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For the nation’s 50th year anniversary celebrations the president’s wife, Patience Jonathan, decided to share bags of rice to “alleviate the poverty” of local women – and did this in the crudest, most elementary way possible – by calling people together and throwing them bags of rice like beggars.

By the time she was through, there were plenty of casualties, some fatal, as citizens struggled not just for rice but also against the complete absence of crowd control measures or indeed any kind of preparation to handle the melee that was sure to ensue from that method of distribution.

The bottom line: someone wanted to make a public show of doing good, but the action was neither thought through nor planned well; a metaphor for many of this administration’s handling of crucial issues.

Last week however, it all became a bit too much..

At a campaign rally for the People’s Democratic Party at Port Harcourt sports stadium, where the president was heralded and governors received their party flags, it all ended in avoidable tragedy. Sixteen people died and many others were wounded from the stampede that ensued after a police officer fired into the air to disperse the crowd..

Unfortunately, this is no simple tragedy. According to reports, the problem began when crowds wanted to leave as the president was about to begin his speech. While there is no doubt that this probably had more to do with people’s impatience with speeches rather than any animosity towards the candidacy of Mr. Jonathan, his presidential security seems to have convinced itself that this would be embarrassing to the president. The guards therefore refused to allow the guests leave – especially because it appears the same thing had happened at a similar rally in Kaduna just the day before.

But a crowd that wants to leave is a crowd that wants to leave – and when the armed guards were unable to control the pushing any longer, one of them began to shoot. Evidently, in a democracy, a people cannot even choose whom to listen to and when, and it has somehow become a duty to sit still during a campaign rally. The result was chaos, death, and many wounded at an event where people came to answer the invitation of a man who wants their votes.

The information commissioner for Rivers State, Ibim Semenitari, confirmed the sequence of events. “As soon as governors finished receiving their flags, and the president was about to make his speech,” she revealed, “some of the people, who had come to celebrate with the president and their governors began to leave. Initially, the gates were opened, that is at the Liberation stadium. But people were leaving in an uncoordinated manner, and security personnel were trying to manage the crowd and in the process of managing the crowd, they shut the bigger gate. Then a woman fell down and the crowd started stepping on her, some other people fell subsequently, and more people were stepping on them; that was how the confusion started.

“Now, when that happened, the mobile police men, who were standing outside, shot into the air to scare others. They (MOPOL) released a shot into the air to stop further surge and rescue those on the ground. Unfortunately, that worsened the confusion and more people started pushing, rushing back, rushing forward, leading to more casualties.”

We are left to wonder, are the president and his staff - aware that he is in fact responsible for the security of the people he leads first and foremost?

Everything about this unfortunate series of events shows Nigerians that there is plenty to be worried about: the fact that the security measures were not only insufficient, but the course of action taken by those charged with ensuring crowd control precipitated the tragedy: the fact that the presidential guards took over the security functions that are usually the preserve of the local police: the fact that the government has not taken any steps to heighten security and crowd control measures in this election season that guarantees there will be many more such gatherings of large crowds.

How is the president going to safeguard lives in Jos if he cannot even safeguard lives at his own campaign rally?

As if to add insult to injury, speaking to newsmen after the incident, an obviously clueless Governor Godswill Obot Akpabio, of Akwa Ibom State, urged Nigerians to vote overwhelmingly for Mr. Jonathan as a mark of honour in memory of those who died in the incident. It would be comic if it weren’t so tragic.

After unnecessary denials and a concerted effort to minimise the true import of this story – the president’s team decided to put off his campaigns for a while in a mark of respect for the dead.

However, it is barely one week after, and the president is back on the campaign trail – this time to Jos, the same city he never visited while hundreds, even thousands, were being killed on his watch.

Indeed, there is much to mourn.

He was only a candidate for vice president then but in 2007, Goodluck Jonathan is alleged to have taken matters into his own hands — literally. According to US diplomatic cables leaked to the whistleblower site Wikileaks, and which were made exclusively available to us, Mr. Jonathan helped himself gain the vice presidency four years ago by voting illegally four times. The astonishing accusation against Mr. Jonathan, now a president seeking validation at the polls next month, came from Edo governor Adams Oshiomhole, in a December 2008 briefing with US diplomats.

According to Mr. Oshiomhole, as reported in the US diplomatic cables, the court ruling voiding the supposed election of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate for Edo governor and declaring Mr. Oshiomhole the legitimate winner would not have been possible without documentary evidence that, Mr. Jonathan, among others, personally rigged the election.

Photo: Oshiomole presenting Benin Art Work to the president

“Oshiomhole told poloffs (‘political officers’ at the US embassy) that it proved impossible to use forensic evidence because of the poor quality of thumbprints and that claims of intimidation also proved difficult to prove in a court of law, but documentary evidence, such as proof that the ‘vice president’ had voted four times, for example, proved decisive in the courts,” the cables revealed.

