Both Atikulants and Obidients have been shouting loudly to whoever cares to listen, that the February 25th 2023 Presidential elections were rigged. They said the election was not transparent. It was not transmitted. And so on and so forth.
These wailers never considered the fact that all the anomalies they mentioned about the election had affected all the parties on equal measure, including their arch rival, the APC.
If the election was rigged as they claim, at what point? Do they mean Bola Tinubu had rigged the election against himself in Lagos and Osun states? Or that Buhari, El-Rufai and Lalong had rigged the election against their party in Katsina, Kaduna and Plateau respectively? Or that Ayade had rigged the polls against himself and his party in cross River state? etc, etc. I can’t understand.
Why is APC not alleging rigging against LP and PDP in those states where APC lost to the two parties? Particularly why is APC not alleging rigging against LP in all the states of Eastern Nigeria, where APC lost to LP even without conceding the required 25% to APC in virtually all those states? Why is it that it is only the Atikulants and Obidients that think they are entitled to complain? Tell me.
Now, one crucial post election development that I want all of us to now consider, is the prompt alliance and joint effort of PDP and LP in antagonism against Bola Tinubu’s APC. This unholy alliance is grossly at variance with what Obi and his motley crowd of Obidient followers had made us to believe from the start of their laughable movement. They said Obi and his people were the new broom that was determined to sweep away all the ills and woes of Nigeria. And as we all know, chief among the creators of these ills is PDP and it’s plundering hawks. Now the so called new broom has suddenly melted into one fold with the old mess, in a concerted fight against the incumbent status quo. How do we reconcile this exhibition of patent oxymoron and inexplicable double standard of Obi and the Obidients?
What one can make of the foregoing development is to agree totally with Dele Alake. Beyond all shreds of doubt, Obi’s LP and Atiku’s PDP are nothing but mere two sides of thesame coin. They were only separated momentarily by the personal ambitions of the leaders of the two parties.
But they made a grave mistake. Since the two of them are one and thesame in principle, they should have done what APC did in 2015 to unseat PDP from power. They should have joined their efforts together and also lobbied other smaller parties to join them to fight APC in concert. In history, a formidable force is only conquered by a coalition of other forces. But after the common enemy has been vanquished, then the concerted coalition can then be dismantled. That is why we say in history that “coalition disintegrates as soon as the common enemy is removed”. We all can see the validity of this historical truism in the cracks that characterise the APC regime in the past eight years. The cracks had resulted largely from the unity of strange bed fellows that formed the pre 2015 election coalition which successfully wrestled power from PDP.
I’ve never heard of a coalition of forces after the war has been fought, won and lost. Such a coalition is an effort in futility because the winner will soon consolidate his hold on power and then use it’s vantage position to crush such a post war coalition. This is a lesson of history which both PDP and LP have failed to learn. They should know better than their current poor show. Pity !
My name remains Dauda Adesina Joki-Lasisi
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