How Insecurity Could Decide Who Becomes Nigeria's Next President THISDAYLIVE: Nigeria
Nigeria first voted in presidential elections just over 43 years ago in October 1979. The introduction to this form of government was not very auspicious. Four years into the experience, in December 1983, Muhammadu Buhari, then a Major-General in the Nigerian Army, overthrew the system. Soldiers thereafter ran the barn for another 14 and a half years.
Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the Senior Advocate of Nigeria who came second in the ballot on the ticket of the Unity Party of Nigerian , challenged the declared outcome before the election petition tribunal. If he succeeded, the country would have conducted a second round to decide the winner. Since 1979, therefore, the legal standard required for the announcement of results in any election in Nigeria is"substantial compliance". This can be subjective to the point of whimsical. What it means in fact has steadily been whittled away into meaninglessness over four decades of multi-agency, electoral chicanery.
While assuring the country and the world of the desire of the Independent National Electoral Commission under his leadership to organize the 2023 elections to schedule, Commission chairperson, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, has increasingly become voluble about the possibility that a multiplicity of insurgent groups in different parts of the country could interfere with or preclude the exercise of the franchise to a significant scale.
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