Before our very eyes, grand lies are being concocted
and sold about Maurice Iwu’s dud contraption that he
and his coterie have misnamed elections. There’s the
canard that, regardless of the massive rigging that
Iwu oversaw, the PDP and its slate of candidates would
have won the elections at any rate. This is a
pernicious notion, and a certified lie, and its intent
is to mitigate the enormity of the crime perpetrated
by a coalition of the ruling party, a compromised
police, and electoral officials at all levels. More on
that lie presently.
For now, let’s turn to a shameful, British-made
version of the crude lies being fed to Nigerians and
the world. A woman who styles herself Baroness Lynda
Chalker owns the patent to one of the grandest of
these deceptions being telegraphed to mislead the
gullible in Nigeria and elsewhere.
Speaking last week at a meeting of the Honorary
International Investors Council, Chalker, according to
a report in Nigeria’s ThisDay of Friday, May 4,
“criticized the international media for exaggerating
the electoral fraud said to have characterized the
just-concluded general election in Nigeria, adding
that it is not only peculiar to Nigeria.”
In making a straw man out of the media, Chalker no
doubt gave great comfort to the master riggers of
April: the president, his party, the criminally
compromised Nigerian police, and a chain of electoral
officials. Besides, the Englishwoman, who makes a tonne
of money out of Nigeria, proved that nothing deprives
a person of her senses as thoroughly as the blind
pursuit of lucre. The good old baroness was saying in
effect: “Just show me the money and I’ll make a
thorough fool of myself on your behalf.”
And what a pathetic figure this genteel woman cut, a
desperate propagandist from the gray metropolis of
England caught with her stinky foot in her mouth! “I
want to say one thing to the international media,”
said Chalker in a scolding accent. “It is all very
well to believe that the system in America and Europe
are without faults. They are not. I can tell you that
I have had dead people vote against me in elections.
We have evidence to prove it.”
Well, what do you know? Once upon a time, some dead
voters had the temerity to cast their votes against
Baroness Chalker. Whereupon the baroness developed an
imperfect theory of elections, seeing polls as
occasions for fraud. Alas, Chalker the fraudster
entered the annals of history!
Ideally, Chalker’s perorations should be dismissed as
being so self-evidently hollow as to be laughable. In
England, her verbal miscues would have been turned
into fodder for post-prandial jokes. “Oh, that
baroness and her plague of dead voters!”
Unfortunately, Nigerians can’t afford to laugh at
Chalker and move on. Her doctrine, patently false as
it is, has the potency of a virus. And there is not a
shortage of Nigerians waiting to latch on to just this
kind of anecdote to rationalize the bizarre creature
that Obasanjo seeded and Iwu bore into fruition. “You
see,” some among us are already saying, “Nigerians
didn’t invent rigging. We didn’t start the practiced
of stuffed ballot boxes. For that matter, we don’t
hold a monopoly on electoral malpractices. A white
woman has just confessed that dead people vote in her
country. How dare you criticize Iwu, the president or
the PDP?”
Chalker’s comments were, to put it simply,
cash-driven. At Obasanjo’s behest, she’s a player in
Nigeria’s power industry, but a controversial player
at best. For one, Nigerians are yet to see any
demonstrable positive impact of her enterprise.
Instead, she has acquired a reputation as one whose
posture is hostile to Nigerians’ popular aspirations.
Her ghastly effort to champion Obasanjo’s aborted
third term scheme was defining. It stamped her as a
woman whose agenda is at odds with direction of
Nigerians’ dreams. To put it squarely, Baroness
Chalker may be Obasanjo’s pal, but she is an enemy of
Nigeria.
Her participation in an investment council that has to
do with Nigeria points to a perverse mainstay of
Obasanjo’s economic policy: the transfer of Nigeria’s
resources to a tiny cabal of local and foreign
interests with questionable agenda. Chalker’s designs
are at war with Nigeria’s democratic interests and
economic interests. She should walk.