Little birds

These particular cables from US diplomats stationed in Nigeria and reporting to the State Department in Washington are among a massive trove of documents made available to NEXT in a worldwide exclusive. The documents cover a whole range of people and events in our country from as early as 2003 to the last months of the poorly President Umaru Yar’Adua, whose death in office a year ago ended a constitutional crisis and resulted in the ascent of Mr. Jonathan to the highest office in the land. The cables provide an unusually unvarnished insight into the dysfunctional and ineffectual nature of our government at all levels, the various forces pushing and pulling at the country, and the vileness and rapacity of those we have allowed to govern us. Two unnamed political officers, or “poloffs,” in US diplomatic jargon, visited the governor on Dec. 17, 2008 shortly after his legal victory. It was during that meeting that Mr. Oshiomhole made his explosive claim, as dutifully recorded by his visitors. Their cable originated from the Lagos consulate. In the cable, dated Dec. 29, 2008, Mr. Jonathan, who was vice president at the time, is said to have violated the Electoral Act by voting more than once. The law stipulates a maximum fine of N1 million or 12 months’ imprisonment for violators. At a campaign rally on Thursday, President Jonathan repeated his recent declaration that neither he nor his party had any desire to rig the coming elections. He added that he would advocate transparent elections even at the cost of losing the election.

“I am assuring Nigerians that though I am contesting, nobody must manipulate votes in my favour. Our vote is very important,” he said.

Not so secret

The vote-rigging allegations against the president are known to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), according to a highly-placed source at the Commission. The source, who did not want to be named for fear of a reprisal, revealed that a petition had been filed at INEC since 2007 in which references were made to the fact that the former vice president and other public figures voted several times. The source said that the petition did not single out President Jonathan but used him as a high profile example of the rife multiple registrations that took place in Bayelsa, Mr. Jonathan’s home state, where he had served as governor, and other states in the broader Delta region.

“There was a petition which I was aware of dated November 2007 or so,” the source told NEXT. “It was filed by a pressure group in the South-South who named several people as being complicit in multiple voting. Jonathan was one of the people mentioned.

“We get hundreds of such petitions and most of them are without merit. Also, the truth is we just don’t have the time to look into all of them.”

Local and international observers condemned the 2007 election for being heavily rigged in favour of the PDP, with some classifying it as our worst ever. Even President Yar’Adua, in his inaugural address, acknowledged as much, promising to clean things up by 2011. Several cases are still pending in court over the four-year-old election, with successful upturns recorded in Ondo, Ekiti, Edo and Osun states. Mr. Oshiomhole, who is himself a beneficiary of a successful legal challenge in Edo state, is described in the diplomatic cable as a “refreshing reminder that Nigeria possesses competent and honest leaders”.

During the visit by the US officials, the Edo State governor said that approximately 2,000 volunteers in 120 different polling stations had gone through ballots, result sheets and voter registration records to identify documentary evidence of fraud.

Double registration

A day before President Jonathan announced that “nobody must manipulate votes in my favour”, Attahiru Jega, the electoral commission chairman, revealed that several high profile individuals registered more than once in the recently completed voter registration exercise. Mr. Jega refused to divulge the names of the “high profile double registrants” but said that they could all face prosecution.

Several parties have responded angrily to Mr. Jega’s stark admission that influential Nigerians were planning to rig the forthcoming elections. Ibrahim Modibbo, a spokesperson for the Nuhu Ribadu presidential campaign, said that although the INEC chairman did not mention any names, almost all of the offenders were in the PDP.

“I don’t believe you will find ACN members in this act because we are disciplined people,” he said.

The party’s secretary, Lai Mohammed, denounced Mr. Jega’s decision to withhold the name of the culprits and demanded he publish them.

“If he has the names as he claims, what is he waiting for? He should publish their names and prosecute them,” he said.

The spokesperson for the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP), Emma Eneukwu, said the offenders should be taken to court,

“It is a criminal offence,” he said. “If the penalty attached to these offences are handed to the offenders, it will serve as deterrent. There is no sacred cow.

“The issue of multiple registration has been a problem in the country and until somebody is punished we cannot have transparent polls.”

The Conference of Nigeria Political Parties(CNPP) spokesman, Osita Okechukwu, challenged the electoral commission boss to publish the names.

“We challenge Jega to publish forthwith the names of those involved and prosecute them in accordance with the provisions of the Electoral Act,” he said. “He should immediately ask all the RECs (Resident Electoral Commissioners) to audit the Authentic Finger Identification System (AFIS) so that they can separate the junk and the underaged.”

see attachment or click and judge for yourself 

i think it is a literary slant as he does not explain further 

Adams-Oshiomole-seeks-radical-change.pdf

culled from:

http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/News/5681378-146/story.csp