Osun Poll: INEC Should Do A Rethink

ISAAC OLUSESI writes that INEC must re-examine its operational method in order to deepen its effectiveness.

Short of any euphemism, in the background to governorship elections in the recent years in State of Osun, Nigeria, are the fundamentals of unfairness in which the passion of election administrators, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has always been monumentally exploitative of the voting behaviour of Osun electorate.

Except for the INEC outcome of the 2014 gubernatorial poll in the state, the rule of law, justice, and fairness as electoral imperatives for governorship election were only honored by INEC in the overwhelming breach than in any strict observance, characterized by brazen disregard for the true preferences of Osun voting populace. In particular, the electoral formalities and modalities indispensable for continued nurturing of our democracy were officially violated in a hurry by INEC in the 2003, 2007 governorship polls in the state, with seriously unimpressive implications for electoral space morality-trust-esteem, popular participation in the electoral process and public accountability of INEC.

In the electoral absurdities, explainable in terms of charade and grandiose manipulation of voters’ registers, vanished ballot papers and inordinate wide disparity between the number of votes recorded and final results announced, INEC was profoundly aided  and abetted by the carriages of the then governing Osun Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which values unfortunately were in conflict with the positive values of Osun electorate and are not sourced from the primary value system of Osun, thus, PDP resorted to violence that ignited explosive tear gas and sights of billowing smokes at polling centers across the state while the electorate ran zigzag from brute force and absolutism, from blood and death.

Make no mistakes about September 22 governorship poll. Given the entrenched violence confusion and high electoral criminality in the physiology of decadent PDP and its decay splitter-governorship flag bearers in Social Democratic Party (SDP), African Democratic Congress (ADC) et cetera have again mounted various illogical disguises under which people of squabble characters are given roles to play, exemplified by the probable corresponding violence to arm-twist the electorate and nullify the will of the people.

The PDP governorship candidate and splitter-governorship candidates in Osun cannot attain the state stardom emphatically in an error-proof, fraud-proof electoral process because their comportments make acute depression on the fundamental integrity, dignity and social discipline in the praxis for the ultimate office in the state. To them, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac and they seek power to want to dominate the rest of us. They are a nincompoop whose orders must be carried out with exactitude. Their obsession with power must be more than the sweet sirens. Rather, they are “seeking power to be able to get angry without the rest of us being able to answer back,” in the words of Albert Camus, the French writer and thinker in his book “The Fall”. Albert won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

That is unwholesomeness in incidence and magnitude, the rotten kind of unbridled ambition of these gubernatorial candidates of PDP and its splitter-SDP, ADC to be in power by such behaviours as electoral bribery, using rewards to pervert election result; electoral nepotism, allotting victory at the poll by reason of ascriptive relationships; and electoral misappropriation illegally allocating ballot papers for illicit electoral reasons. All of that practically made, for instance the 2007 un-availed and consequentially generated such reactions as disruption of normal life, reversion of societal gains, and misdirection of aggression and tyranny with gargantuan tragedy of social-economic-political dislocation of Osun in human and material terms that brought grief, sorrow, tears and death to so many homes.

The 2007 governorship flawed result and its attendant burning, breaking, beating and battering anybody, anything in sight as voters’ spontaneous revolt to seek redress for a wrong committed by INEC, way of avenging the wrong should input a re-think in INEC to appreciate that any such electoral violence resulting from INEC sidedness this September 2018 may take an omnipresent entity in the cherry, rambunctious but combustible Ilesa, Ile-Ife, Osogbo and Iwo epicenters of Osun.

Characteristically in terms, PDP, and its splitter-governorship candidates in SDP and ADC, would want always to take laws into their hands, drawing flaming machetes from the scabbards, engaging the services of hired arsonists and trying several other methods of acquiring instant justice based on their own sense of outrage, completely out of tune with civilized verdict.

The fear among the articulate members of Osun populace is that the policies of PDP or that of its splitters in the garb of SDP, ADC would only benefit the bourgeois, the aristocrats, the powerful monarchical lords, the privileged wealthy few and the parties’ egg-heads, was confirmed by the PDP leeway with reckless abandon in the state while Olagunsoye  Oyinlola, erstwhile of PDP, lasted as executive governor of Osun from 2003-2010.

Please, cast your mind back.

• OLUSESI is a political analyst wrote in from Osogbo.