In some years past, when snatching ballot boxes during elections was like a side attraction, Nigerians were never threatened with declarations of brazen killings that have been handed out to a bemused people as the 2027 general elections draw closer. Threatening the killing of opponents appears to have suddenly become an item on party manifestos and on the list of electoral promises of our modern-day politicians who seem excited to destroy and not to build.
Globally, election periods are marked by controversial uppercuts and below-the-belt kicks that are meant to score cheap political points and destroy the guards of opponents regardless of how insensitive such outbursts or actions may seem. It hardly matters if these piercing arrows destroy legacy relationships and throw away long-lasting affiliations to Olusosun, Lagos waste dump.
Not long ago, US President Donald Trump, obviously scared by his declining low-rating, promised all adult Americans a princely sum of $5,000 each if his party, the Republican Party, wins the November 2026 mid-term elections. He feared he might be impeached and removed from office if the Democrats command the majority in the US Congress.
If this attempted open vote-buying or bribery isn’t enough damage to the image of the United States as the leading light of democracy in the world, the controversy-laden President last week issued another combustible order in the senatorial race in Alaska. Incumbent senator, Dan J. Sullivan, a Republican, and Democrat Party challenger, Mary Peltola, are running neck and neck ahead of the election scheduled for Monday, November 3. But an independent candidate, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., is on the ballot as well. Don’t ask me if the collision of names ‘get as e be’ or not. I don’t know.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump has instructed the Justice Department to file a suit to block the certification of the Alaska election results if Peltola, the Democrat, wins the poll yet to be held. His ground? There is a similarity in the names of the incumbent, Dan J. Sullivan, and the independent candidate, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. I wonder how Nigerian politicians would have reacted to this type of controversial order perpetrated by leaders of a country where they have suddenly found a safe haven to certify our own local election process.
You may be wondering what I’m drifting towards by visiting Trump America before flying back home. A senior advocate of Nigeria told journalists about two weeks ago to try their luck to publish election results independently, aside from the certified copies with the Independent National Electoral Commission. I dey laugh in Swahili.
Another leading politician made a Manchester Declaration that Nigerians in the Diaspora should stop sending money to their kinsmen back in Nigeria because such humanitarian gesture would help becloud the misrule and poor governance process of the nation’s current government. The kinsmen will then learn to vote out bad rulers, probably when their starvation rises to an unbearable level.
I have always maintained that while politicians talk before thinking (and never meant such a statement), some so-called leaders hide behind dirty linen to put other helpless folks in deep trouble.
Let’s, however, examine the thinking faculty of some politicians who believe killing opponents or their supporters will be justified as long as elections are involved.
Threatening to kill opponents, supporters and unnamed enemies appears to have gained traction even before INEC declared campaigns open for the 2027 election regime. You and I will agree that active political campaigns for 2027 actually started immediately after President Bola Tinubu was inaugurated in May 2023. What I have not been able to locate is the permit issued by INEC to any politician to threaten to kill or kill supporters or kill opponents in other parties.
I wouldn’t have visited this killing threat epidemic at this time if a former Senator representing Delta Central Senatorial District, Mr Ovie Omo Agege, had not threatened to kill potential election riggers in the state in the forthcoming polls. Omo Agege, a former chieftain of the All Progressives Congress, is eyeing a return to the Senate on the Nigeria Democratic Congress platform.
Notwithstanding the uniqueness of his name, the former Senator declared the readiness of his gang to kill anyone who attempts to rig elections in the state. Not that I support rigging, but how does one reconcile anyone brutally snuffing out a human life and an ephemeral future in politics? To ever think that a lawyer ever plans killing people alleged to be involved in rigging makes the whole scenario not just strange but mind-boggling.
Is it not even stranger that I ever thought the ex-lawmaker would have issued a saner threat after the fiasco he was accused of by his colleagues of masterminding at the Senate at about 11.30am on Wednesday, April 18, 2018, during plenary, when the upper chamber was invaded by some strange faces and the Mace of the chamber stolen by the political hoodlums? The then Senate’s spokesman, Senator Aliyu Abdullahi, alleged that the thugs were led by Omo Agege, who was suspended a week earlier for taking the Senate to court over the sequence of elections as contained in the Electoral Act.
Does it not seem too simple to think that the suspected engineer of that fiasco never realised that the role he allegedly played in the national embarrassment at the National Assembly was not limited to a senatorial district of a state, but poisoned the image of the legislature while impugning the constitution of the nation? If every suspected infraction were to be rewarded with both legal and illegal killings, tell me if those who facilitated the broad-day invasion of the Senate in April 2018 and aided the theft of the Mace would still be alive at this moment to boast of planned extrajudicial killings of election riggers.
