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Ekiti Election Scandal Caught On Tape: A Chain Reaction Whose End Is Unpredictable For Nigeria By Dr. Wumi Akintide.

February 9, 2015

Nigerians must thank God for the life of Captain Sagir Koli who decided to go to the war room with a secret tape recorder unknown to the other participants in the disgraceful gang-up authorized by the worst President Nigeria has ever had.

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The great Chinua Achebe, before his death, wrote his last book titled, “There was a country” I have read the book 4 times because it was written as usual in very lucid language. Even though I disagree with his central message which put s all the blame for the failure of Biafra on Obafemi Awolowo and the Yorubas, I would be the first to admit, it was vantage Chinua Achebe.

I thought Chinua was talking of “Biafra”, but now I know he could also be talking of “Nigeria”. If what I saw in the video in question is anything to go by, Nigeria is clearly on her way to perdition or self- destruction as speak.  American political pundits in their wisdom have predicted that Nigeria is going to unravel as fallout from the 2015 election.

I never paid any serious attention to that prediction, but now I do with so much agony in my heart. I was a passionate believer in Nigeria as the pride of Africa. I knew we had our problems and difficulties, but I could never, for the life of me, believe that I would see any of our Presidents descend so low to do what was alleged to have been done by a civilian President. The full ramifications of what I saw and heard in that video and the principal characters involved in the video one week to an election that may well be the last in the history of Nigeria as one entity.

I watched the video in question 4 times yesterday in total disbelief. I participated in a live program on Sahara TV in New York as a guest speaker to discuss the video and its full ramifications for Nigeria with callers from all over the world on Skype. The program was moderated by Rudolf Okonkwo of Sahara TV who I admire as a talented Engineer-turned TV reporter and stand-up comedian otherwise known as Dr. Damages.

I call Rudolf Okonkwo the Tyler Perry of Nigeria. Like Mr. Perry, Rudolf has successfully impersonated President Jonathan like nobody I have seen on Television. If I did not know the young man from his days as an Engineering student at the Federal University of Technology in Akure my home town, and if he was slightly younger than he looks on camera, I would have thought he was one of the sons of President Jonathan who was born to the President out of wedlock because they both look alike. President Jonathan is known to have two important women in his life as President of Nigeria. There may well be other women who have had children for him but who are too scared of the First lady to show their faces.

One of them who get all the publicity and attention is his ubiquitous first lady, the one and only Dame Patience, an absentee Bayelsa State Permanent Secretary who speaks English like no other first lady in the whole world. The other is the one the born-again Christian keeps in a closet. Her main duty like a Guinea pig is to keep on bearing children for Mr. President but must completely stay out of the spotlight because the president an Anglican by denomination but an evangelical Christian by choice does not want either Bishop Oyedepo or General Overseer to know he is a philanderer, and the Holy Ghost has never bothered to reveal that secret to them and they really don’t care. The President is too big a fish for any of them not to want associate with. Rumors have it, however, that the second wife is related by blood to the Nigeria first lady Petroleum Minister, Deziani Madueke, one of the richest women in Nigeria today with as much fortune as Oprah Winfrey who does now own a plane of her own.

Many Nigerians who could never figure out why President Jonathan is so much in love with the Igbos and why the Igbos would die to keep him in office 4 more years  don’t have to look any further for an answer. The Igbos have more than one reasons to be very supportive of the President because no Nigerian President before him has ever been more magnanimous to the Igbos. Two of Jonathan’s names are “Ebele” and “Azikiwe”, the name of the first national hero of the Igbo struggle in Nigeria before Ikemba Eze Igbo Wuruwuru pushed Zik out of the spotlight following his dominant role in the Biafran war. President Jonathan is as much an Igbo man like he is an Ijaw man. He draws his political strength from the two powerful ethnic groups in Nigeria and deservedly so because I hear his mother was a “Kedu Kodu” who also believed like all Igbos in “Oyun Ube Ruru Ya Ra Ra Ma”. (Meaning you should suck your pear when it is ripe) The Jonathan time in power is their time to suck their pear. They are not going to let go without a fight. Jonathan can do no wrong with the Igbos because they argue he won’t be the first President to ever rig elections in Nigeria and they sure get that right.

