Coalition of 24 Civil Society Organizations United for Good Governance and Electoral Integrity in Nigeria (The C24 for short) today (Monday) November 5th, 2018 meet in Abuja to discuss the present atmosphere of Nigeria politics and politicians desperate moves.
Based on this the undersigned CSOs call a Press Conference to alert the nation to clandestine activities by some desperate politicians, compromised judicial authorities, unscrupulous personnel of the electoral umpire and hostile foreign actors to destabilise the peace of Nigeria before, during and after the 2019 Presidential Elections.
Read the speech below:
The Political Class: This administration is prosecuting many highly influential members of the political class for looting the public treasury when they held public office.
Others have been forced to pay back huge sums of money in revenues stolen from the Federal Government of Nigeria through shady companies and business practices.
These rattled members of the political class consider themselves in a race against time to ward off the evil day when they must account for their misdeeds against the people, and they are prepared to wreck anything, even the country itself, to prevent the inevitable reckoning.
They have responded with curious political realignments to strengthen the aforesaid vicious conspiracy whose fulcrum consists of the recruitment through blackmail or bribery or both, of compromised judicial officers, unscrupulous staff of INEC and a high stakes game of thrones into the 2019 Elections.
The Judiciary: We may recall that the present administration undertook a cleansing exercise of the Judiciary sometime ago, raiding residences and making arrests, including some of the highest ranking judicial officers in the nation.
Some of these judicial ofricers have since been arraigned in various courts; some discharged by the courts, those found guilty penalised accordingly while others are still facing trials.
Sadly, some of the biggest fishes were let off the hook then in what we discovered to be a shout-out to the self-same insular sentiments which have so grotesquely distorted the administration of justice in our nation and stunted her growth and development.
Some of them were later promoted within the Judiciary despite the existence of dossiers full of evidence uncovered by not one, but several investigating agencies, disclosing how they horribly broke their Judicial Oaths and abused the sacredness of the judicial office over the course of their careers.
These Judicial Officers have now become the hub of a grand conspiracy to undermine the electoral Sovereignty of Nigeria via incendiary rulings, injunctions and judgments throughout the 2019 electoral cycle in a manner that is certain to cause provoke civil uprising among the populace.
Unscrupulous Electoral Officers: There is no gainsaying the fact that the only value in the electoral process is its credibility.
We have learnt of a growing cadre of unscrupulous electoral officers who have bowed to all sorts of filthy inducements and stand ready to throw a spanner in the cogs of credible and fair polls in 2019.
This army of mischief-makers are being recruited gradually but surely at all levels within the electoral body to undermine elections through a multiplicity of actions and utterances planned to call into question the integrity of the polls and create disaffection likely to engender violence.
Hostile Foreign Actors: The first leg of this segment consists of hiring foreign political strategists to lay down a consistent fussilade of blackmail against the country and the forthcoming elections through procurement of adverse publications in foreign media which will then be echoed endlessly by local outlets.
The second leg is to actively remote-control the outcome of our elections in 2019 by hacking into INEC’s servers and taking control of her website to upload fictitious results in favour of their paymasters, thereby determining electoral outcomes against the run of play of ballots contrary to the expressed will of voters.
We are aware that these plotters have held meetings within and outside our shores and are already deploying actions calculated to achieve their ignoble ends.
Part of these plots include but are not limited to:
Sponsoring ethnic and religious upheavals as a build up towards the forthcoming general elections and to create the notion of instability needed to mask their underground roles.
Using illegal judicial processes to truncate the participation of perceived enemies, especially the incumbent in the 2019 Presidential Elections, or failing that, to stop him from claiming his mandate if re-elected in 2019.
To achieve the aforementioned unpatriotic objectives, the conspirators have already taken steps to enforce 100% electronic voting in 2019 even when the sophisticated IT technology and expertise required to use it safely and credibly is not yet on ground.
The conspirators have also recently spent weeks recruiting highly skilled hackers, mainly from Asia and Europe, acquiring sophisticated equipment and setting up a base of operations in a popular Middle East destination with the sole aim of taking control of INEC online and uploading fictitious results in real time as voting goes on across the nation on election day. Alternatively, they plan to take down the INEC website totally.
Followers of international politics will admit that notwithstanding its sophisticated technology the US has not been at ease since her 2016 Presidential Elections because of alleged hacking activities by a hostile foreign power.
Unfortunately, rather than consolidate efforts on how to win over the people and secure their votes at the forthcoming poll, these self-serving elements want to have their way, or they will scuttle the entire 2019 General.
May we by this briefing put them on notice that all is known and we will not hesitate to name names should they fail to drop their ungodly activities.
Let it be known that we will keep watch over our homeland to make sure that her peace and development is not frustrated by anti-democratic and corrupt elements.
This is a warning.
Thank you all.
For: C24 Good Governance & Electoral Integrity of Nigeria
…………………………………
Chief Dennis Aghanya
Executive Secretary
Anti-Corruption and Research Based Data Initiative
(ARDI)