He may have his own shortcomings, but Mr Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the NDC, a party on whose platform Omo Agege is planning a return to the Senate, has never been an apostle of violence or killings in the name of politics. How come the gentleman is cohabiting with suspected ruffians in the same party? I tend to agree that most parties harbour strange bedfellows, sharing the same platform but blessed with different grades of mentality.
It may sound strange if most federal lawmakers are taught the art of eliminating political opponents through the barrels of the gun at the National Assembly. If this is contrary, how come an APC senator currently representing Osun East Senatorial District, Francis Fadahunsi, equally threatened the killing of Accord Party members in Osun State ahead of the governorship election in the state in August this year? How on earth does a serving Senator believe that the only way to seize and hold on to power is by taking human lives, as if those lives belong to sacrificial lambs and chickens?
This unfortunate scenario equally speaks to the fact that the antecedents of most people in positions of authority and influence are largely unknown, and their mental capacity is clearly obscure. Is anyone surprised that some of our leaders’ academic and birth records at the Presidency, National Assembly, ministries, departments and agencies and even the academia in our clime remain sources of controversies, debates and litigation?
When confronted with video evidence of the bile of violence in his tummy, the Osun federal legislator unconvincingly turned the blame on the head of the whipping boy of Nigeria’s reckless politicians – the media. You may be thinking that I was as confused as the officers of the Osun State police command who bought the Senator’s one-kobo lie that what he meant was that the APC supporters should kill the Accord Party with votes. I won’t be surprised if the police actually taught him the way to spew out such an embarrassing lie, and with his eyes wide open o!
Omo Agege and Fadahunsi simply wanted human blood to flow as the late Muhammadu Buhari threatened during his presidential bid on the platform of the Congress for Progressive Change in the 2011 election. A state assembly candidate (another potential lawmaker) of the NDC in Kano State, Aminu Warkal, was more audacious by brandishing his ‘weapon of mass destruction’ at a campaign rally in the Janbulo area of Gwale Local Government Area three weeks ago. A viral video showed an excited Warkal brandishing his rifle and reportedly fired some shots to show his seriousness about how he plans to confront electoral manipulators in the 2027 elections in the state.
Warkal’s arraignment for illegal possession of a firearm raises more posers. If you ask me (thanks for not asking), Omo Agege and Fadahunsi, who issued bloodsucking orders, are in the same fellowship with gun-toting Warkal, who, in his state of madness, expectedly overstepped his bounds. Who is prosecuting the former and sitting senators for their threats? And you want us to build a working society this way?
I can beat my chest that Obi can never be caught issuing killing orders anywhere, at any time. His recent Manchester Declaration, which says Diaspora Nigerians should reject the cry for help from their brethren at home to address bad governance, is, however, tantamount to prescribing poison to cure a headache. What? The NDC presidential standard bearer was obviously high on excitement, as this clearly turns logic on its head.
Any day I come across our dear Obi, I want to know the correlation between our leaders’ poor governance and serial mismanagement at home, and Nigerians helping their relatives in Nigeria who need such help. Our potential “incoming” (that’s the appellation in politics) believes that when help refuses to come from the Disaporans, the traumatised (some may even be dead) home-based Nigerians will then know how to vote for political messiahs, who are probably newly descended from Mars.
So, Okoro, sent to study at the University of Manchester some years ago through community and family resources, must stop sending life-saving bailouts to his family members in Arochukwu to increase their pains and teach them how not to vote for Bola Tinubu in 2027. Haba! What governance model is this? This is one slip too many.
It probably skipped the mind of Obi that this symbiotic transaction between home and diasporan Nigerians is not one directional. Some Nigerians abroad would most likely have ended up in rehabs if their relations in Nigeria reject their pleas for financial help. Truth is some of them are actually sustained by the resources of their people back home. Most of our people wrongly believe that the grass is always greener when they step out of Nigeria to Europe, US, Canada and others both legally and illegally.
This Manchester Declaration is pure offside, sir. We await the reworked version, as usual.
PS
Agbakoba’s invitation to confusion
I do not understand the theory recently proposed by eminent lawyer Mr Olisa Agbakoba that journalists can publish election results after collation at polling units before INEC declares a verified election result. In the same breath, he was quick to warn journalists not to “go on a frolic of their own” by inventing or announcing unverified results. Hmmm!
Regardless of the personal motives behind this unsolicited illegal advice, how on earth can an elder statesman pressure media outlets to publish results not sanctioned by INEC, saying such an illegal move is different from ‘declaring’ results? Oga, reconcile the books and your stand.
The SAN may need to be reminded that elections in Nigeria took a different dimension in 2015 when the APC seized power from the ruling PDP, especially with the intrusion and deployment of social media. Any media house that oversteps its bounds by publishing election results not declared by INEC will be to blame. I’m sure you will not be around to defend such an infraction pro bono.