Watching that video and digesting it has, nonetheless, forced me to view President Jonathan as enigma in Nigerian Politics based on some of the things he has done in the public domain and what he has been doing behind closed doors by providing cover for those Nigerian criminals who took over a whole wing of the Spotless Hotel in Ado Ekiti as their war room to rig Dr. Kayode Fayemi out of office despite his performance in Ekiti which stood out again when the same Governor was picked by his Party to conduct the best party Convention in Nigeria that produced General Buhari  as the flag bearer of the APC.

Jonathan  the titular Commander-in Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces and President of Nigeria sat at Aso Rock in Abuja  while a Brigadier General named Aliyu Momoh and an Intelligence operative named Captain Sagir Koli  were busy doing his dirty job to bring Ekiti State to the PDP column by all means including subterfuge. The President ordered all leaders of the APC and anyone who could be identified as their supporter to be arrested and stopped from being able to cast their votes for any candidate of their choice.

The cabal was far more equipped than the few soldiers assigned to Jega’s INEC with 27 Hillux Jeeps enough ballot papers they can use to influence the outcome of the Ekiti Gubernatorial election in each of the 16 local Governments in Ekiti including Oye where Dr. Fayemi comes from. The President knew Professor Jega could not be in two places at one time but the cabal had enough soldiers and SSS operatives to dislodge the APC agents and to replace them with their own men with the APC kicking and screaming to the State Commissioner of Police who simply turned a deaf ear because he has been told by his IG to ignore any protest from the opposition.

The Cabal was free to assign how many votes they wanted each the two gladiators to score in each of the 16 Local Governments unknown to Professor Jega and his INEC state Commissioner.  The Cabal replaced each of the polling agents with their own agents while keeping the APC agents and their leaders under house arrest for the entire duration of the election. They made sure that nothing could move in and out of the State a week before the election and that was how Governor Oshiomhole and Rotimi Amaechi who were coming to Ekiti to lend some moral support to Dr. Fayemi were barricaded at the Akure Domestic Airport while Ayo Fayose who they freely addressed as “Governor” or “Your Excellency” was temporarily assigned the role of the Commander-in-Chief for the entire Ekiti operation. It was an amazing spectacle that gave a new meaning to the statement that “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” President Jonathan was more than willing to trade of his title with a hoodlum named Ayo “Oluwayose” who had a criminal case pending him and should not have been allowed to run on the platform of the PDP if President Jonathan was of proven probity.

Ayo Fayose was joined in the presidential assignment by former Senator Iyiola Omisore and former Senator Musiliu Obanikoro who as Minister of Defense was ordering the sheepish Brigadier Aliyu Momoh around as seen in the video. He blatantly told the Brigadier he was in Ekiti to carry out the order Mr. President and that he was not there for a tea party. He reminded the Brigadier General of what his failure in the President’s assignment could do to his next promotion to the rank of a General in the Nigerian Army. Ladies and Gentlemen can you imagine a US senator carrying out the kind of assignment these animal farm senators were assigned to do by a useless President?

What President Jonathan did was to declare war against Nigerians and to make it impossible for the opposition APC to win in Ekiti and Osun and later on in the presidential election in 2015. It was a carefully calibrated high wire rigging. The PDP would still have won, even if no Nigerian came out to vote. It is a charade of an election.

What the cabal did in Ekiti was a masterstroke and a fool-proof exercise that could have kept power forever in the hands of the PDP for other 50 or hundred years. The Jega INEC was nothing short of a façade and eye service just to deceive Nigerians. The cabal at Ado Ekiti headed by Ayo Fayose and the two musketeers of Omisore and Obanikoro were given more funds that were given to Jega to carry out his empty exercise.    What made the whole scenario more nauseating and troubling was that the cabal carried out their operations in total secrecy that Jega himself and all of his INEC Commissioners across the country knew nothing about.

