Thousands continue to gather outside the Nigerian National Assembly, yesterday, in protest of a glaring subversion of the electoral mandate of millions of Nigerians by the nation’s lawmakers.
This is in reaction to the decision of the Senate and the House of Representatives, on Tuesday, to repeal real-time electronic transmission of electoral results thus preserving loopholes for potential manipulation of results through manual (form EC8A) entry.
In an age of cloud technology and satellite connectivity, the Nigerian lawmaker’s choice of analog electoral process remains a worrying subject for both global and local debate given the antecedence of previous electoral cycles punctuated by seismic corruption, violence, result forgery and manipulation toward party interest advancement .
Nigerian lawmakers must note that jettisoning the planned real-time result upload on the basis of epileptic power supply or poor rural network connectivity is flatly unacceptable. Such action clearly represents an indictment on the bewildering corruption, waste, fraud and abuse that has become a hallmark of the Tinubu-led APC government. As eyewitness antecedence has shown, pen and paper poll entry in an age of AI, clearly constitutes a retrogressive hijack and weaponisation of democracy to sustain the cancer of anti-democracy, nepotism and cronyism.
A free and fair election is the only lifeline of over 250 million Nigerians—-660% of whom suffer from multi-dimensional poverty.
With barely a year to the nation’s most consequential election yet, Nigerians all over the world must act with urgency to apply all diplomatic and civil pressure and compel its lawmakers to respect the decisions of their constituents and seal up every loophole for electoral manipulation..
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