Obasanjo has just hijacked the function of the President and Commander-In-Chief by pronouncing on credibility and validity of the conduct of an election process that is about being concluded.
He has insinuated that INEC officials have been corrupted and sought to blackmail the INEC Chair, charging him to cancel the election and fix a new one for Saturday, 4th March, if he was sure that he had not been bribed along with other INEC officials to compromise the election.
Here is a man who did not even win his polling booth on Saturday, despite being the partisan endorser of a candidate at the election.
He as much as called on Buhari to interfere in the process to direct INEC to cancel the election, thereby procuring the President to breach INEC’s independence.
What gives Obasanjo the right to address press conferences to intervene in the electoral process in this manner just as to discredit the entire election.
He even invited NBA President to weigh in and guide INEC on what it should do. If he believes so much in NBA, does he know that NBA cannot take over the constitutional duty of the judiciary to arbitrate election disputes?
Now none must ask if he did conduct or superintend an election any cleaner than the present one as a sitting president from 1999 – 2007.
On the contrary, he left office by overseeing an election that produced his successor as do or die affairs.
The successor, who benefited from the fraudulent victory, was so embarrassed by the process, his conscience forced him to admit that his election was severely flawed.
So what has Obasanjo to teach Nigerians about free and fair election? It is disgusting listening to his sanctimonious press conference.
It is unbecoming of a former Head of State and ex-president counsel resort to arbitrary and jaundiced extrajudicial means of resolving speculative grievance with an election whose results have yet to be declared.
It is obvious that some people still nurse nostalgia for a repeat of June 12, 1993 election annulment. So that their prophesy of 30-year cycle of calamity befalling a section of Nigeria can be repeated yet again.
God forbid!!!
Long live Nigeria’s constitutional democracy. Long live Federal Republic of Nigeria, inspite of those bent on holding it down for egotistical validation.
•Mr. Abiodun J. Owonikoko, SAN, is a Lagos-based legal practitioner.
