigeria’s election once it gets to your desk. She wrote fiction, inspired by the monumental loss of her tribesmen, Peter Obi.”
But Adichie in the letter noted: “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.
“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.
“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.”
INEC AND ELECTRONIC ELECTION
According to Adichie, the INEC Chairman, failed woefully to keep to his promise of a free and credible election, and instead, hastily announced a winner without any investigations of reports of the many irregularities recorded during the polls.
She insisted in the letter, that the elections were rigged, and insulted the intelligence of Nigerians, especially, as there was no legal action to issues of “evident manipulations” reported.
Adichie: “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.
“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.
INEC SHUNNED RED FLAGS
“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.
“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.)
US RESPONSE MUST NOT BE BUSINESS
Adichie expressed shock that the US State Department congratulated Bola Tinubu, Nigeria’s president-elect, and went further to describe the election as a “competitive election” that “represents a new period for Nigerian politics and democracy”.
Said Adichie: “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.”
She enjoined Biden to stick to his stance on the need for a true democracy, and emphasised that congratulating Tinibu would amount to an endorsement of the illegitimate process that produced him as President.
Adichie: “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?
“This Nigerian election was supposed to be different, and the U.S. response cannot—must not—be business as usual.
“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.”
