2027: The 2.5 million votes and others that do not add up

By SUFUYAN OJEIFO

My governor, Monday Okpebholo, polled 291,667 votes to become governor of Edo State. Recently, he promised to deliver 2.5 million votes to President Bola Tinubu in 2027.

How? Will he manufacture them?

That question is at the heart of the prelude to 2027. Okpebholo may have started what now looks like a contest of absurd projections, but he is no longer alone. A group in Bayelsa has pledged 1.5 million votes for Tinubu. In Osun, a curious coalition of Governor Ademola Adeleke, Government Ekpemupolo Tompolo and Gboyega Oyetola is projecting between 1.5 and 2 million. The Governor of Ekiti, perhaps more tactful, avoided a figure and opted for a percentage: 80 per cent of Ekiti votes.

This daily bazaar of millions is happening in a multi-party democracy where opposition parties and over 90 million non-partisan Nigerians are treated as if they do not exist in the electoral equation.

It is worth interrogating these figures against INEC’s own numbers. The Commission says we now have 103 million registered voters. That register itself is contested, still carrying, as we know, details of dead Nigerians. But even if we take it as sacrosanct, the arithmetic of these pledges collapses on contact with reality. In 2023, total votes cast for the presidential election was under 25 million. Where will Edo alone find 2.5 million?

Unless what is being announced ahead of the poll is not a projection, but a result — a foretaste of the rigging template.

That suspicion is deepened by a second, more ominous companion: violence as test-run. In Edo, Enugu and elsewhere, opposition meetings have been dispersed, venues sealed, members harassed in brazen fashion. Rigging plus violence is a combustible mix.

When a ruling party combines the illusion of pre-written figures with the reality of physical intimidation, it invites the response it claims to fear. No party or group has a monopoly of violence. If that rhetoric becomes mainstream, the nation risks simultaneous eruptions in the nooks and crannies of the country, born of collective annoyance.

There is only one antidote: a free, fair and verifiable election whose outcome is easy to accept, even by losers.

That is the message President Tinubu should be giving to INEC and to all election-supporting institutions. The President is presently in Saudi Arabia for Umrah, seeking divine favour for his re-election bid. He has told Nigerians that God has answered: that he should continue. Prayers are legitimate. Every contestant prays.

But beyond the prayer to continue, there should be a prayer for the courage to defend the national interest above personal interest, and to commit to a transparent, peaceful poll in the mould of 2015.

Tinubu knows this terrain. He knows that after all the strategies, structures, war chests and defections — what Niccolo Machiavelli called virtu and fortuna — there remains a higher decider. As the Florentine himself admitted after prescribing how princes should rule, there are unseen hands in the affairs of men.

In our context, God is the ultimate decider of who will be president in 2027. No governor should arrogate to himself the power to manufacture millions where they do not exist. No group should ascribe invincibility to itself.

The vast majority of Nigerians are at the receiving end of severe economic hardship. They are not in the super-minority of those whose condition has improved since the eight Buhari years that laid the foundation for what we now experience. These Nigerians deserve the right to vote and to have their votes count.

That is how acceptability is tested — not through intimidation, manipulation and pre-declared figures. Those who are confident of their record should go to the market and sell their product.

The mandate rests with the people. Let the best product win.

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