What was even more disturbing was that the so-called international observers who came to supervise the elections did not detect what the cabal was doing behind closed doors from their war room at the Spotless Hotel at Ado Ekiti. Jonathan invited the robbers to come rob his victims and he also invited the Police to come arrest the robbers like they say in Yoruba language. He most certainly set up ignorant and imbecile Professor Jega for failure by putting Jega. The PDP candidate who planned the whole coup was nobody but Ayo Fayose. The criminal President signed on to the plot in total secrecy on the presumption that Nigerians would never discover or detect the terrible espionage and rape on Democracy in Nigeria. The President once told President Obama that If Obama is ever going to fix Africa; he must begin his job by fixing Nigeria. How could Obama fix Nigeria with the criminal kind of behavior and impunity we saw in that video?

In more civilized countries Brigadier General Aliyu, Governor Ayo Fayose, Iyiola Omisore. Musiliu Obanikoro and President Jonathan and everybody who participated in the rigging as revealed in that video should have been put behind bars by now.  As a matter of fact, Professor Jega who supervised the elections and gave the impression the elections were free and fair ought to cover his face in shame. The same thing goes for the international observers who came to Nigeria to give the whole election a pass mark as being free and fair. Many Nigerians, myself included who simply joined the bandwagon to start eulogizing Ayo Fayose as having won the Ekiti election fair and square, have to be ashamed of ourselves.

We were all taken for a ride by a criminal-minded  President that  General Olusegun Obasanjo had imposed on Nigeria by picking him to run as a running mate to a terminally-ill President he had to know could possibly die in office.  Dr. Kayode Fayemi the APC candidate, as I recall was the only one who showed some circumspection in accepting his defeat by Ayo Fayose. Dr. Fayemi for a brief moment, after the election, was in what I would call a clinical disorientation because the man could not understand how he could have lost in his own household in Isan-Ekiti not to talk of his own Local Government of Oye comprising Ilupeju up to Imojo, Itaji and Aiyede?
As a democrat he felt it duty and morally-bound to pick up his phone and to call Fayose to concede defeat and to congratulate Ayo Fayose even though he knew something did not add up but he could not tell what it was or place his finger right on it. He later reversed himself saying that the only reason he conceded defeat was because he did not want Ekiti to become the battle field for the cumulative political problems of Nigeria.

He did the right thing in retrospect and Nigerians must respect him for what he did. To him winning was not a do or die affair like Ayo Fayose had said before the election. Ayo Fayose was so sure of his victory  because of what the cabal did with tacit approval of President Jonathan who I see as “fons et origo” of the scandalous tragedy to borrow a cliché from Patrick Obahiagbon of Edo State. It was a quintessential “ogar mogar” of an election outcome as bombastic Obahiagbon would have put it I get a kick out of listening to the video interviews of Patrick Obahiagbon who was scheduled to introduce General Buhari during his visit to Benin but was stopped from doing it because the rally would have needed a dictionary to understand what the man was talking about.

I am still shocked to my bones watching that video and so should most Nigerians. I couldn’t help but weep for Nigeria because I started out my career in the Ministry of Defense- Army Headquarters way back from January 3rd 1968 to August 1970 when I served as Assistant Secretary (Army Matters) under two permanent secretaries of Defense named Alhaji Damcida and Yussuf Gobir from Ilorin. Mr. B.G. Popo from Warri was the Deputy Permanent Secretary. My direct boss at the time was one S.A. Ogunleye from Ijebu Ode an economist who later became a Director of the African Development Bank in Addis Ababa. As Assistant Secretary (Army) I had unrestricted access to the personnel files of all of the top officers in the Nigerian Army including that of Yakubu Gowon, Murtala Mohammed, Olusegun Obasanjo, Benjamin Adekunle the black scorpion, Colonel Shittu Alao, Joe Akahan, Joseph Garba, Agbezikah innih, Ike Nwachukwu, Austin Peters and Adefowope, to mention a few. I knew all of them by their first name. Theirs was the golden age of the Nigerian Army not the rag tag we have today under President Jonathan.

