THE June 12, 1993 presidential election that was said to have produced the late billionaire businessman, Bashorun Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola [popularly called MKO], as a civilian president who would replace the self-styled military president, Gen. Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, has been regarded as the only free, fair, credible, and transparent election conducted in Nigeria since and after the independence of this country in 1960 from the British colonial rulers.
The process and the election itself were so transparent that up and until the time it was arrested by the sitting military usurpers who, on hindsight, had no intention of vacating office, the rival presidential candidate, Bashir Tofa, made no noticeable and serious moves to challenge and dispute the majority of the results that had been announced. Nigerians were heady with expectations of a return to democracy after a decade of a succession of military regimes. The affliction of Nigeria, the late Maj.-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, had usurped presidential powers in 1983 after some military officers had sacked a bungling and short-lived civilian government of, Alhaji Shehu Aliyu Shagari [1979-1983], and an architect and later lawyer-vice president, Dr. Alex Ifeanyichukwu Ekwueme. Both are now late.
Almost everybody who played any significant role in that June 12 election saga including Abiola, his running mate, Babagana Kingibe, advocates and activists for the restoration of that election result which was annuled in controversial circumstances had been recognised and rewarded, some posthumously. Abiola, who had been long dead, also in curious circumstances, was created as a president by the clueless Buhari. Of course, such thinking of making a dead man president was certainly beyond his pay grade. He ventured further afield and named Kingibe as a vice president. With this, Kingibe achieved the dubious distinction of being the first Nigerian ‘’elected’’ and a living vice president not to be sworn to the oath of office and oath of allegiance, and who didn’t occupy the office of the vice president nor performed its functions even for one day. Apart from possibly being illegally paid a pension and other perquisites as a ‘’vice president’’ created by Buhari and his accomplices, the only benefits of the office that he would enjoy would be when he’s dead – a state funeral. In our clime you cannot validly and legally be said to have been elected to a high political office without receiving a certificate of return from the election management body, and being administered to the oath of office and oath of allegiance.
We do not recall any of such being administered on Kingibe. But Buhari, who was under enormous pressure from the Yoruba-centric Action Congress of Nigeria [ACN]-wing of the ruling All Progressives Congress [APC] to do what needed to be done – politicking – did that just before he faced the reelection to second term in 2019. Of course, he won as expected in spite of his woeful performance and “non-governance” in his first term, because no incumbent had lost the presidency of the country until President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015. Jonathan was a good man. But he was a bad politician and a poor leader. He is currently pretending to being forced by his supporters to contest the presidency in January 2027. Doing so would be within his rights and it would not matter if that venture would signal his dimunition as a statesman and a global citizen – the status he is currently enjoying.
Yes, everybody connected to the annuled June 12 election had been recognised and rewarded, some with titles to bogus offices and others with medals and certificates. But the main architect of that election was treated with scorn and ignominy until his death in a foreign country about one year ago. Prof. Humphrey Nwosu was an exciting and demonstrative teacher in the department of political science of this country’s first full-fledged university, the University of Nigeria, Nsukka [UNN]. Then he was recruited to become the chairman of the National Electoral Commission [NEC]. It was Nwosu who deployed his political and administrative sagacity to dig up Option-A4 as an antidote to rigging and electoral nightmares that the country had grappled with since its colonial days and beyond, sadly uptill today. The British also rigged the elections they superintended to favour a section of the country that they perceived would not challenge colonialism and imperial rule.
In spite of popular belief, Prof. Nwosu did not invent the crude but efficient Option-A4 mode of conducting elections. Option-A4 or open ballot system, a voting method in which voters vote openly often by queueing in public and in the full glare of everybody present behind their candidate or the candidate’s picture or surrogate, was reported to have been the norm in democracies before 1856 when the Australians adopted the secret ballot system. It has been recorded that many countries used the open ballot voting system well into the 20th Century. Indeed the Latin American country of Argentina reportedly used the equivalent of Option-A4 in the conduct of its elections until 1912 when it pivoted to secret balloting. Nwosu and his team had to dig deep to resurrect this system of voting and then applied same to the 1993 presidential election to wide acclaim. What Nwosu achieved in 1993 in terms of delivering a free, fair and credible election was recognised and deemed to be a feat. The beneficiaries of what he did were celebrated and feted. But the man, Nwosu died. In a foreign land. Unsung. For the avoidance of doubt, he was alive and well when others from that era were being celebrated, including those who, during those days of national crises and bloodletting, were doing deals with Generals Babangida and Sani Abacha in the night while standing on Abiola’s mandate in the day. Politicians are generally duplicitous. But those of Nigeria belong to a different class. And they have gotten worse under Tinubu. For instance, public reporting had it that Kingibe abandoned the mandate soon after the election result was voided. But he has been made vice president on the basis of the mandate that he had reportedly repudiated. Kingibe is not alone in the perfidy.
It’s interesting that 33 years after June 12, 1993, some political parties have chosen to return to the Option-A4 mode of electing candidates to fly their respective flags in the January and February 2027 national and state elections. The foundation for a resort by the political parties to Option-A4 was laid by the dubious Electoral Act 2026. The makers of the Electoral Act were intentional in doing what they did. Usually when people are said to be intentional, it was more for personal or public good. But this time, members of the national assembly who manufactured the extant Electoral Act were intentional but for evil. However, what some of them did not contemplate was that the boobytraps that they set for opposition politicians and parties would entrap them. A prominent trap embedded in the Electorate Act was the criminalising of switching political platforms by disaffected aspirants seeking elective office in the next election cycle. Subsequently, the supine ‘’Independent’’ National Electoral Commission [INEC] was corralled by the ruling APC enforcers to introduce subsidiary legislations further constricting the space for political jostling. Both the Electoral Act and INEC’s regulations for the elections in 2027 are subjects of litigations in courts of law. And of course, the court of public opinion. However, we can trust the courts to further compound the confusion in the Act and INEC’s guidelines. Already, two courts of coordinate powers had given seemingly differing and conflicting and confusing rulings on aspects of the INEC guidelines for the 2027 polls.
While Nigerians await the appellate courts to make their rulings in terms of the validity of aspects of the Electoral Act and the INEC guidelines as they relate to the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria [as amended], politicians are already at work perverting what was largely perfected 33 years ago. More than 30 years after Nigeria seemed to have gotten it right, our modern day politicians no longer knew how to accurately and faithfully and transparently count voters on a queue. Today, before our eyes and on national, nay, global television stations, parties’ electoral and returning officers feigned not to know their numerals. Across political parties we have been made to be witnesses to counters jumping from 17 to 77 to 507 to 1007 and finally to pre-determined destination figures for any particular electoral ward. These political bandits had sat in their offices which actually are covens, and decided the votes that should be returned by their field operatives in the electoral wards nationwide in the case of the presidential primaries.
The idea is to maximise the returns but then to ensure that the votes fit neatly into their digital membership register which had been mandatorily deposited with INEC. These are gangsters at work. Like everything fraud, some of their numbers still did not add up when you even casually do the math. It is obvious that some of our so-called political parties have primed their digital registers and the results of their primaries as dress rehearsals to perfect their planned rigging of elections in 2027. It is obvious that the journey of electoral redemption of Nigeria is farther than we are willing to acknowledge. But. We. Will. Win. Ultimately.
