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The general election of 2023 in Nigeria has come, but not gone. I remember how in those ancient times, the great Roman empire military General, Julius Caesar, who fought and brought the whole world under his country Rome, was warned that he will be assassinated on the ides of March. He was so full of himself that he scorned all the people that admonished him to be careful. On the day of the ides of March, as he was heading to the capitol to seat as the undisputed ruler of Rome, he saw one of those poor Romans that warned him to beware of the ides of March. He arrogantly mocked the poor soothsayer, “the ides of March is come” and the poor man looked straight to his eyes and retorted, “but not gone Caesar”. It is important to note that Julius Caesar entered the capitol but never came back. He was brutally assassinated by the same people who encouraged him to scorn the warning of those who loved him.
Yes, the general election of 2023 has come but indeed not gone. It has trumped up so many issues that made most Nigerians dub it the worst election in the history of Nigeria. The truth is that one can argue that it is the worst election on earth because there is no country on earth that has spent N305billion spent by Mahmood’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and achieved nothing like Yakubu Mahmood has done. First, Mahmood announced his result at about 4:30am, when, according to the scriptures, men are asleep and evil is most free. Nigerians woke up to the news that Mahmood has announced his President-elect. Fair enough, they thought, there’s no law that forbids Mahmood from declaring his result by 4:30am. They rushed to the INEC IREV Portal to see the results Mahmood declared, as Mahmood promised them he must do, on the same day of election, from the polling units, before declaring any result and making any return. They were conned as they noticed there was none. They waited for days, weeks and going to a month, even up till date, but couldn’t see all. The candidates of the presidential election of the other parties who rightly were offended by the impunity of Mahmood trying to announce his winner without fulfilling the law of showing the result to Nigerians before announcement as he promised, questioned the illegal process to Mahmood, through their agents, while he was collating the results, but Mahmood rebuffed them and arrogantly told them that he must race to finish his unlawful work and if they don’t like it, they can go to court.
They harkened to Mahmood and went to Court. It is hilarious that when they went to court, Mahmood could not give them the result which he claimed he announced. They had to seek the order of court to compel Mahmood to give the result, yet Mahmood couldn’t. Till date Mahmood couldn’t furnish them with all the results he declared. The question is where did he get the results he declared by 1st March, 2023, if by 14th March, there was no already made result to give anybody who wanted to see, meanwhile the law is that if the results were not ready and available for Nigerians to see from 1st March, when it was declared, Mahmood should never go ahead to collate and announce the winner? The answer can only be that he got them from the pit of hell.
For the avoidance of doubt, we are going to state the step by step procedure by law for the conduct of the presidential election to lay bare the charade that Mahmood called election because in the presidential election, he is the Returning Officer and has the sole authority to collate and announce the winner of the presidential election. (See Section 25(1)(2h)(3) of the Electoral Act, 2022). Let us state preliminarily that INEC is 100% responsible for whatever happened on February 25 and March 18, 2023. The Constitution gave INEC, the sole authority to the exclusion of any other person or authority, in Section 160(1), Paragraph 15(a) and (e) of Part 1 of the third schedule to the 1999 Constitution, as amended, the power to organise, undertake and supervise all elections to the offices of the President and Vice-President, the Governor and Deputy Governor of a State, and to the membership of the Senate, the House of Representatives and the House of Assembly of each State of the Federation.
