By Chuks Iloegbunam
LEND me your ears. Please! Anyone who believes, even for a millisecond, that what the rapers of our commonwealth plan for January 2027 are general elections has already lost tragically. Such a loser will be served this mocking injunction of “Go to court!” But on the Benches all across the nation’s courthouses, the betrayed petitioner against a stolen mandate will find, not brave and honest adjudicators, but the carcasses of sneering tramplers of the law who, with election riggers, are like six and half-a-dozen. The aggregated submissions of the very best Senior Advocates of Nigeria can never and will never move them to give justice a chance.
The odds are stacked against seekers of truth in contention with all Four Estates of the Realm mired in sin and corruption. It bears repeating that what the skin-headed, potbellied, knock-kneed and collapsible despoilers of the communal pond have in store for long-suffering Nigerians in January is nothing other than electoral abracadabra. The more you look, the less you see.
It happened in 2023. The fellow grandstanding today as the Oga at the top knows as much as his coterie of unrestrained recidivists are aware that he did not win that year’s national ballot. He is praying to his god of greed and grasping that the citizens will again take their eyes off the ball for another electoral heist. There are three compelling reasons why they are conjoined with rigging. One, it is in their DNA.
Even without an opposition in their presidential primary ballot, the umpire used other than arithmetic to count the votes – right in front of cameras: 1, 2, 3, 300, 4001, 4002, 5002, 145000! In their primaries for all levels of elections, the fraud went on, in front of cameras, whereas election riggers in times past tried not to be caught. Two, because of their crippling non-performance, they know that in any free, fair, and credible ballot, they are guaranteed to fail abysmally.
Three and to their heart failure, is the contingency of their ouster unleashing gargantuan indices of corruption, a hundredth of which will impact any ear that hears it with the destructive force of a fragmentation grenade.
These explain their acute desperation for another season of blatant riggings. They need to be stopped and whipped out of public consciousness. Easing them out is uncomplicated because their rigging methods are public knowledge. As the saying goes, a problem clearly identified is half the battle won. These guys manipulate a corrupt electoral umpire to fiddle with the techno-digital functions of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
In 2023, these contrivances worked perfectly for State Assemblies, Governorships, and National Assembly elections, but spectacularly malfunctioned in the presidential ballot, even though all four nationwide elections were conducted simultaneously.
These guys press thugs and lower-level/part-time/outdoor election recruits into scribbling inflated numbers over counted and agreed vote counts already signed by political party representatives. These unscrupulous guys indulge in vote-buying. These evil guys activate their accomplices in the Third Estate of the Realm to stamp legal imprimaturs on vote counts blatantly inflated for the benefit of their puppeteers.
Stopping this brazen habit of cheating may seem complicated. But it is not. In “The Padlock and the Key,” the poet Niyi Osundare wrote:
Call in the blacksmith today
And let forge heat smother
All castles of death
Is it not the fire which molded the padlock
That also forged the key?
Rather than subject, not just oneself or a political party, but the entire country, to a fresh round of the double jeopardy of stolen elections and judicial travesties, the option of smothering the riggers’ articles of illicit trade beckons.
This is what the Obidients, Kwankwasiya, and Compatriots must do:
Band together into a huge, metallic, and powerful bond of unity to shatter to pieces the seemingly endless raping with a barbed phallus of the real owners of the country. Numbers are imperative, real huge numbers. No group of 30 or 50 thugs will have the nerve to tamper with the electoral process where 500 OK & C cadres are massed and unprepared to tolerate any shenanigans. When rogues are faced with vulnerability and imminent danger, they invariably scamper away, tails between their legs.
Those who want a Nigeria changed for the better cannot dally with distractions. Pay no attention whatsoever to money-motivated sorcerers striking prophetic poses, and claiming that the Maidugiri United Football Club will win the 2030 FIFA World Cup or that Olympiacos FC will move from Greece to Fernando Po for all future soccer competitions. These charlatans are as ridiculous as their skull caps and the high-sensitivity microphones with which they bamboozle, harangue, and stupefy the unsuspecting.
The enemy is the cult that promised Eldorado but delivered hell on earth. Nigeria is one of the most indebted countries in Africa today, owing N159.28 trillion (or $110.97 billion), according to the Debt Management Office (DMO). Yet, there is nothing to show for the borrowing spree, not even a rusty bicycle spoke. Insecurity has become a pandemic with bandits, kidnappers, and terrorists seizing vast swathes of the country, wilfully killing, raping, and extorting in front of the eyes of a political authority incapable of even mourning regularly butchered military men, from recruits to Generals.
The vermin have even introduced a new economic model sure to shake the world and earn some starry-eyed fellow the Nobel or Bretton Woods Prize for Economics. They want allcomers to acquire cooking tripods and invest in the miraculous industry of frying akara and kulikuli, and roasting boli. Once everyone is by the fireside, raffia fan in hand, preparing and selling tasty and crunchy bites, the country will undergo instantaneous economic reformation. Meanwhile, the daughters of those pointing Nigerians to tripods and firesides are busy in New England, USA, buying up choice properties. This insolence has got to stop.
Obidients, Kwankwasiya and Compatriots! Your job is neatly cut out. Stop the national rot. In just over three years of being at the helm, the helmsman has turned out a cypher. Both the National Bureau of Statistics and the UNDP have assessed Nigeria on four parametres – Health, Education, Living Standards, and Job/Security – and pronounced the country multidimensionally poor. This means that over 133 million Nigerians (or 63 percent of the population) are living in conditions far worse than hand-to-mouth. Yet, the evil kitchen that served this starvation diet is insisting on another four years of pauperised and dehumanised citizens.
The temerity of this stay put mentality carries implications too frightful to contemplate. It is said that the stench of flatulence presages the taste of excrement. Nigerians are no maggots. Only Obidients, Kwankwasiya, and Compatriots can extricate them from the sewages. Not by fighting elections, but by preventing rigging.
Illoegbunam, former Chief of Staff to Governor Peter Obi, writes from Abatete, Anambra State.
