There is a nauseating game being played out by ex-Nigerian dictator, General Ibrahim Babangida. It is a game aimed at dulling peoples’ memories of the fraud, thievery, corruption and crude human rights abuses that swept across this country in the eight years of Babangida’s dictatorship, 1985 - 1993.

Ringleaders in this game are his ex military colleagues and business charlatans who are desperate to see a return of the free for all looting of  Nigeria and the desecration of civilized norms. These crowd are regrouping into a gang, and may have appropriately named themselves Project 007, as in the proverbial James Bond, seeking to achieve the impossible, by all means. They are getting set to exploit the failures of our electoral system (or lack of it) and hoping to return to power and further intensify their plunder and rape of a bewildered nation. 

In an accountable society, the ex-military dictator would have been taken to court to answer for all the heinous crime alleged against him including: treason – for organizing and participating in several military coups, (particularly in August 1985) and disrupting the manifestation of democracy in Nigeria; crimes against humanity: including widespread human rights abuses and killings, arrests and detention of critics, human rights activists, journalists, etc; annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential elections; massive corruption and looting of the Nigerian treasury, including failure to account for the Gulf war oil windfall, as identified in the Pius Okigbo report.

There is no doubt that General Babangida draws his inspiration from President Olusegun Obasanjo, who wittingly or unwittingly has opened the floodgate for all sorts of characters to get into politics. The Obasanjo government has failed to distinguish itself in fighting corruption or even making the government to be accountable or be of benefit to the people.

The 2003 general elections was a mockery of free and fair polls. Today, politicians think that all they need to win the next elections is, join the ruling PDP, pay off the nominators and vultures within the party, and the rest is history – INEC will announce predetermined results. Whatever way the people vote does not matter.

CRP calls on political parties interested in free and fair polls to begin to forge alliance with civil society groups and the grassroots, to set up election protection vigilantes, that will ensure that political parties can no longer write up results to win elections. 

President Obasanjo and the National Assembly must know that Nigerians cannot accept a repeat of the abuses and failures of the 2003 elections. There is an urgent need for meaningful electoral reforms with input from all stakeholders, including opposition parties and civil society groups