Nigeria’s president-elect, Bola Tinubu, has reacted to the global campaign kick-started by the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) on Wednesday against recognition of the February 25 presidential election result. Tinubu, candidate of the ruling party, APC, was declared winner by the Independent National Electoral Commission.
NADECO has launched a global campaign against recognising Tinubu as president-elect, alleging that the election was grossly manipulated.
Addressing an international press conference on “2023 Nigerian Election Crisis”, NADECO, USA Executive Director, Lloyd Ukwu, declared Tinubu’s election as fraudulent, announcing that the premier Nigerian pro-democracy group has consequently severed ties with him.
Ukwu at the press conference held at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C., on Wednesday appealed to the Joe Biden administration and the global community not to recognise Tinubu’s election. He described the press conference as “the first of its series of events planned over the next several weeks regarding the recently held presidential election in Nigeria”.
Below are parts of his remarks:
“NADECO alleges that the election results pronounced by the Independent National Electoral Commission (“INEC”), February 25-26, 2023, are fundamentally at odds with Nigerian election laws and constitute wholesale disenfranchisement of Nigerian voters caused by the pervasive rot of Nigeria’s increasingly kleptocratic political structure.
“NADECO demands that INEC draw back its curtains to let the full light of truth prove the transparency and veracity of the 2023 electoral processes. It is without question that nearly all of the electoral reforms implemented to safeguard the 2023 Nigerian elections have been savaged by INEC and scattered to the winds of tyranny. It is beyond debate that initial investigation into the 2023 Nigerian Presidential Elections inexorably discloses that Nigeria’s most recent election is the polar opposite of transparency, fairness and electoral integrity This election was polluted by blatant bribery and widespread corruption – even INEC itself has admitted to its abject failures to comply with the requisite transparency laws mandating real-time electronic transmission of election results from the polling units to the public, instead opting to cloak the electronic results in darkness before emerging with a declared rather than proved “winner” who is presently incapable of being fully embraced by the World.
“The Independent National Electoral Commission INEC action clearly constitutes negligence per se and electoral fraud, as it violated the very statutory provisions and guidelines that are designed to protect against the type of fraud caused by its failure to transmit the results in real time. The people of Nigeria are supposed to be the ones the statute is designed to protect. Instead, they have found themselves at the receiving end of the resulting gross injustice.
“NADECO maintains that the 2023 Nigerian Presidential Election is an attempt to disenfranchise the Nigerian people through the Four Horsemen of Democracy’s Doom – Bribery, Voter Intimidation, Insecurity, and Vote Rigging, all harnessed to skew the results of the 2023 Nigerian Presidential Election.
“NADECO calls upon the people and the Judiciary of Nigeria and the International Community to join hands in a concerted effort toward global condemnation and absolute rejection of the hasty, hollow, and illegitimate result declared by INEC as being contrary to the will of the people and the rule of law.
“NADECO hereby takes the following positions to lead a global call for action to redress INEC’s duplicity that endangers democracy in the Giant of Africa:
“NADECO is gravely concerned about the irregularities, voter intimidation, violence, the breach of the National Electoral Act, and most importantly, the abrupt and hurried pronouncement of the dubious 2023 Presidential Election results. This, in our viewpoint, signals a wholesale disenfranchisement of voters in Africa’s largest nation.
*Say INEC failed to live up to high expectations it had created for itself
*Insist Nigeria, Africa must learn from mistakes
Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja
Two United States diplomats, Ambassador Mark Green and Johnnie Carson, have said even Nigerian citizens who supported the winners of the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections in the country were disappointed with the electoral process.
In a joint treatise, both envoys, who monitored the elections, insisted that critical lessons must be learnt very fast from the shortcomings of the last polls by Nigerians and Africans, with a view to forestalling such flaws in the future.
Writing for the Washington-based President Woodrow Wilson Centre, a United States non-partisan policy forum for tackling global issues through independent research, Green and Carson noted that, among other issues, many polling stations opened late while poll workers reported material shortages.