If you have not watched one particular video currently trending in the aftermath of the victory of Yahaya Bello in the just concluded gubernatorial election of Kogi State, you may have missed out on one vital element in the understanding of the blood-fest that the election and its aftermath turned out to be. In this, the nation surely owes the much vilified social media a debt of gratitude for not missing out on minor but important elements as the nation grapples not just with its electoral future but also its future as a stable, organic entity.
I am here referring to the one featuring a group of young ladies dancing to pulsating tunes rendered in a hybrid of English and one of the local dialects in Kogi.
The refrain went thus:
Who is saying that Yahaya Bello will not be governor? Dem go hear am ta-ta-ta-ta-ta…What are you saying? What are you talking…etc?
Coincidentally, another version, just as boisterous, has since surfaced with the latter featuring a group of young men (more like rough-necks) popping champagne in some wild celebration over the governor’s victory. As if an anthem of sorts, it was the same song; same message with the underlying fatwa on anyone who dared to stand in the way of the governor’s second term ambition
Dem go hear am ta-ta-ta-ta-ta…
I suppose those for whom the message was meant for have heard loud and clear. To be sure, the governor, despite initial projections of an emphatic shellacking, has won his election by a wide berth. For his opponents, theirs have been weeping and gnashing their teeth both on accounts of the scale of electoral loss and of the near dozen lives lost. By the reckoning of the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), 10 deaths in the 79 cases of violence and election malpractices were recorded across the 21 LGAs in Kogi State.
However, much as each case of death is deemed tragic enough, one particular one stands out in unsurpassable bestiality –the murder of Salome Abuh, woman leader of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Ofu local government area of the state said to have been burnt alive in her home by jubilant Bello supporters and thugs in what the various accounts hinted as a case of pre-meditated murder.
As the gory details of the murder filtered out – and this came days after President Buhari had congratulated the governor for a well fought victory – an obviously anguished president caused to be issued an unequivocal denunciation of the gruesome act even as he called for “scrupulous investigation into the heinous murder”. Specifically, he charged all “security agencies involved in the investigation to do a thorough and expeditious job on the matter, so that justice could be served without fear or favour”.
In calling for justice to be meted to the perpetrators of the heinous crime, the president obviously means well; however, considering that nine other cases of murder were reported, the president ought to have gone the full hog by empanelling a body to investigate every single case and the circumstances of murder during the election to ensure that perpetrators are duly punished.
If I may put things in proper context, Madam Abuh’s murder was merely the climax in the long string of impunities unleashed by the different actors in the farcical play that the Kogi gubernatorial election turned out to be.
In Kogi, we saw a supposedly unbiased electoral umpire attempt to shut a candidate on a ground that would ordinarily be deemed flimsy. I refer to the SDP candidate Natasha Akpoti which INEC attempted to shut until the courts stepped in at the last minute to rescue the ticket.
Thanks to the social media, we saw ‘live’ pictures of helicopters dropping tear-gas as eligible voters scampered for safety; there were also images of “fake policemen” not only running rings round the hordes of security men and women deployed to maintain order but carting away ballot boxes in broad daylight!
As it is, the world knows better than to describe the charade of November 16 as an electoral contest. It was democracy by conquest – the conqueror being the party that had the superior firepower, a contest in which the elector was at best a spectator!
It was truly as yours sincerely had predicted on this page given the vast the army of enforcers already on the leash in the build-up to the poll: it would hardly matter how many heads will be broken or lives lost, an electoral contest would have taken place and democracy a la Kogi would be deemed on the march!
It is just as well that President Buhari has called for justice for Madam Abuh. The people of Kogi deserve no less. I am not talking here of the electoral abracadabra under which three local governments would deliver nearly half of the entire votes cast to one contestant. That is the job for the electoral petition tribunal – the turf of lawyers. Trust the lawyers – head or tail, they win – never mind that the electors are more often than not – bewildered.
What the president owes the people of Kogi is the burden of establishing what went wrong. Interestingly, his Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, has given Nigerians a clue: the ‘policemen’ that disrupted governorship poll in parts of Bayelsa and Kogi States were “fake” and not the personnel officially deployed for election duties.
According to him, all security personnel, who worked during the poll, had “special identification tags”, and that anyone without the tags was on illegal duty. He couldn’t have been referring to the ones graphically captured by the social media.
Or could he truly be referring to those seen with the appurtenances of government at their beck and call as “fake”?
What about the helicopters? Were they “fake” too? Or could they have been receiving fake orders?
The people of Kogi surely deserve to know. And who else but their president can help them unravel the mystery more so as they have to now live under the terror of those guns freely deployed by the fake policemen on the election day!
‘The world knows better than to describe the charade of November 16 as an electoral contest. It was democracy by conquest – the conqueror being the party that had the superior firepower, a contest in which the elector was at best a spectator!’
Credits: Sanya Oni | The Nation
