By Uche Amunike
Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, has revealed, during a Channels TV interview on Wednesday, that there was a conspiracy to have the 2023 presidential election annulled.
He made reference to the 1993 election that was cancelled by former military dictator, General Ibrahim Babangida (rtd), stating that history would just have repeated itself as certain people were determined to take Nigeria back to those days.
Recall that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), had declared Bola Tinubu president after the last presidential poll. The former Lagos State governor was declared the winner by INEC after he pulled 8,794,726 votes to emerge winner.
The renowned playwright stated that he was aware that there was a conspiracy from the onset before the election to see that elections did not hold or that even if it did take place, everything would be reverted to the events what happened during Babangida’s administration.
His words: ‘An attempt was made to annul the (2023) election even before it took place. There were statements from respectable people who, for reasons best known to them, were calling for an interim government, and this was opposed.’
‘No sooner was the voting over that we had a letter directed to the then-president calling for the annulment of the result, even before there was time for verification, annulment through further examination of papers and all.’
‘I am alleging that there was a conspiracy from the very beginning before the election to make sure the elections did not take place or that even if the voting did take place, that everything be reverted to what happened under Babangida.’
‘When we all just woke up and discovered that even though the results have been calculated, even though the results were in possession of international bodies, including monitoring embassies and so on, even if we had the results directly, it was suddenly annulled.’
According to the Wole Soyinka, the contest was no longer between individuals but rather between the so-called interim political party and democracy.
While discussing Baba- Ahmed, a former House of Representatives member who asked the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Kayode Ariwoola, not to swear in Bola Tinubu as the duly elected president of the country, Prof Soyinka referred to Baba Ahmed’s comments as disgraceful and menacing.
His words: ‘At that interview by Datti, that disgraceful and menacing interview, was for me the ultimate signal because this was somebody calling for the rubbishing of a structure he profited to ever become a governor.’
In October 2023 the Supreme Court dismissed the cases of Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party and Peter Obi of the Labour Party who challenged the declaration of Bola Tinubu as the winner of the February 25th presidential poll.
The appeals over claims of fraud, electoral law violations and Bola Tinubu’s ineligibility to run for presidency by the opposition, was ruled without merit by a 7-judge panel.
All the grounds of appeal presented by Atiku and PDP on qualification, 25% votes in the FCT, non-compliance with the electoral act, as well as electoral malpractices were trashed by the court.
