Curtains have been drawn on the 2019 general elections, with the governorship and State Assembly polls held last weekend. The presidential and National Assembly elections had earlier taken place on February 23.
The contests will now continue in the law courts where aggrieved parties will rely on the judiciary to determine the true victors.
Meanwhile, the irregularities and bloodshed that characterised the elections are too widespread and alarming to escape attention.
Although no electoral process is safe from human error or misuse, the 2019 elections, rather than be an improvement over the previous years, will go down as one of the bloodiest and most challenging polls ever in the history of the nation.
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The killing of Temitope Olatoye, a serving member of the House of Representatives, who was also a senatorial candidate in Oyo, was in the upper class of the terror unleashed by political thugs during the governorship elections.
Several policemen fell to the guns of hoodlums in some states. A deputy commissioner of police was molested by thugs in Bayelsa State and just lucky to have escaped from the riverine community alive.
An Army lieutenant and several soldiers were not as lucky. They lost their lives in combat with thugs in Rivers. Soldiers also shot dead many citizens in different encounters.
One innocent victim was a female ad hoc worker of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) shot dead by soldiers while conveying election results to the collation centre in a riverine community in Rivers.
Many other citizens also lost their lives or got injured in different circumstances, making the elections a contest of terror rather than of choices to deepen our democracy and progress as a nation.
There were many instances where armed policemen and soldiers went beyond their briefs, killing and maiming innocent citizens, or aiding political thugs in committing electoral frauds.
Arsonists also went to work, burning down INEC offices and facilities in some states.
Political thugs, bred and buttered by politicians across party divides, compounded the challenges that the polls posed to the electoral umpire.
While announcing the shift, by one week, of the elections earlier scheduled for February 16 and March 2, the INEC Chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, had lamented the challenges of mobilising men and materials; delays in delivering ballot papers and results sheets, occasioned mainly by too many court cases that arose from party primaries as well as flight delays induced by bad weather. Vote-buying also contributed to the mix to complete the flaws of the 2019 polls.
The elections exposed politicians, as constituting a danger to our democracy.
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With the elections now over, there is the tendency to put the irregularities behind us and move on to other burning issues.
But this newspaper strongly feels that the challenges that characterised this year’s elections are far too serious not to be investigated and addressed.
It is quite unfortunate that those flaws associated with the polls happened on the watch of President Muhammadu Buhari, who had been a victim of election rigging in his previous attempts at presidential contests before eventually becoming successful.
Having won his second term election, President Buhari is in the best position to reform our electoral processes to avert bloodshed and fraudulent practices in future.
The president must deliver the nation from politicians, who would stop at nothing to realise their inordinate ambitions.