INEC's records show that in the recently concluded Akwa-Ibom state governorship election Udom Emmanuel, Godswill Akpabio's anointed candidate got 996, 071 manufactured and doctored votes but the INEC card readers only recorded 437,128 accredited voters. As for Rivers State, INEC card readers only recorded 292,000 accredited voters but Nyesom Wike, Dame Patience Jonathan's anointed candidate got 1,029,000 manufactured and doctored votes.
What this means is that in Akwa-Ibom state results were written to give Udom Emmanuel more than twice the number of people accredited to vote. In Rivers state results were written to give Nyesom Wike almost four times the number of voters accredited to vote. This is mind bugling. This is disgraceful.
The election tribunal must cancel these scandalous elections and order INEC to conduct fresh gubernatorial and house of assembly elections in Rivers and Akwa-Ibom states. If these electoral thieves appeal the decisions of the tribunals, the Court of Appeal must uphold their judgments.
The criminals behind these electoral heists and day light robberies are Nyesom Wike, Godswill Akpabio, Dame Patience Jonathan, alias mama stone, and the state electoral commissioners for Rivers and Akwa-Ibom states. The next Attorney-General and Minister of Justice must immediately upon being sworn-in hit the ground running to commence the prosecution of these enemies of peace and democracy and their collaborators in the Police, Armed Forces, NCDC, and DSS. These charlatans must do the time because they did the crime. They must also face murder charges for sponsoring electoral violence that killed over 30 people in these 2 states before and during the elections in these two states.
We cannot be condemning deadly xenophobic attacks by South African xenophobes and not do anything about home grown deadly electoral attacks by political terrorists. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. History never repeats itself. It is nations that repeat history by not learning from it. If we sincerely want to kill corruption before it kills Nigeria we must start by first of all killing the corruption in our electoral process. If the rogue minded politicians are unable to rig themselves into office then the problem of corruption is half-solved. A person who corrupts the electoral process with violence and money would definitely not be accountable to the people because the votes of the people did not put him in office. A person who wins an election genuinely with the votes of the people is less likely to be corrupt and is more likely than not to respect the wishes of those who elected him. If you fail to keep the criminals out at the point of entry you are less likely to succeed in preventing them from pillaging the resources of the country.
I got the statistics about the INEC card readers from the Facebook timeline of Omoyele Sowore.
Bunmi Awoyemi, Ph.D, the author of this opinion piece is a public affairs analyst, lawyer and entrepreneur.