President elect or imposed?
When you pronounce a candidate of an election among other candidates, as the candidate elect, it must be that the candidate did not only win most votes but also satisfied the electoral requirements as stipulated in the constitution.
In the early hours of Wednesday, 1st of March 2023, the Independent National Electoral Commission of Nigeria INEC, pronounced Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress political party, APC as the president-elect of the just concluded 2023 Nigeria general election.
The Labour Party, LP rejected the election outrightly, as a matter of fact, the party’s agents stormed out of the collation centre where the results were announced state by the state during the announcement. The People’s Democratic Party, PDP also stormed out of the centre with LB during the collation of results. Their reasons were based on many electoral malpractices. As it is, LP will go to court to contest the result of the election.
As a Nigerian, and a first time voter who paid keen attention to the whole process, I am very disappointed in INEC, and I do not also accept the result of the election. I refuse to believe that the candidate the commission brought forward as the winner, truly won the election.
Nigeria's election has always been seen as a do or die affair with violence and rigging, but the president and the commission promised a free, fair and credible election. Adding that a new law was put in place before the general election. And that promise gave many Nigerians the assurance to come out like never before to elect candidates of their choice.
Unfortunately for Nigerians, they were well disappointed. From thuggery to violence, to ballot snatching to rigging, they experienced it all — putting the hopes and aspirations of millions of Nigerians in shambles. People have lost their lives in this election, some have sustained injuries, and many are traumatized.
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Someone rightly said, “only in Nigeria will professors rig elections for politicians but expel students for examination malpractices”, isn’t that shameful…? That is our unfortunate situation in Nigeria.
Is this winner truly the elect or the imposed?
Because every important law against election fraud was broken in this election, it was broken in such a way that, many Nigerians feel insulted. It was so poorly done that many Nigerian feel, their intelligence was mocked. Why are these people forcing themselves on us? This is an important question.
At my polling centre, I experienced intimidation and threat from thugs, they threatened the voters publicly and boldly, with no security to protect anyone. The INEC officials didn’t get to my polling centre until about 12 pm when the election was scheduled to start at 8:30 am. On top of that, one machine out of 2 failed to work, and we didn’t get another one until the evening when a lot of voters had left for their homes. After the election and counting, results were not uploaded on the IReV portal— at first, one of the officials said, they have an instruction for them to bring the result to their office rather than upload it on the IReV portal as stipulated in the law. After lots of back and forth between the party agents and the officials, they decided to upload the results on the portal but it didn’t work, so they left without uploading the results on the IReV portal. I will later find out on Twitter that, it was the same in most centres across the country.
I fear for my country! I fear for my people because, for someone to commit these atrocities just to get into the highest political office in the country — he sure won’t respect the people since the people did not elect him, he imposed himself on the people like the military have done on several occasions.
This is not good for our democracy at all.
Democracy grows when the people are well respected and elections are free, fair and credible. A government that gets power through electoral malpractices is not a legitimate government.
He is not President elect, he is president imposed!
