By now all politically-conscious Nigerians, who were hit below the belt by INEC’s equivalent to Boko Haram’s improvised explosive device when it landed at dawn on Saturday, must have sufficiently regained their analytical senses to realize that the 2019 elections and its predictable outcome were the targets. It is called the disruptive strategy and it has the triple focus of scuttling process, conduct and outcome in the ulterior context of overtaking the momentum of popular mobilization with an unexpected disabling impact, meant to discourage, demoralize and kill interest of the zealous voters.
Logically, the only potent antidote to the political weapon of mass disorientation is a stronger resolve to use the alternative date that INEC had to set aside for resumption of the civic duty it chose to collude to derail for clandestine sub-national objectives. All politically-conscious citizens should tighten their grip on PVCs so that they can deliver a resounding endorsement of the undeniable entitlement of President Buhari to a second term, which also stands for an uninterrupted pursuit and implementation of the unprecedented overhaul and reform of the corruption-ridden system of government. The 2019 election is clearly a battle against corruption as well as a contest between the self-acclaimed powerful people of Nigeria and the popularly elected man-of-the people.
The need for a clear understanding of the agenda behind the shock and awe strategy adopted by INEC cannot be under-estimated. From all indications, INEC deliberately delayed the suspension of the February 16 election until the wee hours of the poll day because not only was it an open secret among INEC commissioners a clear week before that the logistics schedules had failed, the INEC Chairman Professor Yakubu deceptively maintained that all was well up to 48 hours to the polls! In actual fact, Professor Yakubu single-handedly handpicked an adhoc committee of untried commissioners and staff to replace the existing experienced committee assigned with the management of logistic distribution and then looked away while their incompetence steadily sabotaged timely and coordinated distribution.
As President Buhari stated after expressing his exasperation at the inexplicable inefficiency of an overly empowered INEC, there will be a lot of questions for INEC’s Chairman to answer immediately after the rescheduled elections which reflects the President’s conviction that we must remain focused on exercising our civic duty of voting for him to continue the herculean task of correcting a Nigeria that the world has written off as beyond repair.
We must also be alert to the other masquerades in the democracy-defeating agenda that INEC has chosen to spearhead. At the centre of the plot is the marauding groups of so-called international observers whose silence in the face of national outrage over the postponement agenda can only signify consent and collusion, especially against their background of jittery response to previous violations of democratic ideals in other climes. The mercenary attitude of the foreign observers in terms of being mere puppets on the strings manipulated by the major Euro-American embassies, who themselves treacherously transformed from avid supporters of the Buhari corrective crusade anchored on democratic and good governance principles in 2015 to shameless promoters of the hordes of corruption-driven opposition cliques, is clearly manifesting around the election postponement saga.
The sophisticated manipulation of public perception and instigation of mass hysteria under the unregulated abuse of social media platforms on a world-wide basis to achieve premeditated neo-colonialist political and economic domination agenda has become the plague of developing nations and their people. It was comprehensively deployed during the dying days of the Jonathan-PDP regime in 2015 and it is being deployed now against the Buhari regime whose unwavering commitment to uphold the national interest in favour of the majority of common people gave no room for any so-called international community leverage and therefore fell under their “no permanent friend” template.
Nigerians must therefore strengthen their resolve with the keen awareness of these incriminating circumstances and unpatriotic compromise of state institutions such as INEC to frustrate the bustling determination of Nigerians to re-elect the hero of the masses by calculated disruption of scheduled elections and ultimately creating a false democratic short-cut such as interim government to achieve a tyrannical imposition of unpopular, unpatriotic corruption-backed and foreign-sponsored alternative to the imminent and irreversible re-election of President Buhari.
They will not rule out anything, including recognizing the defeated candidate as is happening today in Venezuela. But we Nigerians know where the shoe has been pinching us in the last 16 years, we know that the opposition is united by a common responsibility for the plundering of national resources and privatisation of national sovereignty and we now know that indeed only President Buhari stands alone and deserves our unconditional democratic endorsement to utilize his entitled second term. We must remain solidly behind him and turn out in greater numbers to defeat the disruptive strategy initiated by INEC last week.
Gambo writes from Kano
