As criticisms continued to trail the presidential and National Assembly elections, the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) has knocked the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for settling for a “declared” rather than a “proved” winner.
The body was formed in the United States of America (USA) in 1994 by Nigerian exiles and became a rallying platform for other civil society organisations to fight the military regime of Gen Sani Abacha.
In a statement issued from Washington D.C, yesterday, and co-signed by its Executive Director, Lloyd Ukwu and General Counsel, W. Bruce DelValle, the group called on the international community to support the impanelling of a team of internationally acclaimed technical experts to examine and analyse INEC servers and BVAS, among others, to extract the original votes cast for each of the candidates by the electorate and to determine the true winner. It said the February 25 presidential election were fraught with irregularities that contravened the Electoral Act and that the same species of dictatorship it fought in 1994 manifested in the 2023 election in a more dangerous civilian dictatorship. It also urged the government of the US and other countries worldwide to place an immediate visa ban on INEC chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu.
NADECO alleged that the election results pronounced by the INEC were 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 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 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.”
NADECO also announced that it has severed its relationship with the president-Elect, Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for allegedly participating in a fraudulent election.
“NADECO and Tinubu fought Gen Sani Abacha as the military dictator who scuttled the will of the Nigerian people in 1993 June 12 elections. Ironically, exactly 30 years later, in 2023, NADECO is fighting the same species of dictatorship but only this time a much more dangerous civilian dictatorship – a kleptocracy- mostly perpetuated by one of those who fought Abacha then. NADECO will not look the other way simply because the fraud was perpetrated by one of its founding members. NADECO hereby, as a first step, formally severs its relationship with Bola Ahmed Tinubu as a former founding member of NADECO (USA) for his participation in the worst electoral fraud in Nigeria’s recent history.
“NADECO maintains that the 2023 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 presidential election. INEC’s 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.”
It also urged Nigerians and the judiciary to join hands in a concerted effort toward global condemnation and absolute rejection of what it called “the hasty, hollow, and illegitimate result declared by INEC.”