The first step for a voter that intends to vote is to approach the polling unit on the day of election with his permanent voter’s card (pvc). The card will be confirmed to be genuine using the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS). The owner of the card will be verified to be the true owner either through fingerprints or facial recognition identification. When confirmed, the voter will be issued ballot papers with which he will vote for candidates of his choice in a secluded cubicle, after which he drops them in a transparent box openly displayed for the whole world to see. Any voter that the BVAS cannot confirm is not allowed to vote. ( See Clauses 18-19 of INEC Regulations and Guidelines for the Conduct of Election, 2022)
After the voting, INEC officials, Presiding Officer (PO) will publicly count and announce the results in the presence of all at the polling unit. This will be followed by a recording of the scores of the candidates in an election result sheet. Subsequently, the PO shall paste the duplicate copy of the result sheet at a conspicuous place at the polling unit. The PO then electronically transmits or transfers the result of the Polling Unit direct to the collation system. He must use the BVAS to upload a scanned copy of the result sheet to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IREV). It is to ensure that this transmission of results is done before collation that the law compels INEC to compile, maintain and update, on a continuous basis, in a register, to be known as the National Electronic Register of Election Results which shall be a distinct database or repository of polling unit by polling unit results, including collated election results, of each election conducted by the Commission in the Federation, and the Register of Election Results shall be kept in electronic format by the Commission at its national headquarters from where any person or political party may obtain a certified true copy of any election result. (Section 62(1-3) of the Electoral Act, 2022)
It’s this Electronic Register that every collation officer must place by his side to confirm the correctness and consistency of any manual results submitted to him from the Polling Units by the Presiding Officers. The Act and INEC Regulations and Guidelines warned that an election result shall only be collated if the Collation Officer ascertains that the number of accredited voters agrees with the number recorded in the BVAS and votes scored by Political Parties on the result sheet is correct and agrees with the results electronically transmitted or transferred directly from the Polling Unit and if there’s a dispute between the two, the Collation or Returning Officer shall use the result electronically transmitted directly from the polling unit to collate and announce the result (See Section 64(4-9) of the Electoral Act, 2022; Clause 48(a-b) of INEC Regulations and Guidelines for the Conduct of Election, 2022). All these processes were bypassed by Mahmood in his 4:30am infamous declaration of fathom election results. He didn’t have any National Electronic Register of Election Results by his side to confirm the correctness of the fabricated results given to him. Indeed, he intentionally didn’t even want to have because his attention was brought to it but he rebuffed it. No evidence of BVAS recorded number of accredited voters or votes by his side as required by the law. The law declared these acts as criminal, but he was above the law and needed not to comply with the law.
The law also gave INEC the sole authority and power to request for and deploy the security agencies as it deems fit on the election day. Section 27(3) of the Electoral Act, 2022 made it clear when it states, “Notwithstanding the provisions of any other law and for purposes of securing the vote, the Commission shall be responsible for requesting for the deployment of relevant security personnel necessary for elections or registration of voters and shall assign them in the manner determined by the Commission in consultation with the relevant security agencies”. The job of our armed forces is to obey the last order from whoever has the authority to issue such orders. It becomes unfair to criticise the performance of our security officers who were merely obeying the orders issued to them by Mahmood. If you saw security agencies standing aside and watching while INEC Officials or thugs cart away ballot boxes and papers to unknown destinations to dish out cooked results, they are simply doing what INEC leadership told them to do, otherwise, how many petitions has Mahmood written against the security agencies that brutalised Nigerians. He has not even publicly condemned them. It is a shame. And you are still arguing whether this was not the worst election?
People from particular ethnic groups in Nigeria were denied their PVCs in Lagos before elections and warned not to come out to vote on the day of election and Mahmood made no comment and retained the Lagos REC. Every resident of Lagos State, including the Yoruba, was warned not to come out to vote if they are not voting APC, yet Mahmood looked the other way. All the threats against the non-voters of APC were carried out to the letter on the presidential election day and people were suppressed, subdued, dehumanised and disenfranchised, yet Mahmood did not see those and retained the Lagos REC. Little wonder, it became worse during the gubernatorial election on March 18. Till date, Mahmood had neither called for investigation nor the arrest of any person involved in the Lagos debacle. The innocent citizens of Nigeria were left to defend themselves during Mahmood’s election of 2023. Mahmood has established the preliminary foundation of electoral anarchy in Nigeria. May God never allow this to germinate.
