(OPINION) 2023 Presidential Election Should Be Cancelled; It’s Already Predetermined – Farooq Kperogi

With the help of Aminu Tambuwal, Atiku Abubakar has defeated Nysom Wike to win the PDP presidential primaries. I’ve seen people exultingly proclaiming that Atiku will give APC a bloody nose in 2023. That’s misplaced optimism.

Your votes won’t count—like they didn’t in 2019—because INEC is anything but independent. It’s a dutiful, groveling poodle of APC and Buhari and has no capacity or willingness to provide a level playing field for all contestants.

I think there’s no point wasting billions to hold a presidential election whose outcome is already predetermined. INEC’s last-minute extension of the electoral timetable in response to Buhari’s instruction is all the evidence you need to know that that the 2023 election has already been decided. I hope I’m wrong.

But recall that on May 5, INEC told political parties that pleaded with it to tweak its timetable that its “deadline is firm and fixed.” It repeated this on May 10 when IPAC again requested it to extend its deadline.

But Buhari traveled out of the country, called Mahmood Yakubu, and told him to bend his “firm and fixed” deadline. Yakubu then invited the same IPAC guys whose request he’d spurned and told them the “firm and fixed” deadline was now suddenly infirm and unfixed.

If Buhari can unilaterally call the INEC chairman and direct him to loosen a “firm and fixed” deadline in order to give an unfair advantage to the APC, he’ll certainly tell INEC chairman whom to declare as “president” in 2023 irrespective of the actual outcome of the presidential election.

That was precisely what happened in the 2019 election, which Buhari lost by close to 2 million in spite of APC’s massive, in-your-face rigging in Borno, Yobe, Lagos, and Kano. As I write this, INEC has still not provided a comprehensive breakdown of the votes cast in the election like Jega’s INEC did in 2015.

Farooq Kperogi

With the help of Aminu Tambuwal, Atiku Abubakar has defeated Nysom Wike to win the PDP presidential primaries. I’ve seen people exultingly proclaiming that Atiku will give APC a bloody nose in 2023. That’s misplaced optimism.

Your votes won’t count—like they didn’t in 2019—because INEC is anything but independent. It’s a dutiful, groveling poodle of APC and Buhari and has no capacity or willingness to provide a level playing field for all contestants.

I think there’s no point wasting billions to hold a presidential election whose outcome is already predetermined. INEC’s last-minute extension of the electoral timetable in response to Buhari’s instruction is all the evidence you need to know that that the 2023 election has already been decided. I hope I’m wrong.

But recall that on May 5, INEC told political parties that pleaded with it to tweak its timetable that its “deadline is firm and fixed.” It repeated this on May 10 when IPAC again requested it to extend its deadline.

But Buhari traveled out of the country, called Mahmood Yakubu, and told him to bend his “firm and fixed” deadline. Yakubu then invited the same IPAC guys whose request he’d spurned and told them the “firm and fixed” deadline was now suddenly infirm and unfixed.

If Buhari can unilaterally call the INEC chairman and direct him to loosen a “firm and fixed” deadline in order to give an unfair advantage to the APC, he’ll certainly tell INEC chairman whom to declare as “president” in 2023 irrespective of the actual outcome of the presidential election.

That was precisely what happened in the 2019 election, which Buhari lost by close to 2 million in spite of APC’s massive, in-your-face rigging in Borno, Yobe, Lagos, and Kano. As I write this, INEC has still not provided a comprehensive breakdown of the votes cast in the election like Jega’s INEC did in 2015.

Farooq Kperogi