Between “trader-moni” and Electoral Act

IF it is too close to this year’s General Election for the Electoral Act to be amended, as claimed by President Buhari, is it not also too close to election for “Trader-moni” to be shared by the same President Buhari to would-be voters in the coming election, more so since the money-sharing is seen as another scantily-conceived vote-buying ploy?

BEDC reconnects 42 communities in Edo, Delta, Ondo, Ekiti

APC appears so ingenious in an infamous way that it comes up with all manner of schemes to compromise elections. From Edo, where counting of votes was suspended overnight for the “needful” to be done, through Ondo, Ekiti and then Osun states, different methods have been originated to manipulate elections and new nomenclatures have entered into our political lexicon. “D’ibo ko s’ebe”(Ondo); “See and buy” (Ekiti); “inconclusive” (Osun) and now “trader-moni” – all these are election-rigging methods. In Zamfara, where APC shot itself in the leg and will have no candidates in the elections, the option of declaration of state of emergency is being considered to give the ruling party a back-door second chance of presenting candidates for elections, which will come up after the General Election of February/March.

Nationally, INEC last week eventually showed its hand with the two important committees it composed, both headed by Northerners, with Buhari’s niece in charge of collation and announcement of results. Haba! Such impunity! Such desperation! No more shame and caution is thrown to the winds! Once this is allowed to stand, then, there is no use for anyone taking the trouble to go and queue to vote in February/March. The results are already known. Trader-moni is especially reprehensible and any right-thinking and conscionable person should have wasted no time throwing it out of the window. It is a brazen re-looting of recovered Abacha loot.

The same Buhari that worked for Abacha and who defended “the evil one” as a saint is now thanking the foreign countries that returned part of Abacha’s loot. So, it meant Buhari was wrong when he said Abacha was not a thief; Abacha was not the saint that Buhari swore he was. Or, put differently, Abacha was as saintly as Buhari! Birds of a feather, I dare to say! Buhari owes Nigerians an apology over his defence of Abacha. If silver rusts, we can say “after all, it is silver” but when gold rusts, what can we say? Let Abacha be Abacha and Buhari, Buhari; but how about VP Yemi Osinbajo – born-again Pentecostal pastor, tongue-blasting, pulpit-clutching, Law professor and SAN to boot? If this supposed gold were to rust, as many now perceive it has, what will silver do? His “trader-moni” scheme is another “Ponzzi” scheme of deceit and evil. It is opaque and open to abuse. It is akin to another security vote or NSA’s arms money diverted for political patronage. How much is given out, we may never know. They cannot tell us to trust them; strict rules of openness, transparency, and accountability, which have wilfully been thrown to the dogs, took humanity till eternity to invent. It is not for fun, Osinbajo, but humanity’s collective wisdom over the ages shows that no one must be left to his devices or good-naturedness, so to say, but everyone must be tied down by rules and regulations for their own good as well as for the good of society.

So we should demand that Osinbajo publishes the list of those who have received the “trader-moni” with incontrovertible evidence. Facts and figure must speak; otherwise, River Jordan will not wash Osinbajo clean of his “trader-moni” leprosy; neither will the best Arabian perfumes suppress the putrid and offensive odour that will trail him long after he might have left public office. We need also to know the amount gulped by the logistics of moving from place to place sharing this trader-moni. A source said N25m is spent on logistics to share N10m. How much economic sense does that make? If not to campaign and bribe voters to secure votes, does the VP need to meet beneficiaries face-to-face to share a paltry N10,000?