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By Maupe Abiodun-Adenuga
The stakes are extremely high and Nigerians are mindful that a failure to transition to a new political governance cycle headed by the new democratically elected president thereby sustaining democratic stability may imperil the country’s future as a coherent state.
Beyond the unseemly exchanges of political hot air, there is clearly a need to focus sharply on the glaring facts which basically underpin the position that Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, couldn’t by any stretch have lost the February 25 presidential election. he clearly won it.
Former Minister of State for Defence, Musiliu Obanikoro, aptly captured the absurdity of the unfolding drama when he warned that those protesting and kicking against the inauguration of the president-elect, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, on May 29, 2023, should not turn the country into a “banana republic”.
Obanikoro, a former ambassador of Nigeria to Ghana, made the remark while speaking with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on the sideline of the 9th Ramadan Lecture of Anwar-Ul Islam College, Agege, Old Students’ Association (ACAOSA), on Saturday in Lagos.
Hear him: “They are daydreaming. There is no perfect election anywhere in the world. For anyone that is not satisfied, what is next is to go through the judiciary. If you feel aggrieved, go to court.
“We cannot turn Nigeria into a banana republic. Our system is not perfect; it is a work in progress. We have to continue to work at it until we get to a situation that all of us will be comfortable with.”
President-elect Ahmed Bola Ahmed Tinubu polled 8, 794, 726 to defeat his closest rival, Atiku Abubakar, who scored 6,984, 520 and Peter Obi who garnered, 6,101,533 while Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigerian Peoples Party (NNPP) got 1,496,687.
Tinubu won outrightly in 12 states out of 36: Niger, Benue, Kogi, Zamfara, Jigawa, Oyo, Rivers, Ogun, Ondo, Kwara, Ekiti and Borno. To even show it was a tough contest, Tinubu lost to Obi in Lagos State where he governed for eight years between 1999 and 2007.
He similarly lost Katsina, the home State of President Muhammadu Buhari, a leader of his party whose second term ends on May, 29 this year, to PDP’s Atiku.
Besides recording the highest vote cast in the presidential poll, Tinubu even exceeded the required 25 per cent in two-thirds 36 states. None of his major challengers came near to matching Tinubu’s numbers.
Consequent upon this electoral outcome which also aligned with constitutionally stipulated requirements, Tinubu was declared winner of the 2023 presidential election by Prof. Mahmoud Yakubu, the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
In effect, the quirky argument being pushed by Atiku and Obi that they won the presidential contest is best suited to old-wives-tales and worthless. Nevertheless, they’ve made the move of seeking what they perceive as shortcomings of the poll. This course is clearly better than inciting civil insurrection which some of them are doing.
Since Tinubu was declared the winner of the presidential election by the election management body INEC and subsequently issued with a certificate of return, many voices from the opposition ranks have been making very inciting and provocative pronouncements. But the institutions saddled with maintaining law and order are on their toes and alert.
The National Broadcasting Code (NBC) recently appropriately fined Channels Television N5 million for allegedly violating the NBC code in a programme with the Labour Party vice-presidential candidate, Datti Baba-Ahmed.
Speaking on Wednesday’s edition of “Politics Today” on Channels Television, Mr Baba-Ahmed called on President Muhammadu Buhari and the Chief Justice of Nigeria not to swear in Bola Tinubu, whom INEC declared as the president-elect, insisting that declaring Tinubu a winner and issuing him a certificate of return was against the constitution.
Whoever swears in Mr Tinubu, Mr Baba-Ahmed said, has “ended Democracy” in Nigeria. Some in their desperation have gone on to canvass and unconstitutional interim national government. This is going to the extreme. Good a thing the DSS is on top of their game and closely shadowing the desperados.
The preparation of Tinubu’s victory and ascendancy to the presidency today took a long time and many don’t know this.
It could be recalled that Tinubu was elected to the Nigerian Senate, and represented the Lagos West Constituency in the short-lived Third Republic. After the results of June 12, 1993, presidential election were annulled, Tinubu became a founding member of the pro-democracy National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), which mobilized support for the restoration of democracy and recognition of the June 12 results.
He went into exile in 1994 and returned to the country in 1998 after the death of military dictator Sani Abacha, which ushered in a transition to civilian rule.
In the run-up to the 1999 elections, Tinubu won the AD primaries for the Lagos State gubernatorial elections in competition with Funsho Williams and Dr. Wahab Dosunmu, a former Minister of Works and Housing. In April 1999, he stood for the governorship election on the AD ticket and won.
With the birth of the Fourth Republic, Tinubu was elected governor of Lagos State on the platform of the Action Congress. He remained governor between May 29, 1999 and May 29, 2007 and grew so much in influence to become the most influential member of the party and a prominent aristocrat as the Asiwaju of Lagos, a title given to him by HRM the Oba of Lagos.
Tinubu won re-election in April 2003. All other states in the South-West fell to the Peoples’ Democratic Party’s contrived political tsunami. Through his tenacity and uncommon focus in guiding the reversal of electoral impunity across a wide swath of the nation’s political landscape at the period, he reaffirmed the enduring fact that, indeed, justice is the first condition of democracy.
He revamped the progressives’ vanguard and compelled the then-ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party to revise its gratuitous assumptions – especially in the Awoist enclave – and to ponder its future. It’s then not surprising that Tinubu has conquered all challenges and won the endorsement of Nigerians to become President; a pan Nigerian President.
Abiodun-Adenuga is a visiting professor at the National Open University, Abuja.