As The Church Slept… (7) Tue, 09/08/2011 -  | SHARON FALIYA CHAM This call was proved fruitful in Kano and Bauchi States in the heavily and violently rigged 2007 general elections. This is the reason the P.D.P. was jittery in the build up to the 2011 elections concerning this call and attempted to do all they could to stop the protection of votes, because they cannot win any free and fair elections even if they stoke religious sentiments like they always do, and therefore the P.D.P. and their supporters criticizing Buhari’s call for votes protection would rather we escort PDP thugs with cheers, claps, flowers, love songs and poems when they come snatching ballot boxes or when they are rewriting election results usually with active connivance of security forces who probably see themselves as the armed security wing of the PDP and making it worse is an unpredictable judiciary that could “arrest” certain judgments that seem not to favour the party. They had an elaborate scheme to secure 25 per cent of the presidential election votes in states they considered to be General Buhari’s strongholds. In their flawed analysis or thinking they thought outright rigging was going to bring violence because of the evident determination of the people not to have a repeat of the 2007 farce called elections, more so they know very well that the teeming masses respect and listen to General Buhari more than them, hence the resort to padding the votes to generate the much sought 25 per cent. But they failed to consider one thing, that is, if General Buhari was so unpopular in any of the south-south or south-east states such that he could win only about 5, 000 votes in one state how popular was Goodluck Jonathan in Buhari’s strongholds for him to win hundreds of thousands of votes in, say Kano for example or Sokoto, more so considering the seething anger and frustration over Goodluck Jonathan’s usurpation of the rightful turn of the north to contest the election in his party. In this context, was it logical that the mass of northern voters would love Goodluck Jonathan more than his southern voters or supporters would love General Buhari? Or is it a case of the new definition of national unity now gaining ground, that at a political party convention southern delegates are entitled to give their bloc vote to a southern presidential aspirant contesting against a northern aspirant with northern delegates expected to do same and those northern delegates or states that did not toe that pattern labeled as not believing in national unity? The same attitude was expected and exhibited in the general presidential election. All of a sudden it is conveniently being forgotten that the north overwhelmingly dumped their own, Alhaji Othman Bashir Tofa for Chief M.K.O. Abiola in the 1993 elections and massively repeated the same for General Obasanjo in 1999. Some commentators are now labeling the north that voted Buhari as anti unity or as sectionalists. Are historical voting records, which will showcase who the real sectionalists and tribalists are, missing even before rapture? Therefore without doubt, the responsibility of the post-election violence should be and must be placed on the shoulders of the P.D.P. They raised a very large army of unemployed, frustrated and angry youth through their corrupt practices and then capped it by dishonestly resolving their zoning brouhaha and then wanted 25 per cent from the region cheated why wouldn’t there be such backlash. So, you see clearly that General Buhari became a victim of the backfiring of the PDP’s long term mischief. The national youth corps members that were killed were also victims of this mischief. In the elections preceding the presidential vote there were media reports of youth corps members working as ad-hoc staff caught aiding and abetting vote rigging in favour of the PDP in most northern states, then came the presidential vote and its complications. Complications because southern and Church going national youth service corps members working as INEC ad-hoc staff got caught in the web of corrupt and thieving P.D.P. governors who were determined to secure 25 per cent of the votes for a desperate southern presidential candidate of the thieving party, and these ad-hoc staff probably heard in Church to “vote according to faith”, and so, what coincidence! They became victims of this notorious coincidence. I have heard people say why did the riots break out in places the General won, and why did the riots start even before the final result tally was made. It all boils down to this 25 per cent stuff. Reports were of course filtering in that General Buhari was winning mere 5, 000 votes in southern states, the vote tally expressing how much they love him as a Muslim Hausa/Fulani northerner and then here was Goodluck Jonathan whom they had every reason to be angry with polling hundreds of thousands in their own domain. It just doesn’t add up. Whatever factor they thought made Goodluck Jonathan very popular in the south and correspondingly made General Buhari unpopular there could also be the same factor that made General Buhari popular in the north and correspondingly made Goodluck Jonathan unpopular there, except of course, I know that, that factor cannot be anti-corruption or patriotism, for on these the General stood and still stands in good stead. In the case of Goodluck Jonathan, logically speaking, he stood and still stands more unpopular in the north for cheating them of their rightful turn at the presidency. I have read suggestions from hitherto reasonable analysts and columnists suggesting that General Buhari couldn’t have expected to win the elections because he had no structures in the south. For example, Eddy Odivwri who writes for This Day newspaper, in his column (polscope) on page 56 of their edition of Saturday, April 30, 2011 titled, Buhari: If the Truth Be Told said, “Buhari is popular in the north, not in the south. Yet, he made no effort to specially court the south. He took the south for granted…” Somewhere in the same article he contradicted this claim by saying, “The widespread acceptance of Buhari’s nascent Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) should have even gladdened him, rather than give him a false status of a political conquistador. Here was a political party that is less than 20 months old. And within such a short time had had such flaming spread across the country, with a good following. ” Did you notice the sudden transition? From “not popular in the south” to “flaming spread across the country, with a good following” and “widespread acceptance.” This gave me more evidence that sentiments rather than capability was whipped up by the PDP in collaboration with some Christian clergy to defeat the General. On the Hausa service of the Voice of America broadcast at 6am on Wednesday, May 11, 2011, Hon. Usman Bugaje, the erstwhile National Secretary of the A.C.N. was asked why his party seemed to have delivered for the PDP in their strong hold, the south-west. He answered that President Goodluck Jonathan came and held several meetings with several groups in Lagos, and he consistently impressed on them that he was the only Christian and ethnic minority in the contest among the major contenders. This can be true; for the president had no selling point other than sentiments, including the false claim to niceness, meekness and humility as if these were not the uniform the devil wore to be able to deceive Eve in the Garden of Eden. Such a president! This is the “structures” his supporters and handlers are trumpeting he has nationwide and of which General Buhari doesn’t have. Eddy Odivwri again: “What is more, the rave of revolution supposedly sparked by Buhari derives strongly from his military portraiture as a no-nonsense man. He is generally believed to be a firm, honest, and disciplined man. Yes! But anyone who will lead such a complex country like Nigeria, will require far more than these threesome virtues. Under a democracy, most of the tough image associated with Buhari would have been weakened or diluted.” Can you imagine that? Mr. Eddy Odivwri conceded that the General is generally considered to be a man of integrity, but that the sum of the virtues that make integrity are not enough, that he should have weakened or diluted his character because of democracy, meaning he should have been a little bit of a thief, a little bit of a liar, a little bit of a womanizer, a little bit of a drunk, a little bit of a disco freak, a little bit of D’Banj interviews, a little bit of a homosexual, a little bit of a ritualist, a little bit an occult and a little bit corrupt to gain acceptance. Was this what the clergy wanted? Was this the requirement to win in the south? Was this the much vaunted structures Buhari was and is being lampooned of not having nationwide?