Anambra Assembly poll: The votes must count this time

Thousands of voters, who endured the scorching sun and malfunction­ing card-readers
to cast their votes in last week’s presi­dential and National Assembly elections in Anambra State, are still reeling from the shock of the dubious results announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) at the end of the exercise.
In what could easily pass for a faint reminder of the Hobbes­ian Days of the old Anambra, the people watched, helpless as the state Resident Electoral Com­missioner announced what has been widely condemned as voo­doo results that have no bear­ing with the actual votes cast in the various polling booths and cheekily handed victory to all Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidates, some of whom never even ran any serious campaign before the elections.
From Umuerum to Ihiala and from Ogbaru to Amansea, the sense of outrage is the same. Ndi Anambra are shell-shocked.
They are deeply gob smacked by what they consider the great­est electoral heist in recent memory. The prevailing sense of revulsion stems from the fact that even the most political igno­ramus in Anambra State can tes­tify that as far as the actual votes cast at the polling booths are concerned, the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) won al­most all the seats in contest. The sense of wonder therefore came from the final results declared by INEC. Ndi Anambra are still bewildered at what may have happened at the collation stage of the electoral exercise where they believe that the mandates they had graciously handed to their preferred APGA candidates in order to finally give gravitas to the party in the state were thwarted and dubiously allocat­ed to PDP candidates.
Giving words to the people’s collective outrage, Chief Arthur Nwandu, a respected opinion leader in Anaocha Local Gov­ernment Area, described the show of force by PDP elements during the elections as bizarre and unacceptable. Narrating what he saw in his locality, Chief Nwandu said he witnessed some gangster-like PDP agents strug­gling to wrest the collated results in the council srea from the re­turning officers.
“Soldiers and policemen ar­rived the scene and began to beat people up. They beat up the deputy chairman of the lo­cal government and bundled him into a van and carried him away with the result sheets. An armed personnel carrier escorted them as if we were in a war. This thing is unacceptable in modern Nigeria. It should not be allowed to happen. We say no to this kind of politics in Anambra State. We reject it in totality!” he thun­dered.
Chief Nwandu is not alone in this season of fermenting discontent. The APGA senato­rial candidate for Anambra State, Chief Victor Umeh, could not put a firm cork on his own rage. Battling unsuccessfully to keep bitterness away from his voice, Chief Umeh compared what hap­pened in the March 28 elections to what happened in the 2003 gu­bernatorial election in Anambra State when APGA won but the PDP elements hijacked the poll results and awarded victory to themselves.
“I can assure you that the PDP candidates lost woefully in this election and we are going to prove to them that Anambra State is not a guinea pig that any­one can use to test the efficacy of their drugs. Those mandates given to APGA candidates will be recovered. It is a huge shame that the government of Nigeria should empower a young woman of 42 years of age with the police and the army to ravage Anam­bra State in the name of national politics. It is a huge shame. We are going to reverse this!” he pledged.
Chief Umeh, a veteran of many electoral legal battles, is already spoiling for another bout of legal kamikaze war with some erstwhile allies who have fol­lowed political expediency to the other side of the divide. Liv­ing true to his reputation, Umeh reminded his new political foes of his antecedents, saying: “I am Chief Victor Umeh, I have been leading
Anambra State and Igbo peo­ple in the struggle for self-defi­nition. I assure them that within weeks and months they will be­gin to count their losses. Their victory cannot be sustained.”
Earlier in his statewide broad­cast on the elections, the Gov­ernor of Anambra State, Chief Willie Obiano, had deployed a strong language to condemn the travesty that was the March 28 elections in Anambra State. In a voice laden with emotion, Gov­ernor Obiano had declared: “I must condemn in strong terms, the brazen return of brigandage and lawlessness displayed in the last elections by PDP stalwarts in Anambra State who hijacked the electoral process at the collation stages and came up with spurious figures as the final results of the elections. Fellow citizens, I want to assure you that the dubious victory of the PDP in the Nation­al Assembly elections of last Sat­urday shall not stand! We have assembled the necessary docu­mentary and material evidence that will expose the bare-faced lies of the PDP and retrieve the mandate that you graciously gave to all APGA candidates from the law courts,” urging Ndi Anambra not to lose hope. Now, the thing about the Anambra elections is that it has all the makings of an infuriating democratic farce. The open show of federal power by some PDP figures in the state was simply rankling.

By JAMES EZE (eziokwubundu@gmail. com)