I was moved to tears as I knew the caliber of the Nigerian Army at that time in their history. It was the finest fighting force in West Africa if not in the whole of Africa minus South Africa and Egypt. I was a military scholar and the first son of the veterans of the Second World War to win the British Canadian Legion Scholarship first awarded in Nigeria in 1963 my first year at the great Obafemi Awolowo University.

To now see what the Nigerian Military has become under a clueless President Jonathan makes me want to throw up. If I got a gun and I have access I could almost shoot some of those individuals in that video who have reduced the  Nigerian Army to a laughing stock as depicted in that video.

I am fast losing confidence and getting disillusioned by Pastor Adeboye’s limitless tolerance level for a cruel, sinful and dangerous President Jonathan who is going to rubbish the reputation of General Overseer Adeboye over time if care is not taken. I have seen President Jonathan use his picture kneeling down to receive the blessings and endorsement of Adeboye and going ahead to use those photo opportunities for political propaganda to score a cheap point with the Nigerian Christian voters.
I am surprised and frustrated that if he Pastor Adeboye is truly a man of God like we all believe he is, I do not understand why he has continued to flirt with  a useless President who will authorize the hoodlums we saw in the video to go commit such a crime. I don’t know about any of you reading this. I love and respect Pastor Adeboye but I disagree with him on his cozy relationship with President Jonathan. I know some of you reading this may want me excommunicated from the Church for saying it. I would be committing a sin to keep quiet.

I do not question the General Overseer’s prerogative to always welcome the President to the Holy Ghost Redemption Camp as often as the man wants to come there. I think Mrs. Kunle Omotosho in herSunday sermon today touched briefly on the point I want to make with this article when she based her sermon on the Gospel of St Marks Chapter 11 verses 23 to 26.

If you have faith in God and don’t doubt, you can tell this mountain to get up and jump to the sea and it will. Verse 25-26 whenever you stand up to pray, you must forgive what others have done to you. Then your father in Heaven will forgive your sins.

I know it is the role of the General Overseer as a man of God to help intercede on behalf of every sinner that comes to kneel down before him in the hope that Pastor Adeboye can help him. What I have some doubt about and what is bothering me as I write this article is whether or not Pastor Adeboye really knows that the man kneeling in front of him could have authorized the kind of wicked plot that was played out in that video, and if so, how could the General Overseer not realize that the President has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God by doing what he did, sponsoring and deliberately promoting the rigging of elections in Nigeria.

May be I am expecting too much of Pastor Adeboye. But as a lay man and a sinner myself, I was hoping that the type of prayers that Pastor Adeboye should have ordered for President Jonathan should have reflected that he knew that the man kneeling down before him was a big cheat and fraudulent leader who would authorize the cabal in the terrible video to do what they did to Ekiti voters and to Dr. Kayode Fayemi and the whole of Nigeria.

Such a President, in my judgment, does deserve to receive the blessings and the endorsement of Pastor Adeboye if that man is really communicating with God as we think he does. I can understand Bishop Oyedepo or some of the mercenary pastors being taken for a ride like that, not Pastor Adeboye. I commend Pastor Adeboye for refusing to allow President Jonathan to make a political statement in his Church which was exactly what Pastor Oyedepo had invited President Jonathan to do in his Winners’ Chapel at Ota. Bishop Oyedepo in my own opinion worships money and influence with the power brokers of Nigeria more than he worships God.

I said that much in my article on him and Rev. Father Ejike Mbaka. What both Mbaka and Oyedepo had done were beyond the pale and somebody had to call them to order. If every Pastor in Nigeria does that, Nigeria would soon be engulfed in a religious crisis we do not need. It is true that some of us in the Church are often described as the “Sheep” and the Pastor as the “Sheppard”. I reject such description because I have seen the way some of the cattle rearers in Nigeria treat their sheep.  I refuse to be treated like that by any pastor of my Church. I am sorry. It is no arrogance. I just don’t accept that kind of language. And I would never refer to anyone as my sheep if I were to be a pastor.

