Bad losers of elections are not those who complain over a real or even imagined malpractice and, in practical demonstration of their opposition to the result, take all necessary legal steps to get redress. The adoption of such an approach is not, in anyway, less legitimate than the participation in the political, electoral and the governance processes, which is, in fact, a basic civic right that enlightened and patriotic citizens strive hard to enjoy.
This is the reason for the existence of abundant provisions in the Electoral Act and, by extension, the country’s Constitution on the possible pursuance of complaints over elections by aggrieved political parties and/or candidates. This means that every party or candidate reserves the right to approach the election tribunals that are usually set up to entertain cases relating to observed infractions committed during elections.
All such provisions and the several other instruments that are readily made available to aggrieved contestants are meant to ensure that complaints are treated in such a manner that will re-enforce the confidence of all participants and the entire citizens in the system. Such litigations are a whole process that allows the timely resolution of a lot of the contentions that follow the conduct of elections, thereby strengthening democracy.
Good competitors, even if they end up as losers, take advantage of all the existing mechanisms to seek justice where and when they feel or are really cheated. They, in full observance of the rules of the game, apply due diligence in the course of the struggle until their claims are finally either established or dismissed.
However, even long before they were conducted, the 2023 General Elections were seen as an exercise over which there would be hot quarrels, considering the desperation of a lot of the contestants to capture power. The patterns of the campaigns and the voting fully indicated the complete possibility of the outbreak of disagreements that could lead to monumental crises similar to the ones that the country, at some points, experienced in the past.
The reactions of, for example, the Presidential Candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP), Atiku Abubakar and Mr Peter Obi respectively, to the announcement of the results of the election by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), have been such that are traceable to a resolve to cause a serious obstruction to the on-going process of transition of power from the current government to the next one. It is the restlessness which, more than anything else, have continued to characterize their approach to the declaration of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress ((APC) as the winner of the election that re-enforces the suspicion that they are on a mission to destabilize Nigeria.
The attitudes of, particularly, LP’s Obi and some elements in his own South-Eastern part of the country are justifiably being analyzed in the context of the destabilization and dismemberment agenda of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPoB) and such other groups that are out to undermine Nigeria’s sovereignty. Their provocative pronouncements and actions have absolutely given them away as bad losers who have turned themselves into, in one way or another, facilitators of the secessionist activities of the group(s).
Since the announcement of the election results, the threats to the country’s democracy and corporate existence have rapidly and tremendously increased, especially with the call by some supporters of the losers for the formation of the Interim National Government (ING), instead of the inauguration of the newly-elected president. Those people have crossed the boundaries of legitimate agitation for the review of the results by either INEC or the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) and indulged in acts that are clearly the features of a rebellion against a country.
When, after the declaration of the winner, those biggest losers disagreed with INEC, expressed intention to challenge it and practically took steps in this direction by approaching the tribunal, it was generally concluded that they started very well. A lot of Nigerians had, at that particular point, not only appreciated those initial actions of the losers but also demanded for a fair treatment of their complaints by the tribunal.
The resort to the clamour for a complete disregard of the election results and the immediate establishment of an ING as a sole precondition for the prevalence of peace in Nigeria is, therefore, an approach that has already been dismissed by all the patriotic citizens. It looks more like an attempt to shake the basic foundations upon which the country has been built than a struggle for the “retrieval” of a so-called “stolen mandate.”
It is quite untrue that the agitators are making those demands on behalf of all other Nigerians who are strongly desirous of genuine democracy that predicates on the conduct of credible elections. It is foolhardy for them to believe that the voters who eagerly exercised their franchise and are openly happy that the elections were successfully conducted will now throw their weight behind groups that seek to render all such efforts useless.
The bad losers are, of course, in a lot of places persistently crying aloud and profusely shedding tears just to attract the attention and resultant sympathy of some other citizens and the international community. They have even somehow vowed to make the inauguration of the new government impossible or, if it finally happens, make the country ungovernable, which are all a strategy for the realization of their aim.
But the resolve of the government and the various segments of the citizenry to keep the country intact and maintain the peace is much stronger than theirs. While the government appears quite ready to safeguard the democratic process, the citizens have shown more than enough resentment towards the attitudes of the ING advocates, with a lot of them even threatening to counter the activities of the agents of violence and division.
The government and the people will definitely never allow the country to suffer a setback or even ruination just because some power-seekers are aggrieved over elections. In the last 24 years that democracy has been in existence in Nigeria, the capacity of the citizens for a resistance against internal and external pressures that are meant to completely cripple the system has appreciably risen.
This is a fundamental reality that the bad losers and their allies have not yet acknowledged and is also the reason for their belief that they can use agitations to sway people’s opinion. Their failure to come to terms with the fact that the more they try to subvert the system, the more it is defended by the government and all the other stakeholders is, perhaps, what is making them to think that they can have their way.
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