AFRICA/NIGERIA – “Nigeria continues to hang in the balance and democracy stands on the edge of a precipice”

AFRICA/NIGERIA – “Nigeria continues to hold within the steadiness and democracy stands on the sting of a precipice”

Abuja (Agenzia Fides) – “As this case strikes to the following degree, the destiny of the nation continues to hold within the steadiness and the way forward for democracy in our land stands on the sting of a precipice”, warns Msgr. Lucius Iwejuru Ugorji, Archbishop of Owerri and President of the Episcopal Convention of Nigeria, in the course of the opening of the Second Plenary Meeting of Nigerian Bishops. Msgr. Ugorji was referring to the ruling of the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal, PEPT, which confirmed the victory of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, by rejecting the requests offered by the candidate of the Labor Celebration, Peter Obi, and that of the Peoples Democratic Celebration, PDP, Atiku Abubakar. Abubakar and Obi, respectively second and third within the presidential elections of February 25 (see Fides, 1/3/2023), had requested the courtroom to annul the elections for a collection of causes: from electoral fraud to the failure to electronically publish the outcomes by of the electoral company. Obi and Atiku, who rejected the courtroom’s verdict, determined to take the matter to the Supreme Court docket. “We pray and hope that the Supreme Court docket Judges will neither bend the legislation nor search to fulfill the whims and caprices of any celebration,” the President of the Nigeria Bishops Convention mentioned. “We additionally pray and hope for a day in our nation when all election outcomes might be lastly determined on the polling models and never on the courtroom,” he added. Bishop Ugorji additionally lamented that “regardless of the billions of naira of tax-payers cash appropriated for the supply of the BVAS know-how as a game-changer in our normal elections, the judges of their ruling tried, amongst different issues, to counsel that it was fallacious to anticipate INEC to maintain its promise or obey the electoral regulation of transmitting election outcomes electronically in actual time from polling models.” The INEC Voter Enrollment Gadget (IVED) along with the INEC Bimodal Voter Accreditation System is a system to confirm the right id of voters (by biometric verification) after which transmit the outcomes from particular person polling stations to the centralized polling system. On the eve of the election, the Nigerian Bishops (see Fides 20/2/2023) had warned of the dangers related to the usage of new applied sciences within the upcoming votes. (L.M.) (Agenzia Fides, 11/9/2023)

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