If the man the So-called Christian Association of Nigeria is asking Nigerians to support for re-election was the same man that authorized and master-minded the massive election rigging at Ado Ekiti and was planning to repeat the same at Osun and later at the federal level on February 14, I condemn the Christian Association with all the emphasis at my command. Any President who will gang up with hoodlums like Ayo Fayose, Iyiola Omisore, Musiliu Obanikoro, and Brigadier Aliyu Momoh to swindle and defraud Nigerians in that kind of way does not deserve re-election in my judgment.

I know the criminals are going to deny ever doing anything of the sort but video cannot lie. Sahara Reporters have used Forensic technology to prove that the voices in the video tally with the voices of the individual involved in the Ekiti Election rigging. I am sure that Nigerians have not heard the last word on that video which is going to end up in Court without any question in my mind. Nigerians in general and the APC and all opposition parties in Nigeria who have not been bought or bribed by the PDP would be insane not to pursue this scandal to its logical conclusion not only in the court of public opinion but also in the Court of law

Nigerians must thank God for the life of Captain Sagir Koli who decided to go to the war room with a secret tape recorder unknown to the other participants in the disgraceful  gang-up authorized by the worst President Nigeria has ever had.

I know many of you reading this would immediately remind me of how many times Olusegun Obasanjo another Yoruba President has used his power as President to rig elections for Shehu Shagari and so many times for himself. He did it against Chief Oluyemi Falae who I know very well and who was far more qualified than Obasanjo, all things considered.

Obasanjo was guilty as charged. Ibrahim Babangida did the same thing when he cancelled the fairest and the freest election in Nigeria. I get that. But all those criticisms do not justify what President Jonathan has done in the Ekiti elections.  Whatever Obasanjo, Babangida and Abdul Salam Abubakar have done during their own tenures have paled into insignificance if you are thinking like me. That does not excuse what they did, but what Jonathan did in Ekiti and was hoping to repeat in Osun and subsequent elections in Nigeria would have meant the end of Democracy in Nigeria if it goes unpunished.

I make the argument because the plot beat everybody in Nigeria including the international and local observers and INEC. It was the mother of all riggings in Nigeria. It was so fool-proof that Ayo Fayose was boasting everywhere he goes that the PDP was going to use the Federal might to roll-over the opposition and that Nigerians who don’t like it could go jump to the sea.

I saw him address a rally at Abeokuta where he openly boasted that the PDP was going to repeat their strategy in Ekiti to defeat Governor Amosun and the APC in Ogun and he was not apologetic about it. Now that we know what they did, how do we expect Nigerians to respond?  That is the million Dollar question!

I don’t care if the election is postponed by 6 or 12 weeks, I can almost tell you right now that no election is going to hold in Nigeria until Jonathan and the PDP can find another fool-proof formula to remain in power. If you believe in their empty promise, you are deceiving yourself, and I am not going to join you in that foolhardiness.
I do know that Nigerian voters are more determined today to give Buhari a resounding victory than what we expected a week ago  because they now know that President Jonathan is a criminal who deserves to go to jail for what he has done in Ekiti. He has committed more egregious crimes by politicizing the Nigerian Military, the Nigerian Police, and the Judiciary and by instigating Christians against Muslims. Of course he has already divided Nigeria into two camps. He is in charge of one half of the country and Boko Haram has taken over the other half.

What is now left for Nigerians to fight for if the man is allowed to remain in office?  Why go and vote in an election you know the party in power has already designed a fool-proof formula to win by all means even if nobody goes out to vote for them. The Nigerian Military has now made it known they can no longer guarantee the safety of voters until they are sure the sitting President and his party are sure of victory. That is a recipe for disaster for Nigeria

The Nigerian state can explode anytime from now because the implications and the ramifications of the Ekiti election rigging which nearly succeeded in Osun is a terrible omen for Nigeria if nothing is done to bring the culprits to justice. Brigadier Aliyu Momoh does not deserve to keep his job for one more day. The same fate should befall Ayo Fayose, Senator Omisore and Senator Musiliu Obanikoro and anyone who have participated in that abominable scandal.

The Nigerian Military today can longer be trusted to protect Nigerians because their loyalty is now with the party in power. Until an urgent answers can be found to this “Cul-de-sac” Nigerians can kiss a final goodbye to one Nigeria.

I rest my case.