So a few dead people voted against her. So the last
two presidential elections in America were dogged by
questions about hanging chads in Florida and possible
hanky panky in collation of votes in Ohio. In other
words, they were imperfect elections. Surely, Chalker
can’t claim not to know the distinction between an
election marked by a few flaws and the Iwu-supervised
species in which flaws, imperfections, fraud were on
vulgar, arrogant display.
Has this dame of British politics ever witnessed an
election in England in which thugs grabbed ballots
boxes and fled? In which the police set upon known
sympathizers of the opposition parties? In which
ballot material and electoral officials were absent at
polling booths, yet spectacular results were magically
generated? In which, as happened in Ondo, the ruling
party had no candidate but nevertheless won a
senatorial seat? Has Chalker seen anything to equal
the silly theatre that took place in Anambra, a state
where the ruling party’s gubernatorial candidate was
initially awarded votes that exceeded the number of
registered voters—and this after a sham process? Has
she participated in an election in which more than
three hundred lives were lost, most of them at the
hands of the ruling party’s thugs? Does she know of an
election outside of Nigeria where a presidential
candidate allegedly won more than seventy percent of
the votes, and then the whole country sinks into a
depressed funk?
It served Chalker’s purposes (and I daresay Obasanjo’s
and Yar’Adua’s) to trot out the tantalizing but
ultimately deceptive mantra of the inherent
imperfection of elections. That elections are
imperfect is one thing. That they could be turned into
a gleeful game that rewards the most brazenly
fraud-minded is another thing. To put it in different
words, it is one thing to recognize that certain
peripheral glitches attend the best planned electoral
contests. It is a different animal altogether to
imply, as Chalker’s stricture comes dangerously close
to doing, that imperfection is the essence of
elections.
Chalker excoriated the international media for
pointing up the way in which what Nigeria billed as
elections were turned into a gory carnival, leaving a
landscape littered with the maimed and the dead as
well as ballot-hijacks and stuffing. That Chalker
would stand on this most slippery of grounds to chide
the media reveals something profound, and deeply
troubling, about her character.
Left to her, Obasanjo and Iwu would be decorated for
achieving the ultimate destiny of elections: perfect
imperfection! It is hard to resist the conclusion that
her effete raillery against the media was calculated
to ingratiate her with Yar’Adua whom she imagines as
Nigeria’s next captain.
Chalker is not the only liar standing. There’s the now
incessant cant that the PDP would have won the
elections rigging or no. Like any lie repeated often
enough, it’s acquired its own cache, become a
seductive yarn, now voiced (as if irrefutable) even by
some who should know better. Yet, nothing could be
more illogical than this supposition.
Most independent accounts indicate that Obasanjo’s
party would have suffered a devastating defeat. Many
election observers concluded that the party was routed
throughout the south-west (even sustaining a
humiliating loss at the president’s ward). Besides,
the party is widely despised in the south-east, a
consequence of the president’s ruinous policies that
left major federal roads in the Igbo-speaking states
to degenerate into death traps, his contempt for the
developmental aspirations of the region, the
mischievous propping up of Igbo scoundrels and
misfits, and the presidential complicity in the
destabilization of Anambra state. In the Niger-Delta,
it is known that antipathy to Obasanjo and his party
runs wide and deep. What species of magic, then, could
have won the ruling party its so-called triumph?
Even if Umar Yar’Adua, who carried the PDP’s baton,
were beloved of the northern masses or elite, he would
still have had to split the northern votes in a
three-way contest with the ANPP’s Muhammadu Buhari and
AC’s Atiku Abubakar. On what, then, did his landslide
hinge?
There is, besides, the lie that those cheated out of
their mandates should concede to the usurpers and join
hands with the cheaters in order to “move forward.” It
is a toxic idea floated by people who are allergic to
principles. Its purpose is to consolidate fraud and
empower the iniquitous.
All defrauded politicians should borrow from the
tenacity of Governor Peter Obi who, after being
cheated out of his mandate in 2003, threw himself,
with unbending determination, in a legal effort to
reclaim his hijacked office. Even now, as Nnamdi Uba
haunts Anambra with his farcical mandate, Obi is in
court seeking leave to complete his truncated tenure.
Would that more Nigerian politicians exemplified the
same doggedness.
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